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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927952.900-scorn-over-claim-of-teleported-dna.html A Nobel prizewinner is reporting that DNA can be generated from its teleported "quantum imprint" A STORM of scepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. "If the results are correct," says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, "these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry." Luc Montagnier, who shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that...

Certain molecules do exist in two forms which are symmetrical mirror images of each other: they are known as chiral molecules. On Earth, the chiral molecules of life, especially amino acids and sugars, exist in only one form, either left-handed or right-handed. Why is it that life has initially chosen one form over the other? A consortium bringing together several French teams led by Louis d'Hendecourt, CNRS senior researcher at the Institut d'astrophysique spatiale (Université Paris-Sud 11 / CNRS), has for the first time obtained an excess of left-handed molecules (and then an excess of right-handedones) under conditions that reproduce...

The term Nanobacteria is short for its scientific genus & species name Nanobacterium sanguineum, a Latin scientific term that means blood nanobacteria. Nanobacteria are nano-sized in that they are from 20-200 nanometers in size and are the smallest known self-replicating bacteria (a nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter and is approximately the width of ten hydrogen atoms side-to-side) Nanobacterium sanguineum is recognized as an emerging infectious disease. Nanobacteria have been shown to cause the calcification in coronary artery disease and vascular disease atherosclerotic plaque. (Miller V, et al, Mayo Clinic, Journal American College of Cardiology, March 2002 & Submitted...

The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday. Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004. Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth...

Scientists have discovered amino acids, the building blocks of life in a meteorite where none were expected. The finding adds evidence to the idea that some of life's key ingredients could have formed in space, and then been delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite impacts. The meteorite in question was born in a violent crash, and eventually crashed into northern Sudan

Amid a flurry of criticism, a NASA-funded team on Thursday backed off the more extravagant, textbook-changing claims they'd made about a bacterium that had allegedly substituted arsenic for phosphorus in its DNA. The original announcement, made at a NASA news conference Dec. 2, seemed to break a cardinal rule of biology that all organisms need some phosphorus to survive. NASA researchers claimed to have discovered an exotic organism in California's Mono Lake that lived instead on arsenic, thus broadening the types of life that may exist in the universe. The news made headlines worldwide including a New York Times story...

I gave it the front-page treatment when the big announcement was made, so now the big skeptical response gets front-page treatment too. Simply devastating — so much so that I wonder why it fell to an outfit like Slate to put it together. Did the Times or WaPo not have enough of an inkling about NASA’s discovery to survey naysayers before writing up their reports on the “discovery”? This information would have come in a lot handier when everyone was still paying attention to this story. As soon Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. “I was outraged...

Life in space? Not quite. But to scientists in the arcane field of astrobiology, it's still pretty cool. Scientists at NASA's Astrobiology Institute report they have found bacteria -- in Mono Lake, Calif., not in space -- that could be made to live on arsenic. The organism is called GFAJ-1. The finding is important because it expands the prevailing view of what it takes for living things to survive.

Alan Boyle writes:NASA's secret is finally out: Researchers say they've forced microbes from a gnarly California lake to become arsenic-gobbling aliens. It may not be as thrilling as discovering life on Titan, but the claim is so radical that some chemists aren't yet ready to believe it. If the claim holds up, it would lend weight to the idea that life as we know it isn't the only way life could develop. Organisms with truly alien biochemistry could conceivably arise on a faraway exoplanet, or on the Saturnian moon Titan, or even here on Earth. "Our findings are a reminder...

Take a hastily arranged NASA press conference, add a vague allusion to an “astrobiology discovery,” and you’ve got a recipe for mass web-fueled speculation that E.T. is finally coming home. On Tuesday, the U.S. space agency announced a press conference to be held at 2pm EST on Thursday to “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” While that brief teaser is all NASA has said on the issue, many others have since taken to the web to complete the narrative. “If I had to guess at what NASA is going to reveal on...

