The Koyal Group Info Mag Review: Researchers May Have Solved Origin-Of-Life Conundrum

The crash of meteors on early Earth likely generated hydrogen cyanide, which could have kick-started the production of biomolecules needed to make the first cells.

The origin of life on Earth is a set of paradoxes. In order for life to have gotten started, there must have been a genetic molecule—something like DNA or RNA—capable of passing along blueprints for making proteins, the workhorse molecules of life. But modern cells can’t copy DNA and RNA without the help of proteins themselves. To make matters more vexing, none of these molecules can do their jobs without fatty lipids, which provide the membranes that cells need to hold their contents inside. And in yet another chicken-and-egg complication, protein-based enzymes (encoded by genetic molecules) are needed to synthesize lipids.

Now, researchers say they may have solved these paradoxes. Chemists report today that a pair of simple compounds, which would have been abundant on early Earth, can give rise to a network of simple reactions that produce the three major classes of biomolecules—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—needed for the earliest form of life to get its start. Although the new work does not prove that this is how life started, it may eventually help explain one of the deepest mysteries in modern science.

“This is a very important paper,” says Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist and origin-of-life researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not affiliated with the current research. “It proposes for the first time a scenario by which almost all of the essential building blocks for life could be assembled in one geological setting.”

Scientists have long touted their own favorite scenarios for which set of biomolecules formed first. “RNA World” proponents, for example suggest RNA may have been the pioneer; not only is it able to carry genetic information, but it can also serve as a proteinlike chemical catalyst, speeding up certain reactions. Metabolism-first proponents, meanwhile, have argued that simple metal catalysts, as opposed to advanced protein-based enzymes, may have created a soup of organic building blocks that could have given rise to the other biomolecules.

The RNA World hypothesis got a big boost in 2009. Chemists led by John Sutherland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom reported that they had discovered that relatively simple precursor compounds called acetylene and formaldehyde could undergo a sequence of reactions to produce two of RNA’s four nucleotide building blocks, showing a plausible route to how RNA could have formed on its own—without the need for enzymes—in the primordial soup. Critics, though, pointed out that acetylene and formaldehyde are still somewhat complex molecules themselves. That begged the question of where they came from.

For their current study, Sutherland and his colleagues set out to work backward from those chemicals to see if they could find a route to RNA from even simpler starting materials. They succeeded. In the current issue of Nature Chemistry, Sutherland’s team reports that it created nucleic acid precursors starting with just hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and ultraviolet (UV) light. What is more, Sutherland says, the conditions that produce nucleic acid precursors also create the starting materials needed to make natural amino acids and lipids. That suggests a single set of reactions could have given rise to most of life’s building blocks simultaneously.

Sutherland’s team argues that early Earth was a favorable setting for those reactions. HCN is abundant in comets, which rained down steadily for nearly the first several hundred million years of Earth’s history. The impacts would also have produced enough energy to synthesize HCN from hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen. Likewise, Sutherland says, H2S was thought to have been common on early Earth, as was the UV radiation that could drive the reactions and metal-containing minerals that could have catalyzed them.

That said, Sutherland cautions that the reactions that would have made each of the sets of building blocks are different enough from one another—requiring different metal catalysts, for example—that they likely would not have all occurred in the same location. Rather, he says, slight variations in chemistry and energy could have favored the creation of one set of building blocks over another, such as amino acids or lipids, in different places. “Rainwater would then wash these compounds into a common pool,” says Dave Deamer, an origin-of-life researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t affiliated with the research.

Could life have kindled in that common pool? That detail is almost certainly forever lost to history. But the idea and the “plausible chemistry” behind it is worth careful thought, Deamer says. Szostak agrees. “This general scenario raises many questions,” he says, “and I am sure that it will be debated for some time to come.”

The Koyal Group Info Mag Review: Yeti's a Bear, Say Scientists, But What Kind?

