WW3

SCIENTISTS have discovered that inorganic material can take on the characteristics of living organisms in space, a development that could transform views of alien life.

An international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck institute in Germany and the University of Sydney found that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helixes and double helixes and that the inorganic creations had memory and the power to reproduce themselves.

A similar rethinking of prospective alien life is being undertaken by the National Research Council, an advisory body to the US government. It says Nasa should start a search for what it describes as “weird life” - organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life on Earth.

The new research, to be published this week in the New Journal of Physics, found nonorganic dust, when held in the form of plasma in zero gravity, formed the helical structures found in DNA. The particles are held together by electromagnetic forces that the scientists say could contain a code comparable to the genetic information held in organic matter. It appeared that this code could be transferred to the next generation.

Professor Greg Morfill, of the Max Planck institute of extra-terrestrial physics, said: “Going by our current narrow definitions of what life is, it qualifies.

“The question now is to see if it can evolve to become intelligent. It’s a little bit like science fiction at the moment. The potential level of complexity we are looking at is of an amoeba or a plant.

“I do not believe that the systems we are talking about are life as we know it. We need to define the criteria for what we think of as life much more clearly.”

It may be that science is starting to study territory already explored by science fiction. The television series The X-Files, for example, has featured life in the form of a silicon-based parasitic spore.

The Max Planck experiments were conducted in zero gravity conditions in Germany and on the International Space Station 200 miles above earth.

The findings have provoked speculation that the helix could be a common structure that underpins all life, organic and nonorganic.

From The Sunday Times
August 12, 2007

It was supposed to be the one speed limit you cannot break.

But scientists claim to have demonstrated there is the possibility of travel faster than the speed of light.

The feat contradicts one of the key tenets of Einstein’s special theory of relativity - that nothing, under any circumstances, can move faster than 186,000 miles per second, or the speed of light.

Travelling faster than light also, in theory, turns back time. According to conventional physics, an astronaut moving beyond light speed would arrive at his destination before leaving.

But two German physicists claim to have forced light to overcome its own speed limit using the strange phenomenon of quantum tunnelling, in which particles summon up the energy to cross an apparently uncrossable barrier.

Their experiments focused on the travel of microwave photons - energetic packets of light - through two prisms.

When the prisms were moved apart, most photons reflected off the first prism they encountered and were picked up by a detector.

But a few appeared to “tunnel” through a gap separating them as if the prisms were still held together.

Although these photons had travelled a longer distance, they arrived at their detector at the same time as the reflected photons. This suggests that the transit between the two prisms was faster than the speed of light.

Dr Gunter Nimtz, of the University of Koblenz, told the magazine New Scientist: “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ice-covered Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests in a climate much like that of Sweden and eastern Canada today.

An international team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from the bottom of an ice core that indicates the presence of pine, yew and alder trees as well as insects.

The researchers, led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, say the findings are the first direct proof that there was forest in southern Greenland.

Included were genetic traces of butterflies, moths, flies and beetles, they report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The material was recovered from cores drilled through ice 1.2 miles thick at a site called Dye 3 in south central Greenland. Ice cores from another site farther north, 1.8 miles deep, did not yield any DNA.

Greenland was discovered by Vikings sailing from Iceland about 1,000 years ago. While it had an ice cap then, the climate was relatively mild and they were able to establish colonies in coastal areas. Those colonies later vanished as the climate cooled.

But the new research shows it hasn’t always been so cold there.

“These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken, and what we’ve learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought,” Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement.

The base of the ice is mixed with mud and it was this mud that Willerslev’s team studied.

The DNA, dated to between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, may be the oldest yet recovered, according to the team. DNA found previously in the Siberian permafrost has been dated to 300,000 to 400,000 years ago.

However, because of uncertainties in interpreting the age estimates, they could not rule out the possibility that the newly found DNA dates to the last interglacial, 130,000 to 116,000 years ago.

The research was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, National Science Foundation of Denmark, the Wellcome Trust, Natural Environment Research Council, European Union, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, McMaster University, the Polar Continental Shelf Project, Max Planck Society and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have created a device that uses sunlight to transform harmful CO2 gas into fuel that could replace all the gasoline used in transportation.

Clifford Kubiak, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Aaron Sathrum have developed a prototype device that can capture energy from the sun, convert it to electrical energy and “split” carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen.

