Intriguing science findings - not spacey

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[MargaritaMc]

Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows OFFICIALLY that thinking positive is (usually) BEST!

To suppress or to explore? Emotional strategy may influence anxiety

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 050913.php

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When trouble approaches, what do you do? Run for the hills? Hide? Pretend it isn't there? Or do you focus on the promise of rain in those looming dark clouds?

New research suggests that the way you regulate your emotions, in bad times and in good, can influence whether – or how much – you suffer from anxiety.

The study appears in the journal Emotion.

In a series of questionnaires, researchers asked 179 healthy men and women how they managed their emotions and how anxious they felt in various situations. The team analyzed the results to see if different emotional strategies were associated with more or less anxiety.

The study revealed that those who engage in an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal tended to also have less social anxiety and less anxiety in general than those who avoid expressing their feelings. Reappraisal involves looking at a problem in a new way, said University of Illinois graduate student Nicole Llewellyn, who led the research with psychology professor Florin Dolcos, an affiliate of the Beckman Institute at Illinois.

"When something happens, you think about it in a more positive light, a glass half full instead of half empty," Llewellyn said. "You sort of reframe and reappraise what's happened and think what are the positives about this? What are the ways I can look at this and think of it as a stimulating challenge rather than a problem?"

Study participants who regularly used this approach reported less severe anxiety than those who tended to suppress their emotions.

Anxiety disorders are a major public health problem in the U.S. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, roughly 18 percent of the U.S. adult population is afflicted with general or social anxiety that is so intense that it warrants a diagnosis.

"The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, anxiety and depression –which tend to co-occur – will be among the most prevalent causes of disability worldwide, secondary only to cardiovascular disease," Dolcos said. "So it's associated with big costs."

Not all anxiety is bad, however, he said. Low-level anxiety may help you maintain the kind of focus that gets things done. Suppressing or putting a lid on your emotions also can be a good strategy in a short-term situation, such as when your boss yells at you, Dolcos said. Similarly, an always-positive attitude can be dangerous, causing a person to ignore health problems, for example, or to engage in risky behavior.

Previous studies had found that people who were temperamentally inclined to focus on making good things happen were less likely to suffer from anxiety than those who focused on preventing bad things from happening, Llewellyn said. But she could find no earlier research that explained how this difference in focus translated to behaviors that people could change. The new study appears to explain the strategies that contribute to a person having more or less anxiety, she said.

"This is something you can change," she said. "You can't do much to affect the genetic or environmental factors that contribute to anxiety. But you can change your emotion regulation strategies."

The paper, "Reappraisal and Suppression Mediate the Contribution of Regulatory Focus to Anxiety in Healthy Adults," is available to the media from the U. of I. News Bureau. http://news.illinois.edu/

[MargaritaMc]

Bach to the blues, our emotions match music to colors

UC Berkeley May 16, 2013
Whether we’re listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. For instance, Mozart’s jaunty Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often associated with bright yellow and orange, whereas his dour Requiem in D minor is more likely to be linked to dark, bluish gray.  

Moreover, people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors. This suggests that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers, UC Berkeley researchers said.

“The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors,” said UC Berkeley vision scientist Stephen Palmer, lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a 37-color palette, the UC Berkeley study found that people tend to pair faster-paced music in a major key with lighter, more vivid, yellow colors, whereas slower-paced music in a minor key is more likely to be teamed up with darker, grayer, bluer colors.

“Surprisingly, we can predict with 95 percent accuracy how happy or sad the colors people pick will be based on how happy or sad the music is that they are listening to,” said Palmer, who will present these and related findings at the International Association of Colour conference at the University of Newcastle in the U.K. on July 8.  At the conference, a color light show will accompany a performance by the Northern Sinfonia orchestra to demonstrate “the patterns aroused by music and color converging on the neural circuits that register emotion,” he said.>>

[MargaritaMc]

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
SMALL, SPEEDY PLANT-EATER EXTENDS KNOWLEDGE OF DINOSAUR ECOSYSTEMS

Bethesda, MD—Dinosaurs are often thought of as large, fierce animals, but new research highlights a previously overlooked diversity of small dinosaurs.

