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Asymmetric Molecule, Key To Life, Detected In Space For First Time (yahoo.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Yahoo News: Scientists for the first time have found a complex organic molecule in space that bears the same asymmetric structure as molecules that are key to life on Earth. The researchers said on Tuesday they detected the complex organic molecule called propylene oxide in a giant cloud of gas and dust near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Akin to a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules including propylene oxide possess mirror-like versions of themselves, a chemical property called chirality. Scientists have long pondered why living things make use of only one version of certain molecules, such as the 'right-handed' form of the sugar ribose, which is the backbone of DNA. The discovery of propylene oxide in space boosts theories that chirality has cosmic origins. The scientists in the new study used radio telescopes to ferret out the chemical details of molecules in the distant, star-forming cloud of gas and dust. As molecules move around in the vacuum of space they emit telltale vibrations that appear as distinctive radio waves. Future studies of how polarized light interacts with the molecules may reveal if one version of propylene oxide dominates in space, the researchers said.
When I first read this, I thought they had found a non-50:50 ratio of enantiomers, but it appears that they have simply detected the presence of propylene oxide in some form, which doesn't seem terribly surprising to me. It would be fascinating if they did discover that one enantiomer was favoured but I'm not sure how this could be done short of collecting the chemical... are there any convenient sources of polarised light in space?
Of course these chemicals are now in space. Look at all the things we've launched into it! Undoubtedly these little things just hopped along for the ride.
It's simple cause and effect. In essence, we 'created' this discovery.
We have no one but ourselves to blame for contaminating that great Petri dish in the sky.
So Drake was right after all. There is life everywhere.
In fact those molecules are not life precursors. They're just remnants from a past civilization that ended in a global thermonuclear war after they elected their equivalent to Donald Trump.
if there are songs in the key of life out there.
Any one?
It's gone a long way in 6000 years.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They've found that one of the simplest pair of chiral molecules can be created in space. Not surprising, and both the left and right enantiomers (the left and right handed molecules) are almost certainly present in a 50/50 ratio, so not enantiomerically pure. They have not shown anything at all interesting here.
One of the defining things about chiral chemistry is that to have a pure enantiomeric compound you either have to start with an enantiomerically pure compound as a starting materials (biologically derived materials are the only known natural source) or have it interact with another enantiomericially pure catalyst (biological enzymes being the only known natural source of these) or purification medium. It is pretty much a signature of biology.
What would be interesting is if there was found a chiral molecule in space that was significantly biased to one enantiomer. Depending on the context of what was found this would be proof of either extraterrestrial life, or a cosmic enantiomeric enrichment process that would have huge implications for understanding the origin of life.
The news is interesting not so much for its contents, but for its illumination of a gap in my knowledge. I'm nowhere near astronomy, so I didn't know that in the past we were _not_ aware of the presence of asymmetric molecules in space. If someone asked, I'd have responded, "sure there are probably asymmetric molecules in space, why not" so in some sense, I might have given a more correct answer than someone who knew more about space. The downside is that when you not only learn from a piece of news, but it highlights a gap in your understanding before, then it's quite humbling. It's a bit like waking up in Vegas, and you're told you divorced while you were drunk, yet you aren't aware of getting married in the first place.
. . . Donald Trump's hair!
Start hoarding canned foods and ammunition . . . this is getting serious!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
'BadTunnel' Bugs Left Every Microsoft Windows PC Vulnerable For 20 Years
- Thomas Fox-Brewster, Forbes Staff | Jun 14, 2016 @ 01:00 PM
- Copyright Forbes.com | ARCHIVED/FAIR USE: Educational
"Microsoft is today closing off a vulnerability that one Chinese researcher claims has "probably the widest impact in the history of Windows." Every version of the Microsoft operating system going back to Windows 95 is affected, leaving anyone still running unsupported operating systems, such as XP, in danger of being surreptitiously surveilled.
According to Yang Yu, founder of Tencent's Xuanwu Lab, the bug can be exploited silently with a "near-perfect success rate", as the problems lie in the design of Windows. The ultimate impact? An attacker can hijack all a target's web use, granting the hacker "Big Brother power", as soon as the victim opens a link or plugs in a USB stick, claimed Yu. He received $50,000 from Microsoft's bug bounty program for uncovering the weakness, which the researcher has dubbed BadTunnel. Microsoft issued a fix today in its Patch Tuesday list of updates.
"Even security software equipped with active defense mechanisms are not able to detect the attack," Yu told FORBES. "Of course it is capable of execute malicious code on the target system if required."
Yu, who is one of only three ever recipients of more than $100,000 Microsoft bounty, said there are myriad ways a hacker could exploit the flaw. "This vulnerability can be exploited through Edge, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and many other third-party software on Windows," Yu added. "It can also be exploited through web servers ⦠or even through thumb drives â" insert the thumb drive into one of the ports on the system and the exploitation is complete."