In legend, Yeti is a huge and furry human-resembling creature also referred to as the Abominable Snowman, but in science, Yeti is just a bear.

Now the question is: what kind of bear? A new study, published in the journal ZooKeys, concludes that hair sample "evidence" for Yeti actually comes from Himalayan brown bears.

The finding refutes an earlier study that the hair belonged to an unknown type of bear related to polar bears.

Top 10 Reasons Why Bigfoot's a Bust

At the center of the controversy are DNA analysis studies. Prior research, led by Bryan Sykes at the University of Oxford, determined that hairs formerly attributed to Yeti belonged to to a mysterious bear species that may not yet be known to science.

Sykes told Discovery News that his paper "refers to two Himalayan samples attributed to yetis and which turned out to be related to an ancient polar bear. This may be the source of the legend in the Himalayas."

The new study, however, calls this possibility into question. The research, in this case, was authored by Eliécer E. Gutiérrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald Pine at the University of Kansas.

Video: Did They Really Find Bigfoot DNA?

Gutiérrez and Pine found that genetic variation in brown bears makes it impossible to assign, with certainty, the samples tested by Sykes and his co-authors to either brown bears or to polar bears.

Because of genetic overlap, the samples could have come from either species, but because brown bears occur in the Himalayas, Gutiérrez and Pine think there is no reason to believe that the samples in question came from anything other than ordinary Himalayan brown bears.

For the new study, Gutiérrez and Pine also examined how the gene sequences analyzed might show the ways in which six present-day species of bears — including the polar bear, the brown bear, and the extinct Eurasian cave bear — might be related.

Wolf Attacks More Myth than Reality

This opened up a new mystery, as DNA from an Asian black bear in Japan indicated that this bear was not closely related to the mainland members of that species. The researchers believe that this unexpected large evolutionary distance between the two geographic groups of the Asian black bear merits further study.

"In fact, a study looking at the genetic and morphological variability of Asian black bear populations throughout the geographic distribution of the species is yet to be conducted, and it would surely yield exciting results," Gutiérrez concluded.

As for Yeti, believers might point out that the studies only looked at hair samples, and not the footprints, photographs, recorded sounds and other "evidence" for the Abominable Snowman.

The Koyal Group Info Mag Review: 48 of The The Most Important Scientific Discoveries Of 2014

It may be 2015 already, but in 2014 we saw some truly amazing scientific discoveries. We landed a probe on a comet, discovered new particles that further our knowledge of the physics of the universe, and learned more about the properties of the wonder-material graphene, which could eventually transform everything from fuel cell technology to battery and computing power and more.

At Futurism.co, Alex Klokus created an infographic that highlights 48 of the most transformative scientific advancements and discoveries of last year. We've republished the graphic here with permission, but you can check out Futurism's interactive version to click through to a source for each story.

 

The Koyal Group Info Mag Review: Theory about the life of Professor Stephen Hawking

The theory about everything review: Film depicting the life of Professor Stephen Hawking

IT is going to be a battle of the boffins at the Oscars next year. Benedict Cumberbatch is a frontrunner for playing Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and Eddie Redmayne will be a powerful contender for his remarkable performance as Professor Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything.

Playing Hawking from PhD student through to global superstardom as the author of A Brief History Of Time Redmayne is outstanding, inhabiting Hawking’s stricken body and brilliant mind with complete conviction.

In the same way that The Imitation Game humanised an intimidatingly clever and remote figure so The Theory Of Everything reveals the man behind the icon: courageous, mischievous, funny but also difficult and selfish.

It may not be a warts-and-all portrait (the picture is too genteel for that) but it’s a touching, humorous and inspirational insight into a man who refused to accept conventional boundaries, both of the mind and body.

We’re reminded quite how extraordinary it is that he’s still alive (now 72) when a doctor informs him, while at Cambridge University, that he has only two years to live. Told that his body will shut down as Motor Neurone Disease destroys his muscle function, Stephen asks about his brain. The doctor (Adam Godley) explains that it will continue to function normally but adds: “No one will know what your thoughts are.” The great mind will have no way to communicate.

