Life on Earth may have started because of meteorites. Researchers have discovered organic molecules, Uracil and Xanthine, precursors to DNA, in a 4.5 billion years old Murchison meteorite that crashed into Australia in 1969. These ‘nucleobases’ contain a large ratio of a heavy form of carbon rarely found on Earth. “Emergent life systems may have adopted nucleobases from meteoritic fragments for use in an early and primitive genetic material, enabling them to pass on their successful features to the next generations,” says study leader Zita Martins of Imperial College London. And if meteorites have delivered these building blocks to Earth, they may have also delivered them to other planets. This means, extra-terrestrials may actually exist!
Jason 2 was recently launched. No, it is not the next ‘Friday the 13th’ movie title. It is a NASA satellite, which is now on a three-year journey to observe the entire oceanic surface of Earth. The satellite would provide the most accurate monitoring of rising sea levels and currents. And thus, track the effects of climate change. It will also give precise forecasts of seasonal weather patterns. According to scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Jason 2 will help create the first multi-decade global record of the role of the ocean in climate change. “Without this data record, we would have no basis for evaluating change,” says the mission’s project scientist, Lee-Lueng Fu.
A tree has grown from a 2000-year-old seed! It is the oldest-sprouted seed in the world, says a new study. It was recovered in 1963 from Masada, a fortress in present-day Israel where Jewish zealots killed themselves to avoid capture by the Romans in 70 AD. And it sprouted in 2005. This Methuselah tree, an ancestor of the modern date palm, is being grown at a protected laboratory in Jerusalem, Israel. Experts say it may have medicinal properties, reveal genetic relationships between ancient and modern date palms, and help in species restoration. Wow! So much can happen from a little seed.
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A new energy technology is being tested in the Negev desert, Israel. Mirrors are being used to harness sunrays and create electricity-producing steam. Sixteen thousand mirrors, or heliostats, focus sunrays onto a water boiler set on top of a 60-meter-high tower. The water turns into steam, which is then used to turn a turbine to generate electricity. The testing centre will mainly experiment with the heliostats and the collector, but won’t actually generate electricity. Seems like deserts would soon become hot properties…
X-men movies’ famous character Wolverine exists in real life. Well, not as a human being but as frog. At least 11 species of African frogs can pop out claws to fight off attackers. They puncture their own skin with sharp bones in their toes that they use as claws, say David Blackburn and his colleagues at Harvard University, US. They observed museum specimens of 63 African frog species, out of which the bones at the ends of the toes of 11 central African species were pointed and hooked, with smaller, free-floating bones at their tips. But this new finding is not unknown to locals. “Cameroonian hunters will use long spears or machetes to avoid touching these frogs,” says Blackburn. Hmm… may be these frogs were the “real inspiration” behind the X-men character…
In the battle against malaria, the next big idea is to use its transmitter – mosquitoes – against the disease itself. Scientists at the Imperial College, London, are genetically engineering mosquitoes to stop them from spreading the killer disease. They are trying out various plans like creating malaria-resistant mosquitoes and sterile male mosquitoes, which would mate with wild female mosquitoes and stunt the population growth. Though there are many apprehensions about the “use” of GM mosquitoes, the scientists believe that it is a risk worth taking. Still, there is a major problem – the number of mosquitoes that need to be produced. Millions of GM mosquitoes need to be released into
the environment. So, is it really a risk worth taking?
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