The amazing process produces CO (carbon monoxide) which can be processed by bacterial fermentation to produce ethanol, and massive amounts industrial chemicals used to produce plastics. By splitting CO2 you can save fuel, produce useful chemicals and eliminate global warming greenhouse gases.

The device designed by Kubiak and Sathrum to split carbon dioxide utilizes a semiconductor and two thin layers of catalysts. It splits carbon dioxide to generate carbon monoxide and oxygen in a three-step process. The first step is the capture of solar energy photons by the semiconductor. The second step is the conversion of optical energy into electrical energy by the semiconductor. The third step is the deployment of electrical energy to the catalysts. The catalysts convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide on one side of the device and to oxygen on the other side.

The US uses about 400 million gallon of gasoline a day and produces about 50 million tons of CO2. The goal now is to scale this process up to replace that amount of gasoline and convert most of the manmade CO2 gases in the US.

The US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has been slapped with criminal charges in Nigeria over a notorious clinical trial it conducted on children during a meningitis epidemic a decade ago. Patients became unwitting guinea pigs for a new, untested antibiotic and many of them either died or were left with permanent disabilities.

Pfizer and its representatives will be called to account at hearings due to begin next month in the Nigerian state of Kano, where public anger over the clinical trial - and the assurances of any pharmaceutical company - remains so high that the local population won’t even trust the Nigerian government to immunise their children against polio.

The episode, which has already led to one unsuccessful suit in the US courts, was the inspiration for John Le Carre’s novel The Constant Gardener and is frequently held up as an instance of scientific inquiry gone shockingly awry.

The Nigerian authorities say Pfizer researchers selected 200 children and infants from a crowded epidemic camp in Kano in 1996 and gave about half of them an untested antibiotic called Trovan. The lawsuit alleges that the researchers did not obtain consent from the children’s families even though they knew from their own research that Trovan might have life-threatening side effects and was “unfit for human use”.

The suit further contends that the researchers gave the other half a comparison drug made by Pfizer’s competitor Hoffman-La Roche, but deliberately underdosed them to make their own product look better. Pfizer and its doctors “agreed to do an illegal act,” the suit says, “in a manner so rash and negligent as to endanger human life”.

Once the trial was over, the suit continues, Pfizer left the area, removed all medical records and “obliterated any evidence” of the trial. A Nigerian government report, which appears to have spurred the criminal charges, previously found that Pfizer never told the children or their parents they were participating in a trial and did not inform them that alternative treatments were available - most obviously chloramphenicol, a relatively cheap antibiotic usually recommended for bacterial meningitis.

The government report found that of the 11 children who died, five were taking Trovan and six were taking low doses of the comparison drug, ceftriaxone. An unknown number suffered deafness, blindness, paralysis and other disabilities.

The Kano authorities have charged Pfizer on eight counts of criminal conspiracy and voluntarily causing grievous harm. They have also filed a civil suit seeking more than $2.7bn (£1.3bn) in damages. Pfizer has responded to the lawsuit by insisting it did nothing wrong. “Pfizer continues to emphasize - in the strongest terms - that the 1996 Trovan clinical study was conducted with the full knowledge of the Nigerian government and in a responsible and ethical way consistent with the company’s abiding commitment to patient safety,” a company statement said. “Any allegations in these lawsuits to the contrary are simply untrue - they weren’t valid when they were first raised years ago and they’re not valid today.”

Back in 1997, when Pfizer faced a US government audit of its records on Trovan, the company produced a letter from a hospital in Kano saying its study had been approved by the hospital’s ethics committee. The company’s accusers contend that the letter was fabricated after the fact, using a forged letterhead. The hospital, according to the suit, has no ethics committee.

Nigeria’s decision to prosecute Pfizer marks the first known instance of a Third World country going after a pharmaceutical multinational. Until now, the Nigerians have trod very carefully around the issue - commissioning an investigation but then suppressing the results until they were leaked to The Washington Post a few years ago.

But the episode has got in the way of successive public initiatives, including a polio vaccination drive that prompted an 11-month boycott in Kano.

Trovan has never been approved for use on US children. It was cleared for adults in 1997, but its use was restricted two years later following reports of liver damage and death. It is banned throughout Europe.