Most people would have thrown in the towel and perhaps Stephen would have done were it not for Jane Wilde (a wonderful Felicity Jones), the girlfriend who refused to give up on him or let him give up.

Petite and seemingly demure she’s determined and quietly tenacious and the film is as much about her as it is Hawking. The screenplay by Anthony McCarten is based on her memoir, Travelling To Infinity: My Life With Stephen, and it’s their relationship which resulted in three children but ended in divorce that forms the heart of the story along with the role played by family friend and Jane’s eventual second husband, bashful choirmaster Jonathan Hellyer Jones (Charlie Cox).

This potentially messy state of affairs is handled with great delicacy and is the source of the picture’s fascination, heart and charm. It’s some achievement: what might have seemed uncomfortable and intrusive is actually moving, tender and sweet.

The result is a very British love story between three people, all extraordinary in their own way, who are trying to find happiness and fulfilment in the most trying of circumstances. We don’t get wild explosions or tantrums or declarations of love but mostly silent, dignified struggle and unspoken desire.

Initially we witness the love affair between Hawking and Jane who meet at Cambridge and strike up an instant rapport at a party despite having little in common. She’s a student of medieval Spanish poetry and a firm believer in God, he’s a “cosmologist” which he describes as a “religion for intelligent atheists”.

Still, love conquers all against the backdrop of a firework display during a May Ball where they kiss. On paper it sounds very Hollywood and their courtship is seductively staged and performed but the pair are winningly British and their conversation is hardly the stuff of your average Hollywood romance. They natter about quantum physics, God and Einstein.

Hawking explains his ambition to discover an “equation that explains everything in the universe” as he begins to explore his fascination with “time”.

The scientific talk is cleverly handled with some imaginative visual cues like cream swirling in a coffee cup. We may not understand the details but the general gist is clear as Hawking makes some ground-breaking discoveries into the origins of the universe.

In any case it’s not the science that compels or intrigues; we know the man’s a genius. What we don’t know is the personal story behind the work and the rather strange and testing family life endured by his wife who for years was denied help by her husband. “We’re just a normal family,” he insists. Read Source

The Koyal Group Info Mag Review 11 Mind-Blowing Physics Discoveries Made In 2014

With the help of highly sensitive particle detectors, some of the world’s most powerful lasers, and good-old-fashioned quantum mechanics, physicists from around the world made important discoveries this year.

From detecting elusive particles forged in the core of our sun to teleporting quantum data farther than ever before, these physicists’ scientific research has helped us better understand the universe in which we live as well as pave the way for a future of quantum computers, nuclear fusion, and more.

11. Multiple teams detected what could be our first hints of dark matter.

Although dark matter -- the mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe, but is seemingly undetectable to us here on Earth -- is still shrouded in mystery, two important discoveries in 2014 shed the first rays of light on this elusive material.

10. For the first time, physicists figured out the chemical composition of the mysterious and extremely rare phenomenon of 'ball lightning.'

Reports of ball lighting stretch back as far as the 16th century, but until the 1960s most scientists refused to believe it was real. But, it is real. Ball lighting is a floating sphere or disk of lightning up to 10 feet across that lasts only seconds.

9. An analogue of the theoretical radiation made by black holes was recreated in the lab.

Last October, Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, announced that he had created an analogue for a bizarre type of radiation that can, in theory, escape black holes.

8. An international group of physicists compressed quantum data for the first time in history.

You might grumble when your Internet connection is slow, but it would be infinitely slower if today's classical computers could not compress the information we're constantly sending back and forth.

7. Physicists made powerful, stellar explosions called supernovas in the lab -- for science.

During a supernova, a star explodes, ejecting its guts across space and leaving only a ghostly halo of gas and dust, called a supernova remnant, behind. Astrophysicists have observed supernovae remnants of all shapes and sizes but have yet to understand why they are all so different.

