S26E69: Unlocking the secrets of the first building blocks of life with iron particles

This is Spacetime Series twenty six, episode sixty nine, for broadcast on the ninth of June twenty twenty three. Coming up on Spacetime, Creating Life on Earth, Training for the first Mars sample return mission, and Virgin Galactic now in countdown to its first commercial launch. All that and more coming up on Spacetime Welcome to Spacetime with Stewart. Gary scientists have proposed a new scenario for the emergence of the first building blocks of life on Earth some four billion years ago. The research, published in the journal Science Reports, show how iron particles from meteors and volcanic ash could have not only served as catalysts for converting a carbon dioxide rich early atmosphere into hydrocarbons, but also a settle dihyde and formaldehyde, which in turn serve as building blocks for fatty acids, nuclear bases, sugars, and amino acids. To the best of our current knowledge, life on Earth first emerged just four hundred million to seven hundred million years after the planet itself was formed four point six billion years ago. Now that's a fairly quick development. Now, for comparison, consider that afterwards it took about two billion years for the first proper eukaryotic cells to form, that is, cells with internal structures. The first step towards the emergence of life is the formation of organic molecules that can serve as building blocks for organisms. Now, considering how fast life itself arose, it would be feasible for this comparatively simple step to have been completed quickly as well. The new research provided in this study presents a new way for such organic compounds to form on planetary scales under the conditions prevalent on the earlier Earth. Now, the key supporting role goes to iron particles produced from meteorites, which would act as a catalyst. Catalyst to substances as present speeds up specific chemical reactions, but do not get used up during those reactions. It's sort of like using tools in the manufacturing sector. Tools are necessary to produce something like say a car. Once the car's built, you don't need those tools for the car anymore, and instead they can be used to build the next car. Key inspiration for this new research came from, of all things, industrial chemistry, specifically oliver trapped from the Ludvik Maximilian's University in Munich and the Max Bank Institute for Astronomy wondered whether the process for converting carbon monoxide and hydrogen into hydrocarbons in the presence of metallic catalysts might also have been an analog on the early Earth with a carbon dioxide ridge atmosphere. Trapp says that when he was looking at the composition of the Campo del Cilium iron meteorite, which consists of iron nickels and cobalt and tiny amounts of iridium, he realized that this looked like a perfect catalyst. So the next logical step was to set up an experiment to test the cosmic conversion of the catalyst. As well as studying iron meteorites, Trapping colleagues also looked at the catalytic properties of volcanic ash particles. After all, the early Earth should have been full of lots of geological activity, and so there should have been plenty of fine ash particles in the atmosphere and on earth first land masses. The first ingredient for the experiments was always a source of iron particles. Now, in different versions of the experiment, those iron particles could be iron from an actual iron meteorite or particles from an iron containing stone, meteorite or volcanic ash from Mount Etna. The ladder as a standing for iron rich particles that could be present in the early day Earth with its highly active volcanism. Next, the iron particles were mixed with different minerals of the sort that might be found on the early Earth, and these minerals would act as a supporting structure. Now, the fine volcanic ash particles produced by volcanic eruptions, typically just a few micromedicine size ALFA meteorites falling through the atmosphere of the early Earth. Atmospheric friction would have belated nanometicized iron particles, and the surface impact of an iron meteorite or iron core of a larger asteroid would produce micrometicized iron particles directly through fragmentation and nanometicized particles as iron evaporated in the intense heat and later on condensed again in the surrounding air. Now, since Earth's initial atmosphere didn't contain oxygen, the authors then followed up with chemical reactions that removed almost all the oxygen from the mixture, and as a last step in each version of the experiment, the mixture was brought into a pressure chamber and filled with mostly carbon dioxide as well as some hydrogen molecules in order to simulate what the atmosphere of the early Earth would have been like. Now, both the exact mixture and the pressure were varied between experiments and the results were impressive. Thanks to the iron catalyst, organic compounds such as methanol, ethanol, and acetaldehyde were produced, and also formaldehyde, and that's an encouraging harbor a. Seed Aldehyde and formaldide in particular are important building blocks for fatty acids, for nuclear bases themselves, building blocks of DNA, for sugars, and for amino acids. Importantly, these reactions all took place successfully under a variety of different pressure and temperature conditions. So with these new results it means there are now new contenders for how the first building blocks of life could have formed on Earth, and that allows them to join the classic mechanisms such as organic humo synthesis, near heart events on the ocean floor, and electrical discharge through lightning in the methane rich atmosphere. This