In the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, a team of paleontologists from the University of Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum, Cleveland Museum of Natural History and University of Calgary have described a new dinosaur, the smallest plant-eating dinosaur species known from Canada. Albertadromeus syntarsus was identified from a partial hind leg, and other skeletal elements, that indicate it was a speedy runner. Approximately 1.6 m (5 ft) long, it weighed about 16 kg (30 lbs), comparable to a large turkey.
 
Albertadromeus lived in what is now southern Alberta in the Late Cretaceous, about 77 million years ago. Albertadromeus syntarsus means "Alberta runner with fused foot bones".

Unlike its much larger ornithopod cousins, the duckbilled dinosaurs, its two fused lower leg bones would have made it a fast, agile two-legged runner. This animal is the smallest known plant-eating dinosaur in its ecosystem, and researchers hypothesize that it used its speed to avoid predation by the many species of meat-eating dinosaurs that lived at the same time.
 

Skeletal outlines illustrating both the relative size and completeness of two of the small ornithopod specimens described in the paper. Bones indicated in white are present. Human (in grey) for scale. Illustration by C. Brown.

---

>>>
 
“Albertadromeus may have been close to the bottom of the dinosaur food chain but without dinosaurs like it you'd not have giants like T. rex,” said Michael Ryan. “Our understanding of the structure of dinosaur ecosystems is dependent on the fossils that have been preserved. Fragmentary, but important, specimens like that of Albertadromeus suggest that we are only beginning to understand the shape of dinosaur diversity and the structure of their communities.”
 
“You can imagine such small dinosaurs filling the niche of animals such as rabbits and being major, but relatively inconspicuous, members of their ecological community” said Anthony Russell of the University of Calgary.

[MargaritaMc]

The Simons Foundation
Unheralded Mathematician Bridges the Prime Gap
by: Erica Klarreich
May 19, 2013

Yitang Zhang

---

On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field — a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang — the paper claimed to have taken a huge step forward in understanding one of mathematics’ oldest problems, the twin primes conjecture.

Editors of prominent mathematics journals are used to fielding grandiose claims from obscure authors, but this paper was different. Written with crystalline clarity and a total command of the topic’s current state of the art, it was evidently a serious piece of work, and the Annals editors decided to put it on the fast track.

Just three weeks later — a blink of an eye compared to the usual pace of mathematics journals — Zhang received the referee report on his paper.

“The main results are of the first rank,” one of the referees wrote. The author had proved “a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers.”

Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know — someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1991 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.

“Basically, no one knows him,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Université de Montréal. “Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory.”

Mathematicians at Harvard University hastily arranged for Zhang to present his work to a packed audience there on May 13. As details of his work have emerged, it has become clear that Zhang achieved his result not via a radically new approach to the problem, but by applying existing methods with great perseverance.

“The big experts in the field had already tried to make this approach work,” Granville said. “He’s not a known expert, but he succeeded where all the experts had failed.”
>>

A Chinese immigrant who received his doctorate from Purdue University, he had always been interested in number theory, even though it wasn’t the subject of his dissertation. During the difficult years in which he was unable to get an academic job, he continued to follow developments in the field.

"There are a lot of chances in your career, but the important thing is to keep thinking,” he said.

>>
“I think people are pretty thrilled that someone out of nowhere did this,” Granville said.

For Zhang, who calls himself shy, the glare of the spotlight has been somewhat uncomfortable. “I said, ‘Why is this so quick?’” he said. “It was confusing, sometimes.”

Zhang was not shy, though, during his Harvard talk, which attendees praised for its clarity. “When I’m giving a talk and concentrating on the math, I forget my shyness,” he said.

Zhang said he feels no resentment about the relative obscurity of his career thus far. “My mind is very peaceful. I don’t care so much about the money, or the honor,” he said. “I like to be very quiet and keep working by myself.”

I'm not including the whole article here, but mathematicians - and even non-mathematicians - would find the complete article a very interesting read.