6. Powerful lasers compressed a diamond to simulate the centres of the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.

Jupiter and Saturn are the two largest planets in our solar system, and yet what is inside them is mostly a mystery -- we don't even know if their centres are liquid or solid.

5. Researchers transferred information in light four times farther than ever before -- an important step to quantum computers.

If we are ever to have a digital world run by quantum computers, then we must learn how to transport information in the form of what scientists call quantum data, or qubits, which is encoded inside of subatomic particles, such as ions or photons (light particles).

4. Physicists developed a new and better kind of fibre optics to transfer information.

Traditionally, when you're trying to transfer particles of light through a fibre optic cable, the last thing you want are for the particles to be moving all about in a disorderly manner. But there's an exception to this that scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Clemson University discovered the first time this year.

3. A physics team discovered a new particle, 80 years after it was first predicted.

After nearly 80 years since it was first predicted, the Majorana fermion was finally observed. The physicists at Princeton University and the University of Texas at Austin announced their discovery last October in the journal Science.

2. The National Ignition Facility made a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it used up -- a first .

Nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction that generates up to four times more energy than nuclear fission -- the process that fuels today's nuclear power plants. One big issue standing in the way of harnessing this energy for electrical power is that it takes more energy to create the reaction than we've gotten out of it, until now.

1. We've figured out how the sun generates energy through nuclear fusion in its core.

Energy from the sun is essential for life on Earth. Yet we were not certain of how the sun's core works until just this year.

The Koyal Group Info Mag Review - Philae Comet Lander Eludes Discovery

Efforts to find Europe's lost comet lander, Philae, have come up blank.

The most recent imaging search by the overflying Rosetta "mothership" can find no trace of the probe.

Philae touched down on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November, returning a swathe of data before going silent when its battery ran flat.

European Space Agency scientists say they are now waiting on Philae itself to reveal its position when it garners enough power to call home.

Researchers have a pretty good idea of where the robot should be, but pinpointing its exact location is tricky.

On touchdown, Philae bounced twice before coming to rest in a dark ditch.

This much is clear from the pictures it took of its surroundings. And this location, the mission team believes, is just off the top of the "head" of the duck-shaped comet.

The orbiting Rosetta satellite photographed this general location on 12, 13 and 14 December, with each image then scanned by eye for any bright pixels that might be Philae. But no positive detection has yet been made.

Rosetta has now moved further from 67P, raising its altitude from 20km to 30km, and there is no immediate plan to go back down (certainly, not to image Philae's likely location).

Even if they cannot locate it, scientists are confident the little probe will eventually make its whereabouts known.

As 67P moves closer to the Sun, lighting conditions for the robot should improve, allowing its solar cells to recharge the battery system.

The latest assessment suggests communications could be re-established in the May/June timeframe, with Philae distributing enough electricity to its instruments to resume operations around September.

This would be at perihelion - the time when the comet is closest to the Sun (185 million km away) and at its most active.

Scientists continue to pore over the data Philae managed to send back before going into hibernation.

Some of the results - together with ongoing Rosetta observations - were reported at the recent American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Highlights include a clearer idea of the nature of the comet's surface. Researchers say this appears to be covered in many places by a soft, dusty "soil" about 15-20cm in depth.

Underneath this is a very hard layer, which is thought to be mainly sintered ice.

The conference had the rare opportunity to see pictures from Rosetta's Osiris camera system.

These high-resolution images are not normally shown publicly because the camera team has been given an exclusive period to study the data and make discoveries.

Among them was a shot looking into a pit on the surface, revealing an array of rounded features that the Osiris team has nicknamed "dinosaur eggs".

These features have a preferred scale of about 2-3m and may be evidence of the original icy blocks that came together 4.5 billion years ago to build the comet.

The dino eggs have been seen at a number of locations, including in cliff walls.

Early interpretations of the general surface of the comet indicate that many structures are probably the result of collapse over internal voids.

