5 ms·
What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology
- j16sdiz 5mo agoIt feels next would be trying isolate the component that make CO2. Try to use smaller sample. Put them under microscope, etc.
- wagwang 5mo agoI might be dumb, but I figured they would just continuously subdivide the sample until they isolated it. Maybe CO2 sensors wont be sensitive enough?
- greenbit 5mo agoMaybe it's the very molecules that the live cells were using, just doing their thing without the cells. Cells concentrate things by confining them in a small volume, but otoh, if you have damp particles, the thin water layer on the particles would be a kind of confining space, with the added advantage of surface area to exchange gases with.
- andrewflnr 5mo agoThis is addressed later in the article. They think there's probably some of that activity but don't think those molecules could last long enough to produce the observed effect.
- JackFr 5mo agoObligatory Asimov: 'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but 'That's funny...”'
- roughly 5mo agoYep. The most interesting places in science are where the model breaks down.
- buildsjets 5mo agoReminds me of the Gamma Forest at Brookhaven National Labs. From 1961 thru 1978 they irradiated a section of the pine barrens forest with a cesium-137 source just to see what would happen. It sterilized the soil and hardly anything grows there, almost 50 years later. https://maps.app.goo.gl/pJYr6qiZnMdVwLJS6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/pJYr6qiZnMdVwLJS6 https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brookhaven-gamma-forest https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brookhaven-gamma-forest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsuiLxcDuHY&t=925s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsuiLxcDuHY&t=925s
- ErroneousBosh 5mo agoI'm guessing the distinct lack of Google Streetview on that circular bit of road nearby and the tracks implies a certain amount of resistance to access if you get off that dual carriageway to the west?
- buildsjets 5mo agoThat "circular bit of road" is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the second highest-powered particle accelerator on the planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Heavy_Ion_Collider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Heavy_Ion_Collide...
- ErroneousBosh 5mo agoAwesome! I had a good nose about the LHC when I was there a few years ago. I'm guessing that site isn't quite so enthusiastic about visitors? The dump load for one of my wind turbines is a pair of 22Ω resistors recovered from one of CERN's "free for all" scrap piles :-)
- scheme271 5mo agoBrookhaven does classified research and access to the site is pretty restricted. The last time I visited there were guards with assault rifles at the gates. In comparison, Fermilab used to (and may still) let you walk onto the campus and wander about.
- emsign 5mo agoThis is huge news if true for evaluating soil experiments on Mars. They could give false positives for life if they only look for metabolic products.
- cogman10 5mo agoNot as much as you might think. We've found amino acids almost everywhere we look, including astroids [1]. It seems that the building blocks of life pretty naturally and readily form. Which is a pretty strong indicator that life is likely fairly common outside earth. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-asteroid-bennu-sample-reveals-mix-of-lifes-ingredients/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-asteroid-bennu-sampl...
- stevenwoo 5mo agoTangentially related, this is a bit trying to sell upcoming book, but the discussion of origins of life was interesting to me. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526959-how-a-radical-new-view-of-life-could-reveal-its-origin-and-aliens/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526959-how-a-radical-n... YMMV but It’s free via my local library and Libby if you are stopped by the subscription nag.
- adrian_b 5mo agoThe amino acids that can be found everywhere include ten of the simpler amino-acids that are used in proteins (glycine, the 2 acids, the 3 branched, alanine, proline and the 2 alcohols). The other 11 amino-acids from proteins have never been found where life does not exist. They are more complex and they seem to have been developed by living beings long after the appearance of life and the appearance of the genetic code (they seem to have substituted later the simpler amino-acids in certain locations of the map of the original genetic code, which encoded fewer amino-acids). Moreover, while the simple amino-acids, including the ten that are used in proteins, can be found pretty much everywhere, wherever they were not produced by living beings they have been found in racemic mixtures, i.e. in equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed isomers, while in proteins only the left-handed isomers are used, so the living beings normally produce almost only left-handed isomers. Very small quantities of right-handed isomers are produced by some living beings, for other purposes than making proteins. So it is relatively easy to distinguish amino-acids that have been produced by living beings from amino-acids that have been produced in abiotic conditions (i.e. the amino-acids produced in abiotic conditions are recognized by the absence of complex amino-acids and by the presence of great quantities of right-handed isomers).
- greenbit 5mo agoThis is great, if you have significant amounts of free oxygen to work with, which early earth evidently did not. Would be interesting to see if anaerobic metabolism could also occur without cellular confinement.
- asdff 5mo agoBiochemists have been doing just that for like 100 years. They'd take a bunch of yeast, grind the cells into a slurry releasing whatever is inside, separate the cell debris, and perform experiments measuring fermentation rate.