Klarreich explains the Zhang's findings very well and another useful article is at
Slate.com

[Ann]

Fantastic, Margarita. That's a true Cinderella story.

I like this, too:

As details of his work have emerged, it has become clear that Zhang achieved his result not via a radically new approach to the problem, but by applying existing methods with great perseverance.

“The big experts in the field had already tried to make this approach work,” Granville said. “He’s not a known expert, but he succeeded where all the experts had failed.”

Fantastic. Well, success comes from 10% inspiration and 90% transpiration, that is certainly true.

Ann

[Beyond]

uh, Ann, Yitang Zhang is a human, not a plant. Plants are the ones with transpiration, humans are the ones with perspiration.

So that would be 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Ya gotta watch those spirations, they can be tricky.

[Ann]

Goodness me!!!! That's what we say in Swedish.

Ann

[rstevenson]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

[Beyond]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

Rob, my windows can't find the page you're linking to, even if i paste it into my address bar.

[geckzilla]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

Rob, my windows can't find the page you're linking to, even if i paste it into my address bar.

[Beyond]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

Rob, my windows can't find the page you're linking to, even if i paste it into my address bar.

The power of the Gecko.

[MargaritaMc]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

There's an oldish article here about mathematical innovation not necessarily only being for the young.

And, yes, Ann - what ever transpires , Swedish people or English speaking plants, Dr Zhang is a marvellous model to the virtue of persistence. What I call "stick-ability". And of focus on what is really important.

Margarita

[rstevenson]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

Rob, my windows can't find the page you're linking to, even if i paste it into my address bar.

Sorry, I don't do windows.

Rob

[Beyond]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

Rob, my windows can't find the page you're linking to, even if i paste it into my address bar.

Sorry, I don't do windows.

Rob

ha-ha, you just did, via magic.

[BMAONE23]

One interesting aspect of this story is his age, over 50. Mathematicians often do their best work much earlier in life than that, though not exclusively of course. Reminds me of this XKCD cartoon...

Rob

Rob, my windows can't find the page you're linking to, even if i paste it into my address bar.

Sorry, I don't do windows.

Rob

I myself find the task quite Pane-ful

[MargaritaMc]

ANTIQUITY
Volume: 87  Number: 336  Page: 519–538

‘The king in the car park’: new light on the death and burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars church, Leicester, in 1485

Archaeologists today do not as a rule seek to excavate the remains of famous people and historical events, but the results of the project reported in this article provide an important exception. Excavations on the site of the Grey Friars friary in Leicester, demolished at the Reformation and subsequently built over, revealed the remains of the friary church with a grave in a high status position beneath the choir. The authors set out the argument that this grave can be associated with historical records indicating that Richard III was buried in this friary after his death at the Battle of Bosworth. Details of the treatment of the corpse and the injuries that it had sustained support their case that this should be identified as the burial of the last Plantagenet king. This paper presents the archaeological and the basic skeletal evidence: the results of the genetic analysis and full osteoarchaeological analysis will be published elsewhere.

Richard_lll.jpeg

Due to the worldwide interest in the discovery of Richard III, the University of Leicester has made arrangements to ensure the paper is publicly available via:
http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/087/ant0870519.htm
as a free pdf download.

Margarita

[MargaritaMc]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 052813.php

Beer-pouring robot programmed to anticipate human actions

ITHACA, N.Y. – A robot in Cornell's Personal Robotics Lab has learned to foresee human action in order to step in and offer a helping hand, or more accurately, roll in and offer a helping claw.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Understanding when and where to pour a beer or knowing when to offer assistance opening a refrigerator door can be difficult for a robot because of the many variables it encounters while assessing the situation. A team from Cornell has created a solution.

Gazing intently with a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera and using a database of 3D videos, the Cornell robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene and determines how those uses fit with the activities. It then generates a set of possible continuations into the future – such as eating, drinking, cleaning, putting away – and finally chooses the most probable. As the action continues, the robot constantly updates and refines its predictions.

"We extract the general principles of how people behave," said Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research. "Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it." The robot builds a "vocabulary" of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognize a variety of big activities, he explained.

