21Sep 2022 by Post

A Mystery: Prebiotic Synthesis of Simple Organic Monomers

amino acids, ammonia, atmosphere, building blocks, carbon dioxide, David Deamer, early Earth, Evolution, First Life from Purely Natural Means? (series), gases, geoscientists, high school textbooks, hydrothermal vent, Intelligent Design, methane, Miller-Urey experiment, monomers, NASA, National Research Council, Nick Lane, primordial soup, reducing gases, Science (journal), Space Studies Board, University College London
In 2010, University College London biochemist Nick Lane stated the primordial soup theory “doesn’t hold water” and is “past its expiration date.” Source
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30Nov 2021 by Post

Long Story Short — Did Purely Natural Processes Produce Biopolymers?

amino acids, biology, biopolymers, chirality, denaturation, DNA, Donna Blackmond, Evolution, formamide, glycans, Holy Grail, homochirality, Intelligent Design, Le Chatelier’s principle, lipids, Long Story Short, monomers, natural processes, nucleotides, Occam's Razor, origin of life, polymerization, proteins, RNA, solvents, sugars, toluene, wet/dry cycles, YouTube videos
Science provides a clear expectation of what natural processes produce, and what we observe in the biopolymers of life is dramatically unexpected.  Source
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23Apr 2020 by Post

An Astronomer Considers the Origin of Life, with Sobering Results

abiogenesis, astronomers, biologists, biology, calculation, Chemistry, Drake equation, Erlenmeyer flask, Evolution, Fischer Scientific, inflation, inflationary universe, metaphysics, meteorites, monomers, Nature (journal), nucleotides, origin of life, Physics, Earth & Space, reagents, RNA molecules, RNA world, silver atom, snowflakes, Tomonori Totani, tooth fairy, universe, University of Tokyo
Live Science reports: Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life. Even so, the details to support the idea are lacking. But researchers recently got creative in figuring out the probability of life actually emerging spontaneously from such inorganic matter — a process called abiogenesis. In the study, Tomonori Totani, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Tokyo, modeled the microscopic world of molecules across the epic scale of the entire universe to see if abiogenesis is a likely candidate for the origin of life. He was essentially looking at whether there were…
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