Although a small body just 4km across, 67P's gravity is still strong enough to shape depressions and arrange fallen boulders.

A good example of this is in "Hapi" valley - the giant gorge that forms the "neck" of the comet.

It contains a string of large blocks at its base, which one Osiris team-member argued very likely fell from the nearby vertical cliff dubbed "Hathor".

All the surface features on 67P carry names that follow an ancient Egyptian theme.

Hapi was revered as a god of the Nile. Hathor was a deity associated with the sky.

The Koyal Group Info Mag Review: Shaping Public Perceptions of Radiation Risk

On Monday, November 17, the US House of Representatives passed H.R. 5544, the Low Dose Radiation Research Act, which called for the National Academies to “conduct a study assessing the current status and development of a long-term strategy for low dose radiation research.”

Coincidentally that was the same day that the National Academy of Sciences hosted a publicly accessible, all day meeting to determine if there had been enough new developments in radiation health effects research to justify the formation of a new BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) committee. If formed, that would be BEIR VIII, the latest in a series of committees performing a survey of available research on the health effects of atomic (now ionizing) radiation.

I had the pleasure of attending the meeting, which was held in the ornate NAS building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. There were about 20 presenters talking about various aspects of the scientific and political considerations associated with the decision to form BEIR VIII. Several of the presenters had performed experimental research under the currently moribund Department of Energy’s Low Dose radiation research program.

That intriguing program was using modern genetics techniques to learn a great deal about the dynamic nature of DNA in organisms and about the ways that living tissues isolate and repair recurring damage that comes as a result of metabolic processes, heat, chemicals and ionizing radiation. It was defunded gradually beginning in 2009 and completely by 2011, with the money making its way to solar and wind energy research as the Office of Science shifted its priorities under a flat top line budget.

The agenda allocated a considerable amount of time for public comments. There were a couple of members of the audience interested in the science falsifying the “no safe dose” model who took advantage of the opportunities to speak, but so did a number of professional antinuclear activists from Maryland, Ohio, New York and Tennessee.

Need Better Results This Time

An epic struggle with important health, safety, cost and energy abundance implications is shaping up with regard to the way that the officially sanctioned science and regulatory bodies treat the risks and benefits associated with using ionizing radiation at low doses and dose rates for medical uses, industrial uses and power production.

We must make sure that this battle for science, hearts and minds is not as asymmetrical as the one fought in the period between 1954-1964. One skirmish in the battle worth winning will be to encourage the passage of the Low Dose Radiation Research Act and the annual appropriations that will enable it to function long into the future.

Here is a brief version of that lengthy prior engagement, where there were huge winners and losers. Losers included truth, general prosperity, peace and the environment. Partial winners included people engaged in the global hydrocarbon economy in finance, exploration, extraction, refinement, transportation, tools, machines and retail distribution. There were also big financial winners in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, oncology, and agriculture.

Rockefeller Funded Survey

During a 1954 Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees meeting, several of the trustees asked the President of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) if his esteemed organization would be willing to review what was known about the biological effects of atomic radiation.

The board did not have to pick up the phone or send a letter to make that request. Detlev Bronk, who was the serving president of the NAS, was already at the table as a full member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees. The board agreed that, based on their interpretations of recent media coverage, the public was confused and not properly informed about the risks of radiation exposure and the potential benefits of the Atomic Age.

The tasking given to the NAS was to form a credible committee that would study the science and issue a report “in a form accessible to seriously concerned citizens.”1

Aside: For historical context, that Foundation board meeting took place within months after President Eisenhower made his “Atoms for Peace” speech in December 1953. That speech to the United Nations announced a shift in focus of the Atomic Age from weapons development to more productive applications like electrical power generation and ship propulsion.

At the time the request to the NAS was made, the Rockefeller Foundation had been funding radiation biology-related research for at least 30 years, including the Drosophila mutation experiments that Hermann Muller conducted during the 1920s at the University of Texas. Foundation board members and supported scientists had been following developments in atomic science since the earliest discoveries of radiation and the dense energy stored inside atomic nuclei.