- stymaar 5mo agoIt can, that's the reason why UHT milk has a relatively short shelf lifespan and degrades despite being devoid of living microorganisms. The enzymes keep doing their work long after the cell membrane is gone.
- gamblor956 5mo agoYou might be thinking of something else. UHT has a very long shelf life compared to other forms of liquid milk.
- stymaar 5mo agoCompared to other forms forms of liquid milk indeed, but it has a rather short shelf life compared to most sterile food. (Imagine if canned meat or fish had the same shelf life than UHT milk…)
- gamblor956 5mo agoMeat and fish subjected to the same processes as UHT milk (i.e., brief explosure to ultra-high temperatures) only lasts a few days, so UHT milk lasts way longer than the comparables.
- culi 5mo ago
- bitwize 5mo agoLife uh, finds a way.
- stymaar 5mo agoFunnily enough, the title made me think about the PhD of a friend, and it turns out it's actually his lab that is featured here, and his name is even mentioned. What a star!
- contingencies 5mo agoSoil's amazing. So is fungal diversity. Fungal insect interactions. Bryophytes. Slime molds. Ferns. If you have a lawn, do the world a favor and remove it. No need to mow and you'll be amazed at the world that emerges. Especially with a microscope. Theory on the emergence of photosynthesis whereby chlorophyll-like structures first evolved from harvesting heat rather than light: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/mjpapay/45240-the-first-plant-photosynthesis-without-sunlight https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/mjpapay/45240-the-first-...
- accrual 5mo ago> They’re finding that the chemistry of life is not exclusive to life, he added. “It’s the chemistry of geology.” This has me excited for missions to Europa and Enceladus. Vast quantities of tidal energy flexing unseen ocean floors for millennia is bound to produce some interesting chemistry, if not life.
- MarkusQ 5mo agoThis is like saying "wood burns, even when the tree is dead" but much, much slower. The disequilibrium (sugars and free O₂) were produced by living organisms, and this is just the gradual drift back to a lower energy state. CO₂ is common in the universe, and not at all a sign of life. O₂ and sugars are rare.
- LarsAlereon 5mo agoThis is honestly what I'm thinking. Carbohydrates and hydrocarbons will oxidize to CO2 and water in our atmosphere, and especially quickly at warm temperatures, in the presence of energy sources like sunlight, or in the presence of ozone or elevated oxygen levels. In general biological processes like aerobic decay are so much more effective that we ignore this, but it still happens.
- conductr 5mo agoThis seems like the better explanation of my laybrain reading this and thinking; why would you start with soil? If it were a true geological phenomenon then shouldn’t they use a sterile jar of granite dust or something that only existed on earth prior to life? It seems like pointing at a jar of bio matter and saying we can’t stop it is not really a good methodology to base much upon. I barely ever even took a chemistry class in my life but something just feels wrong with this approach to me. I assume that’s what the other scientists who doubt the sterilization were thinking too.
- mrguyorama 5mo agoIndeed. They suggest that the soil can somehow catalyze metabolic reactions and break down complex carbohydrates without life but where would the complex carbohydrates come from? I'm also curious how they could demonstrate that there isn't some sort of very constrained extremophile producing all their results that doesn't exactly colonize very well but will still function.
- nilkn 5mo agoIt's been speculated for at least a decade now that geochemistry spawned biochemistry and life as we know it. This appears to be the latest instance of this pattern. One of the most notable examples is geothermal processes simply creating calm energy gradients that are stable for billions of years (e.g., underwater alkaline vents), which can then essentially "manufacture" organic compounds, which naturally assemble into more complex compounds like magnetic Lego blocks, which ... I like to think of the Earth as a supercomputer running a vast self-interactive chemical computation of unfathomable scale for an unfathomably long amount of time. In this view, the Earth is roughly a ~10^38 ops/sec dissipative self-modifying search engine, of which life captures roughly ~10^35 ops/sec into metabolism, heredity, ecological competition, and evolutionary search. Once proper biological evolution kicked in, with some bumps along the road, it has had a general tendency to reallocate that immense compute capacity in a way that increases search adaptivity per joule by finding and stacking "search accelerators" (prebiotic geochemistry/biochemistry, replicators, cells, DNA/RNA/protein systems, mitochondria, sexual reproduction, multicellularity, nervous systems, intelligence / brains, language / culture, science / technology, ?).
- lazide 5mo agoThe Buddha nods.
- AareyBaba 5mo agoYet, there is only one form of life on earth exhibiting cellular metabolism and DNA/RNA replication. That original life form formed as soon as the earth became suitable for life. In the 3+ billion years since, there has been no new life form created that we know of despite the ongoing unfathomable computations.