Saxena will join Cornell graduate student Hema S. Koppula as they present their research at the International Conference of Machine Learning, June 18-21 in Atlanta, and the Robotics: Science and Systems conference June 24-28 in Berlin, Germany.

In tests, the robot made correct predictions 82 percent of the time when looking one second into the future, 71 percent correct for three seconds and 57 percent correct for 10 seconds.

"Even though humans are predictable, they are only predictable part of the time," Saxena said. "The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its action. Right now we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond."

###
The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation and Microsoft.

I would rather like one of these once the glitches have been ironed out!

Margarita

[MargaritaMc]

Einstein's 'spooky action' common in large quantum systems

Mathematicians identify entanglement threshold, adding parameters to quantum computing efforts

Entanglement is a property in quantum mechanics that seemed so unbelievable and so lacking in detail that, 66 years ago this spring, Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance."

But a mathematician at Case Western Reserve University and two of his recent PhD graduates show entanglement is actually prevalent in large quantum systems and have identified the threshold at which it occurs.

The finding holds promise for the ongoing push to understand and take advantage of the property. If harnessed, entanglement could yield super high-speed communications, hack-proof encryptions and quantum computers so fast and powerful they would make today's supercomputers look like adding machines in comparison.

The mathematicians don't tell us how entanglement works, but were able to put parameters on the property by combining math concepts developed for a number of different applications during the last five decades. In a nutshell, the researchers connected the math to properties of quantum mechanics—the otherworldly rules that best apply to atomic and subatomic particles—to describe physical reality.

"There have been indications that large subgroups within quantum systems are entangled," said Stanislaw Szarek, mathematics professor at Case Western Reserve and an author of the study. "Our contribution is to find out exactly when entanglement becomes ubiquitous."

Szarek worked with Guillaume Aubrun, assistant professor of mathematics at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France, and Deping Ye, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Their work is published online in the Early View section of Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. ( Note from Margarita: only the abstract is available for non-subscribers )

The behaviors of materials down at the level of atoms are often strange, but entanglement borders on our concepts of sorcery. For example, if two electrons spinning in opposite directions are entangled, when one changes direction, the other immediately changes, whether the electrons are side by side, across the room or at opposite ends of the universe.

Other particles, such as photons, atoms and molecules, can also become entangled, but taking advantage of the property requires more than a pair or handful.

Szarek, Aubrun and Ye focused on large quantum systems—large groups of particles that have the potential for use in our world.

They found that, in systems in a random state, two subsystems that are each less than one-fifth of the whole are generally not entangled. Two subsystems that are each greater than one-fifth of the whole typically are entangled. In other words, in a system of 1,000 particles, two groups that are smaller than 200 each typically won't be entangled. Two groups larger than 200 each typically will.

Further, the research shows, "the change is abrupt when you reach the threshold of about 200," Szarek said.

The team also calculated the threshold for positive partial transpose, or PPT, a property related to entanglement. If the property is violated, entanglement is present.

"From these two perspectives, the calculations are very precise." Szarek said.

Harsh Mathur, a physics professor at Case Western Reserve whom Szarek consulted to better understand the science, said, "Their point is entanglement is hard to create from a small system, but much easier in a large system."

"And the thing that Einstein thought was so weird is the rule rather than the exception," Mathur added.

The researchers used mathematics where analysis, algebra and geometry meet, Szarek said. The math applies to hundreds, thousands or millions of dimensions.

"We put together several things from different parts of mathematics, like a puzzle, and adapted them," he said. "These are mathematical tools developed largely for aesthetical reasons, like music."

The ideas—concepts developed in the 1970s and 1980s and more recently— turned out to be relevant to the emerging quantum information science.

"We have found there is a way of computing and quantifying the concept of quantum physics and related it to some calculable mathematical quantities," Szarek continued. "We were able to identify features and further refine the description, which reduces the questions about the system to calculable and familiar looking mathematical quantities."

So, if entanglement is more common in large quantum systems, why aren't they being used already?