Incredible microbe found in California lakeNasa scientists are set to announce that bacteria have been discovered that can survive in arsenic, an element previously thought too toxic to support life, it can be revealed. In a press conference scheduled for tomorrow evening, researchers will unveil the discovery of the incredible microbe - which substitutes arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth - in a lake in California. The remarkable discovery raises the prospect that life could exist on other planets which do not have phosphorus in the atmosphere, which had previously been thought vital for life to begin. But it...

NASA has set the interwebs a-tremble with a teasing announcement to the global media that a news conference will be held in Washington DC on Thursday "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life". The space agency's routine ploy of trailing major briefings in advance has caused trouble before. In 2008, "revelations" that the White House had been informed of a NASA announcement's content before the media caused fevered speculation ahead of a briefing on data from the "Phoenix" polar Mars lander.

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167 NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2 WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the...

Forests might be detectable on extrasolar planetsThanks to a new remote sensing technique, astronomers may soon be able to detect the presence of multicellular life (like trees) on planets outside of the Solar System. Excitingly, we've been able to detect the composition of atmospheres on a handful of planets orbiting other stars. But if next-generation space observatories go online within the next couple of decades, some scientists propose using a new technique to determine details such as tree-like multicellular life on extrasolar planets. While previous studies have discussed the likelihood of detecting life on exoplanets through signs of biogenic gases...

Thirty years ago, NASA scientists noticed that two of their spacecraft, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, were veering off course slightly, as if subject to a mysterious, unknown force. In 1998, the wider scientific community got wind of that veering—termed the Pioneer anomaly—and took aim at it with incessant, mind-blowingly detailed scrutiny that has since raised it to the physics equivalent of cult status. Now, though, after spawning close to 1000 academic papers, numerous international conferences, and many entire scientific careers, this beloved cosmic mystery may be on its way out. Slava Turyshev, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet almost two years ago, it has emerged. Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney, picked up the odd signal in December 2008, long before it was announced that the star Gliese 581 has habitable planets in orbit around it. Dr Bhathal had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an area of the galaxy that holds the newly-discovered Gliese 581g. The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night...

Charles Darwin may have been wrong when he argued that competition was the major driving force of evolution. He imagined a world in which organisms battled for supremacy and only the fittest survived. But new research identifies the availability of "living space", rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution. Findings question the old adage of "nature red in tooth and claw". The study conducted by PhD student Sarda Sahney and colleagues at the University of Bristol is published in Biology Letters. The research team used fossils to study evolutionary patterns over 400 million years of history. Focusing...

Professor Charles Cockell from the OU explains how the experiment worked A small English fishing village has produced an out-of-this-world discovery. Bacteria taken from cliffs at Beer on the South Coast have shown themselves to be hardy space travellers. The bugs were put on the exterior of the space station to see how they would cope in the hostile conditions that exist above the Earth's atmosphere. And when scientists inspected the microbes a year and a half later, they found many were still alive. These survivors are now thriving in a laboratory at the Open University (OU) in Milton Keynes....

SCIENTISTS have proved for the first time that bacteria can survive in outer space, supporting the theory that life on Earth began with extra-terrestrial microbes. Researchers showed that spores could stay alive when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun if they were protected by particles of clay and red sandstone commonly found in meteorites. The tests, in which spores were released from a Russian satellite, suggest that the 'panspermia' theory that life began elsewhere and was carried to Earth on meteorites is plausible. The hypothesis was first proposed by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, in 1903 and was ...

Life originated in a nebular cloud, over 10 billion years ago, but may have had multiple origins in multiple locations, including in galaxies older than the Milky Way. Multiple origins could account for the different domains of life: archae, bacteria, eukaryotes. The first steps toward life may have been achieved when self-replicating nano-particles initially comprised of a mixture of carbon, calcium, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, sugars, and other elements and gasses were combined and radiated, forming a nucleus around which a lipid-like permeable membrane was established, and within which DNA-bases were laddered together with phosphates and sugars; a process which may...