- jfarlow 5mo agoNetwork effects + energetic fficiencies. On an energy landscape that includes integration over very short and very long lifetimes, the thalweg of utility/energy rests right about where the current codon optimizations are. And any schemes that deviate don't get to share in the others' bounty. Reusing your foods' effort saves a lot, metabolically.
- trentnix 5mo agoGenesis 2:7 (NIV) Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
- IAmBroom 5mo agoYeah... so pretty much exactly, precisely, 100.000% the opposite of that.
- myrmidon 5mo agoIt would have been very easy for older religions to present strong evidence for divinity: just have some explicit, non-trivial facts in the holy book that were unknown to humankind when those books were written, like earth-moon/sun distance, speed of light, etc. Complete absence of anything like that is a pretty strong indicator by itself...
- BigTTYGothGF 5mo agoI'm not going to track down the references to see if they did this, but surely protein mass spectrometry could show if they have enzymes that are still there.
- FjordWarden 5mo agoReminds me of the abiogenic petroleum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
- threwrfaway 5mo ago[dead]
- IAmBroom 5mo agoThat's a wild, out-there hypothesis. This is a factual observation that currently has no strong explanation hypotheses.
- metalman 5mo agosoil is a biological construct and only occurs on Earth, the regolith on other planets will not support life without major amendments and modifications. there are orders of magnitude more types of minerals on earth that found in any sample from an extra terestrial source, and while not proven conclusivly there is strong evidence that the bulk of earthly minerals, have biological origins in there creation. what is not disputed is that the entire top 10km or so of our planet has biological components and biological modifications, 3 billion years will do.that to a world, the point bieng, is that extraterestrial regolith would be the substance to use in substantiating the premise under consideration, but was not.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoSupporting life is different from already having life. There are lifeforms that only rely upon soil for structural support and not for nutrients - they could probably grow on regolith as long as it's not too toxic. We could also spray it with needed nutrients.
- mparramon 5mo agoThat is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
- nelox 5mo agoThe climate change deniers are gonna love this. CO2 from soil.
- foota 5mo agoWhat if life was born under the surface?
- vanderZwan 5mo agoWell, as far as I understand it's pretty much a given that it happened underwater or underground, to protect against cosmic radiation and other harsh conditions averse to lifeg so that's not really a "what if" unless you meant something else than I think you did. Mind you, "soil" as we know it did not exist before life was there to create it. Geology as it exists on Earth does not exist on lifeless planets.
- mjanx123 5mo agoWater is also averse to emergence of life chemistry, despite the mature life depending on it, it hydrolyzes and damages the fragile structures. It is the same situation as with oxygen in principle.
- Shitty-kitty 5mo agoAFIAK only Hydrofluorocarbons detection would be considered a unambiguous signal of life, and those require technology. Life very much seems to be a natural process, largely un-distinguishable from other natural processes. Detection will come from Preponderance of evidence rather than a silver-bullet.
- pslab 5mo ago[flagged]
- rbanffy 5mo agoAs anyone working in a large corporation can immediately tell you, "dead but breathing" is much more common than one might guess.
- ps3udo 5mo agoNot directly related, but it made me think of the "A New Physics Theory of Life" article in the same magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
- georgecmu 5mo agoThe actual publication is available here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw9065 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw9065 The present study challenges the traditional view that the *respiration of organic carbon to CO2* is an exclusively intracellular process, revealing that *organic compound respiration can occur spontaneously in an extracellular context in soils*. On the surface, it looks like they rediscovered that oxidation of organic / carbonaceous compounds occurs at low temperatures independently of presence of living organisms. The real contribution of the paper would be in elucidation of the specific mechanisms of oxidation of these organic compounds (e.g. via abiotic catalysis). Compare to this paper from 2003: https://sci-hub.kvnp.top/10.1016/s0360-1285(03)00042-x https://sci-hub.kvnp.top/10.1016/s0360-1285(03)00042-x Coal oxidation at low temperatures is the major heat source responsible for the self-heating and spontaneous combustion of coal and is an important source of greenhouse gas emissions. This review focuses on the chemical reactions occurring during low-temperature oxidation of coal. Current understanding indicates that this process involves consumption of O2, formation of solid oxygenated complexes, thermal decomposition of solid oxygenated complexes and generation of gaseous oxidation products. Parameters, such as mass change, heat release, oxygen consumption, and formation of oxidation products in the gas or solid phase, have been used to qualitatively and quantitatively describe the oxidation process. Reaction mechanisms have been proposed to explain the characteristics of consumption of O2, and formation of oxidation products in the gas and solid phases. Various kinetic models have also been developed to describe the rate of oxygen consumption and the rates of formation of gaseous oxidation products in terms of the rate parameters of the relevant reactions, oxidation time, temperature, and initial concentration of oxygen in the oxidising medium.