In March 1948, the Tripartite Conferences on radiation protection, a group that included experienced radiation researchers and practitioners from the US, Canada and the UK, had determined that the permissible doses for humans should be reduced from 1 mGy/day (in SI units) to 0.5 mGy/day or 3 mGy/week.

That reduction was not made because of any noted negative health effects, but to provide an additional safety factor.

In between these two extremes there is a level of exposure, — in the neighborhood of 0.1 r/day — which all experience to date show to be safe, but the time of observation of large numbers of people exposed at this rate under controlled conditions, is too short to permit a categorical assertion to this effect.2

End Aside.

Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation

The first NAS Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation committee began its work in April 1955. There were six subcommittees, each of which authored a section of the committee’s report. The report was identified as a preliminary version that was to be followed with a more technically detailed report scheduled to appear within the next couple of years, if desired by responsible government agencies.

Unlike the documents supporting the permissible dose limits that came out of the Tripartite Commission mentioned in the aside above, the NAS BEAR 1 committee report, especially the section from the Genetics Committee, was professionally promoted and received extensive media coverage and public attention.

The NAS held a press conference announcing the release of the report and answering questions in Washington, DC on June 12. Among other media attention, that press conference resulted in no less than six related articles in the June 13, 1956 edition of the New York Times. Several additional articles were published during the following weeks. The selection of pieces included a lengthy article that started at the top of the right hand column of the paper and continued with another 20-25 column inches on page 17. Read full article here

The Koyal Group Info Mag Review: In the Digital Age, Science Publishing Needs an Upgrade (Op Ed)

Daniel Marovitz is CEO of Faculty of 1000. Faculty of 1000 is a publisher for life scientists and clinical researchers, and comprises of three services; F1000Prime, F1000Research and F1000Posters. F1000Research is an open science publishing platform for life scientists that offers immediate publication and transparent peer review. Before that, he was the CEO and co-founder of Buzzumi, a cloud-based enterprise software company. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Quick quiz, which is bigger: the global music industry or scientific publishing? You may be surprised to learn that the music industry racks up $15 billion each year in sales, whereas scientific publishing quietly brings in $19 billion. This "under-the-radar" colossus gets very little attention, yet influences us all.

In many ways, published science tracks and influences the course of our species on this planet. It enables scientists to find out what other researchers are working on and what discoveries they have made. It helps governments decide where to invest and helps universities decide whom to hire. Most people don't give it a second thought but they should. All of us are consumers of science, and perhaps most crucially, all of us are eventually medical patients dependent on the discoveries published in medical journals. The way science is disseminated and the way articles are published is not just a geeky question for librarians — it impacts our society in profound ways.

Publishing science

The history of scientific journals dates back to 1665, when French Journal des sçavan and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first published research results. Around the same time, the first peer review process was recorded at the Royal Society of London. By the 20th century, peer review became common practice to help allocate scientific funding, and before the Internet, all scientific journals were published on paper.

Paper costs money to buy, more money to print, and even more money to transport. It made sense that journals worked hard to find the "best" studies because they were constrained to publishing 10 to 20 articles each month. They limited the number of pages authors could write and severely limited (and sometimes charged the authors extra for) color and additional images. The process was long and laborious for everyone involved, and was constrained by the limits and costs of a necessarily analog world.

You would naturally assume that the Internet Age would have changed all of that, but while all journals now publish online, most of the process is still based on a paper past. This means many perfectly sound articles are rejected, articles take too long to be published, and most articles are published with conclusions, but without the data that supports them. Enough data should be shared by authors to ensure that anyone can replicate their research efforts and achieve similar results.

Such processes seriously bias what is published, impacting all aspects of science and thus society: from new scientific discoveries and the development of new medicines, to scientists' livelihoods and how public money is spent.

Redefining science publication

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