"In the every day world, it's hard to access or create large quantum mechanical systems to do meaningful quantum computations or for communications or other uses," Mathur said. "You have to keep them isolated or they decohere and behave in a classical manner. But this study gives some parameters to build on."

Szarek will continue to investigate mathematics and quantum information theory while attending the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England in the fall. He will work with computer scientists and quantum physicists during a semester-long program called Mathematical Challenges in Quantum Information. He received a $101,000 National Science Foundation grant to participate.

[MargaritaMc]

Intelligent street lights adapt to conditions in Finland

25.04.2013
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a dimmable LED street light that consumes significantly less energy than current lighting systems, while improving the lighting characteristics. The street lights were tested in Helsinki with user experiences collected.

Traditional street lights work on full power when turned on, and the amount of light is not usually adjusted. The new LED street lights developed by VTT adapt to the ambient conditions with the help of sensors and wireless control, allowing them to be dimmed on the basis of natural light, environmental conditions (for example light reflected from snow) and the number of pedestrians. In order to maintain comfort, several characteristics important to road users, such as the amount and colour of light and the shape of the light beam, are considered in the luminaire design. Particular attention was paid to glare control, light distribution and sufficient lighting of road shoulders.

The intelligent street lighting system stores information on energy consumption, temperature, lighting level, and number of pedestrians, among others. According to laboratory measurements, the new LED street light is 50 per cent more energy-efficient than traditional lights on the market – without the intelligence factored in. With lighting levels adjusted according to the number of users or to natural lighting conditions, an additional energy saving potential of 40 per cent with added intelligence has been observed. The developed lighting method is based on available components (for example, LEDs and sensors).

The street lights were tested along a pedestrian road in Helsinki, where initially a total of 20 reference street lights were installed. These represented five different luminaires on the market, three of which were LED luminaires and two others a traditional high pressure sodium and a metal halide lamp luminaire. Aalto University carried out a user survey in the pilot installation area, based on which VTT designed the new LED street light. Demo lights were installed at the end of 2012 as an extension of the first test installation, after which Aalto University carried out another survey on the experiences of the people using the road. The demo street light received the best feedback in the survey.

The AthLEDics project, funded by Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, research institutes and companies, is implemented by VTT and Aalto University, partnered by Alppilux, Helsingin Energia, the City of Helsinki, the City of Jyväskylä, Enerpoint, Ensto Finland, Hella Lighting Finland, Helvar, Herrmans, LumiChip, MTG-Meltron, Oplatek, Sabik, Senate Properties, Valopaa and YIT.

[MargaritaMc]

I've been interested in our nearest cousins for years and find this research most interesting. For me the interest is less in the importance of emotions in bonobo and chimpanzee decision-making and more the video, showing as it does a clear choice to delay gratification.

There is a fascinating video here, which I can't embed - please DO follow the link
Caption: This video shows bonobo temporal choice. The bonobo chooses the larger, delayed reward (three pieces of food) over the smaller, immediate reward (one piece of food).

Credit: Rosati AG, Hare B (2013) Chimpanzees and Bonobos Exhibit Emotional Responses to Decision Outcomes. PLoS ONE 8(5): e63058. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063058

Usage Restrictions: With credit to source

Apes get emotional over games of chance.

Chimpanzees, bonobos exhibit emotional responses to outcomes of decision-making


Like some humans, chimpanzees and bonobos exhibit emotional responses to outcomes of their decisions by pouting or throwing angry tantrums when a risk-taking strategy fails to pay off, according to
research published May 29 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Alexandra Rosati from Yale University and Brian Hare from Duke University.

The researchers assessed the emotional responses and motivation of chimpanzees and bonobos living in African sanctuaries. Rosati explains, "Psychologists and economists have found that emotions play a critical role in shaping how humans make complex decisions, such as decisions about saving or investing money. But it was not known if these processes are shared with other animals when they make decisions about their important resources--such as food."