space time still to come. Training for the first Mars sample return mission and virgin galactic now in countdown to its first commercial launch that are more still to come on spacetime missions to Mars have made many exciting discoveries that have transformed their understanding of the Red planet orbit as landers and rovers have studied the Martian surface in great detail, finding a free stride desert that billions of years ago would have been a warm, wet, habitable world capable of supporting life. But all these studies were forced to use compact equipment and instruments that limit the amount of science that can be achieved on any given mission. Clearly, the next step is to bring these samples from Mars back to Earth for more detailed analysis in more sophisticated laboratories. There, Martian rocks can be analyzed but the most technologically advanced equipment, allowing scientists to verify different results independently. In addition, as equipment improves and new advances are made, samples can be reanalyzed and new information extracted. In fact, that's happening right now with lunar samples brought back to Worth in the nineteen and seventies by the Apollo astronauts. So bringing samples back from Mars on a robotic mission is the next logical step, but it's not going to be easy. In fact, it will require multiple missions. It will be more challenging and more advanced than any robotic mission ever done before. But at the same time it'll also be an incredible precursor to future manned missions to the Red planet, and right now there are only about another ten or so years away. Already, the European Space Agency in NASA are working to explore mission concepts for an international Mars sample return campaign slated for the late twenty twenties. The first part of this project's already underway, with NASA's car size six wheeled Mass Perseverance Rover and its Ingenuity helicopter exploring jes Ro Crater collecting samples for eventual return to Earth. Jesro Crater was chosen because it includes a giant river delta, a place where sediment from further upstream can be collected, and the sort of environment which would of harbored life had any ever existed on Mars. Half the sample was being collected by the Mass Perseverance Rover are stored in a special cache deep inside the machine. The rest, so called backups, have now been carefully placed into depository on the Martian surface. There, the sample chips were imaged from different angles and their exact location recorded. But collecting samples is one thing. Getting them back to Earth it's quite another to achieve that feat at least two more Earth to Mars flights will be needed. One will place an Earth return orbit a spacecraft into Mars orbit, and the other will send a lander to the red planet, which will touch down close to Perseverance. The lander will carry its own helicopters and rovers in order to gather the samples collected by Perseverance. It will then collect them and load them into a Mars of scent vehicle, basically a small rocket also mounted on the lander. Once loaded, the Mars of centric or will launch back into space, performing what will be the first lift from Mars, and then rondevoing and docking with the prepositioned Earth Return orbiter. The samples will be sealed in a special by containment system in order to prevent contaminating the Earth will unsterilized material. The samples will then be transferred into an Earth entry capsule, which is mounted aboard the Earth Return orbiter for the flight back to Earth. As the Earth Return orbiter approaches Earth, the Earth entry capsure will be jettisoned and with it the pressures samples. Capsule will parachute down to the ground, from where the samples will be transported to a special handling facility, and it's only in there that scientists will be able to begin the real work of studying the Martian samples. An important part of the mission it will be the detect, fetch and collect phase on the Martian surface. Now it all sounds easy, but remember this will be happening two hundred and ninety thousand million kilometers away, with its time delays and radiation interference, where anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Testing the technologies for the mission is Laura Bylan, an ESS scientist with the Mars Sample Return Campaign. Her work takes place on a rock strewn recreation of the Red Planet at ESS Mars Yard in the Netherlands. The sample tubes being collected here are exact replicas of the sample cases that NASA's Mars Perseverance roveries leaving on the Red Planet. They're called REST an acronym for Returnable Sample tube assembly, but to most Earth things they look more like lightsabers. Bielenberg's investigetting different sample tube collection strategies. See what works best. For example, the sample transfer arm and the rovers will need to collect the tubes on the Martian surface, transport them back to the Mars Ascent vehicle and then place them inside the rocket. Those that can't be collected by the fetch rovers will be collected by the helicopters using grappling hooks and cameras. It's a complicated and difficult mission. This report from ESA TV. This task burd is on a barge finding samples on Mars, detecting them, estimated the poles, bringing them back to Earth to then be analyzed by scientists and figure out what Mars is made of. These kind of tubes are already on board of Perseverance on Mars, and Perseverance is using them to collect samples of the Martian surface and of regulars and it's stored inside the tube. Well, it looks a bit like a lightsabery, doesn't it if you look at it, So you could imagine just going like this and being a lightsaber. But it's much