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Comet Lovejoy Giving Away Alcohol (eurekalert.org)
Thorfinn.au writes: Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team. The discovery marks the first time ethyl alcohol, the same type in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet. The finding adds to the evidence that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life.
'We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,' said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.
Comets are frozen remnants from the formation of our solar system. Scientists are interested in them because they are relatively pristine and therefore hold clues to how the solar system was made. Most orbit in frigid zones far from the sun. However, occasionally, a gravitational disturbance sends a comet closer to the sun, where it heats up and releases gases, allowing scientists to determine its composition.
'We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,' said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.
Comets are frozen remnants from the formation of our solar system. Scientists are interested in them because they are relatively pristine and therefore hold clues to how the solar system was made. Most orbit in frigid zones far from the sun. However, occasionally, a gravitational disturbance sends a comet closer to the sun, where it heats up and releases gases, allowing scientists to determine its composition.
It's interesting that they are finding organic compounds on comets. It's not much more complex to get to amino acids which are the building blocks of life. Perhaps the earth was seeded with enough organic material to jump start simple life forms. We might all be from alien origin.
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http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/27/an-faq-on-sanders-and-the-left
Bernie Sanders kicked off his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination with a large and enthusiastic rally in Burlington, Vermont, on May 26.
Sanders' candidacy has prompted discussion and debate among a left shaped by recent struggles such as Occupy Wall Street, the Chicago teachers strike, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter and the climate justice movement. Many radicals, publications and organizations either support Sanders' Democratic Party run outright or believe his campaign can be used to build the infrastructure for a stronger left. By contrast, SocialistWorker.org has argued Sanders' campaign will serve to corral and co-opt the emerging left into supporting the Democratic Party--and make it harder, not easier, to build an independent, left-wing alternative.
Here, Ashley Smith and Alan Maass respond to some of the questions and disagreements posed by SocialistWorker.org readers during the course of the discussion so far.
Vermont Sen. Bernie SandersVermont Sen. Bernie Sanders
THERE MAY be problems with Bernie Sanders, but he is also putting forward ideas and proposals that socialists agree with. Isn't it being a "purist" to object to participation in the Sanders campaign?
SOCIALISTS WHO criticize the Sanders campaign aren't just being "purists."
We do support many of Sanders' proposals for reform, like free higher education, the breakup of the mega-banks, a green jobs program to promote alternative energy and stop climate change, and measures to challenge corporate domination of the political system. We also disagree with Sanders' support for apartheid Israel and his failure to consistently challenge U.S. imperialism, his weak position on the issue of racist police violence, and his support for restrictions on immigrant rights.
But the question for us isn't mostly about the "purity" of Sanders' political positions. The crux of our objection is Sanders' decision to run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and to promise in advance that he will endorse the mainstream Democrat who will all but certainly defeat him. This decision is the culmination of Sanders' increasingly close and collaborative relationship with the Democrats, despite the fact that he promotes radical political ideas, labels himself an independent in the U.S. Senate and calls himself a democratic socialist.
Socialist Worker and its publisher, the International Socialist Organization, have supported independent candidates in the past, even when we had political disagreements. We supported Ralph Nader's independent presidential campaigns, for example, while maintaining our criticisms of some positions he took and calling on him to change them. The most important point was Nader's determination to run a campaign that was independent of the Democratic Party, with the aim of building an alternative to the two-party system.
This independence is precisely what Sanders is abandoning by running for the Democratic presidential nomination and pledging to support the eventual Democratic nominee.
The biggest problem is Sanders' relationship to the Democratic Party. It poses as the "party of the people," but it is, in fact, a capitalist party, funded and controlled by Corporate America and the political elite. The party establishment tolerates liberals and even radicals in their midst, so long as they don't represent a significant threat. The liberal and progressive faces of the party are, in fact, immensely valuable in winning support from the voting base of the Democrats among the working class and the oppressed.
The real fear of party leaders isn't that someone like Sanders will raise uncomfortably progressive ideas within the party primaries, but that a threat could arise outside their ranks and build a socialist, labor or Green Party that would challenge the two-party system.
ISN'T RUNNING in the Democratic Party the only realistic way for Sanders to win?
THE OPPOSITE is the ca
Ha! Of course they measure it in bottles of wine. We Americans need that converted to bottles of Whiskey!
Or malt liqueur, which ever you prefer.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Markus and I are going to help prepare a new MIV for launch to intercept this "Comet Lovejoy" and claim it's alcohol and sugar for use in the Cloud Ark. We will need to reuse and tow the reactor from ymir, along with a full compliment of robots to handle all of the slave labor needed to adjust the orbit of this hunk of ice towards the Sun-Earth L1 la grange point. From there we use the alcohol to power the boosters around Old Earth into a high orbit towards Izzy. We can correct for everything bad that happens on the far side of the burn. Then it's 5,000 years old alcohol powered goodness.