The apes in this study faced two different types of problems: one where they made choices about whether to wait to obtain larger rewards, and one where they made choices about whether to take a chance to obtain a high-quality treat, but risk obtaining a non-preferred food item if their gamble did not pay off. The scientists found that both species displayed emotional responses to the outcome of their choice, but chimpanzees were more patient and likely to take risks than bonobos. When their choice yielded the less preferred outcome, both species displayed negative emotional responses including vocalizations similar to pouts and moans, scratching, and banging--a type of tantrum thought to reflect anger in apes. In the risky choice task, the apes even tried to switch their choice after the fact when they realized they had made a losing gamble, but never did so when their risk-taking paid off. Some of the emotional and motivational responses displayed by the apes were species-specific while others reflected individual differences in the animals.

Based on their results, the authors conclude that apes do exhibit emotional responses to decision-making, like humans. They add that further research is needed to determine whether these emotional responses to outcomes can change the apes' future choices and decisions.

###
Citation: Rosati AG, Hare B (2013) Chimpanzees and Bonobos Exhibit Emotional Responses to Decision Outcomes. PLOS ONE 8(5): e63058. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063058

Financial Disclosure: This work was supported in part by European Research Commission Advanced Grant Agreement 233297 and National Science Foundation grants NSFBCS-08-27552-02 and NSF-BCS-10-25172 to BH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interest Statement: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0063058
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 052313.php

Margarita

[Beyond]

Quantum magnetism simulated using ultra cold fermions.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/new ... d-fermions

[mjimih]

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0 ... -all-of-us
Scientists discover a little astronaut within all of us
By Elizabeth Barber, Contributor / June 5, 2013
Phosphorus, a key ingredient in all living things, travelled to Earth via meteors, a new study has found.

Scientists found that the meteors pummeling our planet in its first two eons carried an unexpected gift: phosphorus, a key ingredient in the formation of all known life.

In an examination of samples from Australia, Zimbabwe, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Florida, scientists from the University of Florida and the University of Washington found phosphite only in the oldest samples, in materials from the early Archean period – about 3.5 billion years ago – in Australia.

The new research, published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings a potential close to a chapter in the mystery of life on Earth: how Earth's earliest life forms, which evolved from RNA alone before the modern DNA-RNA protein developed, synthesized phosphorous.

In its modern form, phosphorous is insoluble and unreactive – a poor building material. But the latest research suggests that the phosphorous that arrived on ancient Earth via space rocks was a reactive form.

This space version, an iron–nickel phosphide mineral called schreibersite, is soluble and would have become reactive when dissolved in water. It also would have seeped through Earth's nascent oceans, becoming abundant enough to give Earth a decent go at producing life. Scientists have so far not found any homegrown sources that would have been plentiful enough to do so.

“The importance of this finding is that it provides the missing ingredient in the origin-of-life recipe: a form of phosphorus that can be readily incorporated into essential biological molecules like nucleic acids and cell-membrane lipids,” said Roger Buick, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, in a press release.

The new finding is also bad news for those hoping to witness a replay of the beginnings of life on Earth. Because the conditions in which life developed here billions of years ago no longer exist, the chances that new life forms will again spring from inorganic compounds is nil, at least outside of a laboratory.

“Phosphorus chemistry on the early Earth was substantially different billions of years ago than it is today,” said Matthew Pasek, the lead author on the article and an assistant professor of geology at the University of South Florida, in a press release.

Too bad, for anyone anticipating the next round of dinosaurs.

My phosphorescence is brilliant..

Mark

[MargaritaMc]

That is really interesting, Mark! Thank you for finding it and posting it.
Margarita

[mjimih]

It seems there is plenty of Ph for life to use now, but if all life was extinguished, it would be next to impossible for a new simple life form emerging to "find" any usable Ph to utilize? It begs the question; The next round of life forms here will be completely different (which is probably no surprise).

I took a little chemistry and was always intrigued by where on the periodic table life "similar" to us, or life "most easily" created, would most likely spring from. I thought Silicon-based life was a good candidate bc it is directly next to carbon, holding some of the same general characteristics perhaps. I'm over simplifying it. Maybe just stare at the table and imagine what other worldly life forms are using compared to Earths'.



Mark