cooler than that because it has actual Mars soil in Europe either and now they are collaborating on this, so together we have the smart Sample Return campaign in which we return the samples from Mars, and Europe is playing its part by having the still the Sample Transfer arm which is going to collect the samples from Perseverance and also samples that are dropped by the marsalticopters and put them in the orbital sample to be flown back to Earth, and that would be the first time in human history to actually bring back samples from Mars. This is the Planetary Robotics lab. We have a beautiful mass yard and this is what we test our robo prototype. So it takes an image from a buffs with the enoughcom on the top and then in a second step identify some key points in this tube image to get the post estimate of the tube. You can never really recreate one hundred percent the outdoor lighting environment, but we try to have a mixture of direct lighting with our fresnel lens with an LED and also some environmental indirect lighting with our lab lights. And also to make it look more Mars like, we're using the Mars lap here than we have where we have different types of terrain, so we have sand, we have big stones, we have pabbled, we have flagstones. It's pretty amazing to think that you could contribute to finding out something about another planet in our Solar System and to actually work on a robotic system or on the resource that leads to a robotic system that actually flies to Mars in the end, that is pretty amazing. This spacetime still to come. Virgin Galactic now in countdown to its first commercial launch. That are more still to come on spacetime. Virgin Galactic has successfully carried out its first suborbital flight in nearly two years, and is now set to begin commercial space tourism operations within weeks. The mission aboard THESS Unity from Virgin Galactic Spaceport America complex in New Mexico followed a series of safety upgrades the Virgin's growing flight of wing rocket planes you see. Its previous flight in twenty twenty one sparked an official Federal Aviation Administration safety probe after the space plane dropped below it's assigned air space descent rate during the glide back to the planet's surface. The FAA cleared the company to resume flight only after safety modifications were carried out designed to keep the aircraft inside its flight envelope. The Unity twenty five mission flew Virgin Galactic employees to an altitude of just over eighty seven kilometers on what's considered the final shakedown test flight. The next flight, the first for paying passengers, will carry members of the Italian Air Force. Unlike its main competitors in the space tourism race SpaceX and Blue Origin, who both launched air rockets vertically, Virgin Galactic launches its wings space planes known as Spaceship twos from between the twin fuselage assemblies of a custom built four engine jet aircraft mothership known as White Knight two. It has the advantage of being able to take off horizontally from a conventional runway. Then, after climbing to around fifty thousand feet, the Spaceship two rocketplane is released in what's called a drop launch, quickly firing up its hybrid rocket engine and accelerating to around MAC three as it climbs vertically on a ballistic trajectory that takes it just below the thringing twenty eight thousand feet or one hundred kilometer high Carmen Line, the internationally recognized official start of space. After a few minutes of weightlessness, the world's best views taking in the blackness of space, curvature of the Earth, and the thin blue line marking the planet's life giving atmosphere. Gravity starts to bring the journey back towards the ground, spacecraft eventually gliding to a conventional runway, landing roughly ninety minutes after launch. It's taken a long time to get here, and it hasn't been without its problems. Virgin Galactic Space program suffered years of delays, and there was that fatal twenty fourteen accident due to pilot error, but it hasn't stopped enthusiastic space tourists wanting to go for a ride. Virgin says it's sort of abound. Eight hundred tickets so far well. Initially selling for around a quarter of a million dollars a seat, those tickets are now going for an eye watering half a million dollars each, But when you think about it, that's a bargain compared to SpaceX. There's Axiom two space tourism passengers paid around eighty million dollars each for their ten day trip to the International Space Station. This Space Time and Time out to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news and science this week, with a Science Report. A new study has shown how the COVID nineteen pandemic has changed our drinking habits. A report in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review has found that adult men those aged over thirty five were most likely to increase the alcohol consumption during the early stages of the COVID nineteen pandemic. The numbers are based on survey data and alcohol consumption across the UK, New Zealand and Australia. The authors of the study catalog people into certain groups. Those who drank alone made up around thirty two point three percent of the turtal, those mostly drank in their household thirty six percent, those who drank alone and in their household at seventeen point nine percent, those who drank mostly at parties three point two percent, and those who drank everywhere one point one percent. The authors say those who mostly drank alone report of the highest levels of alcohol consumption or more social drinkers. Young people and women were likely to reduce their alcohol consumption in the early twenty twenties. A new study