= How the attack works
Yu said a successful exploit of the flaw would spoof connections over NetBIOS, a tool originally developed by IBM that that allows software on different computers to communicate with one another over a local area network (LAN). Though the attack would take place over It does not require the attacker resides in the same network. The attack can even succeed when there are firewall and NAT devices in between, as Windows trusts connections from any IP address, according to Yu. He found it was possible to guess the right identifier for a network device (known as a transaction id) and therefore set up trusted interactions across the network. That meant it was possible to redirect the target's traffic to his own PC.
This was possible as an attacker could make it seem like their machine was a network device, such as a local printer server or file server. Not only can the hacker spy on non-encrypted traffic, they could intercept and tamper with Windows Update downloads. And they could inject further attacks in webpages visited by the victim. For instance, they could ensure that the "tunnel" between the target and the hacker would remain open by inserting code into webpages cached by the browser.
Yu believes his findings are the first of their kind. "This is probably the very first time in the history to successfully hijack the broadcast protocol within local area network from the internet," he added. "This is probably the very first time in the history to successfully create a tunnel to pass through firewall and network address translation (NAT) devices, and attack intranet devices directly from the internet."
Ollie Whitehouse, technical director at cyber security and risk mitigation specialist NCC Group , suggested the weaknesses would be difficult exploit due to the need to "chain" different vulnerabilities. But Yu claimed that as long as the hacker understood the principles of the attack chain, they could write an exploit in just 20 minutes.
Users running supported Windows versions should update as soon as they can. For those running unsupported versions of Windows, such as XP, the researcher recommended disabling NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Microsoft has step-by-step guidance for just that on its TechNet
Since we prefer a better explanation of Chirality.
While biologists are finding this property perplexing and strange, in the same freshman year, the physics prof started electro magnetics class with Biot-Savart law. Basically electric currents going around in a loop create a magnetic field using right-hand-thumb rule: Make a thumbs up sign with your right hand, current goes along the fingers and the mag field is along the thumb. Never wondered why it is right hand thumb rule, and not the left hand thumb rule. Never philosophized why electro magnetics in our universe is following the right hand thumb rule. No Discover mag puzzler with the solution, "Check the Biot-Savart law. If the mag field of that coil is following left handed thumb rule, it is 100% certain that worm hole has transported you to a different universe".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The evolution of enzymes necessitates stereoselectiveness, the only other option is two enzymes for every reaction - which is too costly, unlikely and unnecessary.
Has anyone else read the Expanse series and thought of the protomolecule when they read this?
I thought to explore space we had to send test pilots in rubber suits in person?
The discovery of propylene oxide in space boosts theories that chirality has cosmic origins.
Yes, the natural conclusion indeed is that it must have been originated from interstellar cloud from which they ended right to Earth rather than other more significant gravity wells in the solar system. The conclusion that molecular clouds could have conditions where those could have formed like on earths Hadean period are obviously invalid and the conditions in said molecular cloud tells nothing that was going on in Earths atmosphere/oceans.
The above paragraph was obviously sarcastic one.
One has to be careful with wording. Dextrorotatory ("right-handed") forms of various amino acids do occur in various roles in living organisms, just not commonly in protein synthesis.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
TFA suggests a beautiful idea: that life bears the imprint of handedness derived from cosmic dust. The idea may be beautiful, but it's wrong. It's much more likely that the chirality of biomolecules we see on Earth came from spontaneous symmetry breaking on Earth itself than by space seeding any preferred chirality.
Complex molecules in living beings are assembled from consistent smaller molecules, known as monomers. Some of these monomers have a handedness (they have two enantiomers), and in that case living things will almost always use just one of the enantiomers. The best explanation for why living things tend to use just one enantiomer is the same reason you would hate to have two slightly different kinds of Lego blocks with incompatible pitch: this diversity usually just gets in the way of assembling complex macromolecules without providing any compelling value.
Thus, we know even given no seeding of chirality from space, life would pick one chirality since having just one is usually useful. Add to that the facts that we haven't yet found a non-racemic mixture of anything in space, and that even if we did the fraction of space-derived non-racemic molecules on the Earth's surface would hardly noticeably change the balance of chiralities found in proto-life Earth, and it's pretty clear that the chirality of biomolecules in living things is totally independent of biased enantiomers from space.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
"Right hand" and "Left Hand" chirality is named for the polarization of electromagnetic radiation scattered from the molecule. If there is a primordial goo of substances that happen to form a chiral molecule, it is because that goo was in the presence of a right hand or left hand circular polarized incident field. Because, you know, field and wave scattering is reciprocal.
There are many sources of circularly polarized fields and waves in the cosmos. These waves can couple into primordial goo, and the incident energy can create more organized molecules.
Pretty simple...
Scientists have long pondered why living things make use of only one version of certain molecules, such as the 'right-handed' form of the sugar ribose, which is the backbone of DNA.
The left-handed version of the sugar ribose (and other things) is used in the mirror universe where the evil versions of ourselves are - Kirk and Dr. McCoy know what I'm talking about.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Does this mean that the yin-yang symbol must be drawn slightly differently?