Live long, Dr. Doob.
These measurements are made using a spectrograph, right? Then what is the difference between the comet spitting out carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in more-or-less the same relative quantities as found in alcohol, and pure, molecular alcohol? I mean, have they verified that it is alcohol and not acetone? How does one verify the (complex) molecular composition of something when you can only see its light?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity
An angry person writes:
So how much ethyl alcohol? Using standard dimensions as assumptions:
500 bottles at 750ml: 375 litres
375 litres of wine at 13% = 50 litres [*]
Just say that next time, k? At what point in the reporting chain did this idiocy get introduced? It's ejecting around 50 litres of ethyl alcohol. Simple. Now go away.
[*} adjusted ABV from 12 to 13% to get 50 litres - a more likely estimated figure
They don't shave their pits or legs or wear deodorant.
I would pay dearly for a bottle of comet wine that has aged 1 billion years.
Does that mean it's on an irregular, erratic orbit, and should be pulled over and given a breathalyzer test before it endangers any inhabited planets?
[eom]
This is clearly an illegal alien still!
Hey Internet tough guys --
Instead of downmodding my posts, why don't you provide an articulate rebuttal so we can discuss Muslin tyranny like human beings?
I guess ( -1 ) (ie. two bytes,) is easier than articulating their position using something like a paragraph (!!)
The alcohol may be free, but the delivery charges are out of this world.
Learn to love Alaska
Your post is off topic and insane. Arguing with you would be like playing chess with a monkey. I'll win, but you'll throw your shit all over me and the chess board.
Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol [...]
Alcohol is a very poisonous substance for humans. If you associate joy with alcohol, you should seek help. Trivializing it in naming and news articles is dangerous.
It's really hard to understand how people who call themselves computer geeks or nerds, can still find such attraction to alcohol, tobacco, or even worse, sports beside FPS, RTS, or RPG games...
Ethanol is the type of alcohol in beverages.
I'd argue that the release of alcohol isn't necessary for the emergence of life so much as the enjoyment of it.
> Ethanol is the type of alcohol in beverages.
Ethyl alcohol, alcohol of ethane or C2H5OH is just another name for ethanol. You're likely thinking of methyl alcohol, methanol, alcohol of methane, wood alcohol, wood naphtha, methyl hydrate, wood spirits or CH3OH
at 12% alcohol usually and a wine bottle being 75 cl, that's 45 Liters (11.88 gallons) of pure alcohol. Why this ridiculous comparison? How many beers is it?
Joy loving people don't 'give away' alcohol, the word you're looking for is 'throwing up'.
It's my understanding that ethyl alcohol is formed by yeast consuming sugars; the byproduct is ethyl alcohol. How else can ethyl alcohol form? It may be far fetched but did they unintentionally announce they had found a byproduct of life outside our planet?
was it murkian style piss, drops their knickers cheap wine or decent scotch whiskey?
Never before has so many alcoholics wanted to be an astronaut as of this discovery.
I could swear I saw Barney Gumble at Nasa's main entrance yesterday.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
It's clearly guilty of Orbiting While Black. It should count itself lucky if it doesn't get the full Tempel 1 treatment.
Step 1: Send a probe to the comet.
Step 2: Collect alcohol & bring it back to Earth.
Step 3: Bottle the alcohol.
Step 4: Sell it to rich folks who like getting drunk.
Step 5: Profit (for NASA).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It may be a good year, but just look at the terroir.
Imports
None. This is a by-product of infinity; it is impossible to import things into something that has infinite volume because by definition there is no outside to import things from.
Exports
None, for similar reasons as imports.
Glycolaldehyde is not a sugar. From the Wiki:
"It is the only possible diose, a 2-carbon monosaccharide, although a diose is not strictly a saccharide. While not a true sugar, it is the simplest sugar-related molecule."
This molecule is less than half the size and complexity of the simple sugars most essential to life, like ribose and glucose.
More importantly, "the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life" would be things like enzymes, ribosomes, and a DNA or RNA blueprint for those machines. Each of those is hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times larger and more complex than glycolaldehyde or ethyl alcohol.
As the odds of a specific complex, information-laden structure forming spontaneously drop exponentially with its size, even the discovery of true sugars in space would not be meaningful evidence that life-as-we-know-it could have begun through chance chemical interactions.
To me, this is all the necessary evidence of a secret Russian space program. I'd just like to know why they select such clumsy astronauts...
Because arguing with bigoted assholes like you is a waste of time, fuck off back under the rock you climbed out from cunt.
You're drunk.
It's Ted Kennedy.
This is the first time I wish I could post a photo in comments: http://pre13.deviantart.net/eb...