says the bacteria that caused the plague may have arrived in Britain much earlier than the Middle Ages. A report in the journal Lectric Communications found three A. Cinepesta samples in people buried in the British Early Bronze Age around four thousand years ago. Of the three plague genomes, two came from an unusual mass burial site and one from a single burial under a ring can monument. The detection of these genomes represents the oldest evidence of the Black Death in Britain to date. The researchers say that genomes do not include a specific gene that has been associated with a fleaborn bubonic plague of the Middle Ages, so they think this older strain may not have been transmitted by fleas. Ebonic plague killed between seventy five and two hundred million people between thirteen forty six and thirteen fifty three. However, plague has also been identified previously in Eurasia between five thousand and two thousand, five hundred years ago, and the researchers say that the wide geographic spread suggest that the strain of the plague is still easily transmitted. Globally, around six hundred cases of plague is still reported each year, and despite treatment, the risk of death is ten percent, but that goes up to seventy percent if you don't have treatment. A new study shows that Australia's wild dingo populations have far fewer domestic dog jenes than previously thought. The findings are reported in the journal Molecular Ecology, show that most dingo populations are purebreads rather than highbreads. The new research challenges the view that purebread dingoes were on the decline due to cross breeding. The new findings suggests that previous studies significantly over estimated the prevalence of dingo dog mixes. Well, have you been enjoying the later sci fi zombie series though Last of Us? You may be more than a little disturbed to learn that it's based more on science than you're probably comfortable with. As timendum from a Streen Skeptics points out, there really are fungal threats out there that compose deadly, even zombie like control over animals. Yes, there's fungal infections that can create very very bad effects, and there's been for ages. There's obviously nothing new, especially when you talk about Muldi bread or anything like that. Contaminated rye is a big thing, as there's a disease called Saint Anthony's fire, which is about rye contaminated by fungi and you get silos or you get it in storage for various places. You make bread out of it or whatever you make out of it, and that can lead to reduce blood flow, tissue necrosis, which is pretty horrible central nervousness and over stimulated changes, a mental state, hallucinations, depression, delirium, suicidal thoughts, intense pain, gangrein and loss of limbs which is the necrosis. So the fungle is can be a pretty serious thing. It's not just a bit of green stuff on your toast you scrape off. The TV series is about spreading zombie isn't via fungus, which is probably unlikely, But the thing is it is based on a real fungus which has a real effect, which is something called afia called diceps unilaterals. How's that I wrote it down or more easily caught a sets which is easy to say which affect ants. And what happens is that this funguy gets into an ant somehow and it's start to eat away at the ant until basically it concens the whole nervous system of the ant, causes the ant to climb up a plant hang around on a little shoots or branches or whatever about twenty five centimeters above the ground, and when the fungus has had its way with the ant, it then just drops. The fungus just spreads and drops down. It's like a little sort of shower thing up the top and drops down fungus onto the ground beneath, and hopefully there's a more ant down there and continues the cycle, et cetera. That's what the people who wrote their original game, The Last of Us based it on, knowing so, well, that's a bad ants, but they applied it and extended it into sort of the good Zombies TV shirt. But the fungus does do these things, not necessarily zombifying, but they can have a very very bad effect. And what this show is based on a prediction made in the sixties that of viruses are not going to be the big prop fung guy, it will be the big problem. So there's a little bit of science in there. There's a lot more fiction and scary stuff and zombies, but basically there are fun guy that do horrible things to animals that necessarily mammals. There's a case of a fun guy that attacks cicadas, it deploys a hallucinogenic compound that makes the insects fly wildly. Surprised me. There's I'm dope and they release spores in every direction. It's like a little crop dub stuff. But that's only after the fun guy has literally eaten the insects genitals and bottoms. That's the way to get the fung guy out of the body. And then the male cicatas do their little mating dance they seeing, et cetera to attract females and they spread the fungus that way. Not that they can do much one for the genitals and bottom has been eaten, but they can sort of attract the female and that can spread it. I mean, obviously these wonders of evolution the way they work, but it's a strange thing. It's a scary thing. Actually. That's gymendum from Australian skeptics. And that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google podcast, pocket Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, bytes dot Com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from Spacetime with Stewart Gary dot Com Spacetime's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of bernus audio content which doesn't go to war, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. 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