[I know this is LONG, but I think it’s worth it.]
From DISCOVER Magazine February 2008, By Douglas Fox

One morning in late 1997, Stanley Miller [Ed. note Yes, THAT Stanley Miller, of the Miller/Urey Experiment] lifted a glass vial from a cold, bubbling vat. For 25 years he had tended the vial as though it were an exotic orchid, checking it daily, adding a few pellets of dry ice as needed to keep it at -108 degrees Fahrenheit. He had told hardly a soul about it. Now he set the frozen time capsule out to thaw, ending the experiment that had lasted more than one-third of his 68 years.

Miller had filled the vial in 1972 with a mixture of ammonia and cyanide, chemicals that scientists believe existed on early Earth and may have contributed to the rise of life. He had then cooled the mix to the temperature of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa–too cold, most scientists had assumed, for much of anything to happen. Miller disagreed. Examining the vial in his laboratory at the University of California at San Diego, he was about to see who was right.

As Miller and his former student Jeffrey Bada brushed the frost from the vial that morning, they could see that something had happened. The mixture of ammonia and cyanide, normally colorless, had deepened to amber, highlighting a web of cracks in the ice. Miller nodded calmly, but Bada exclaimed in shock. It was a color that both men knew well-the color of complex polymers made up of organic molecules. Tests later confirmed Miller’s and Bada’s hunch. Over a quarter-century, the frozen ammonia-cyanide blend had coalesced into the molecules of life: nucleobases, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The vial’s contents would support a new account of how life began on Earth and would arouse both surprise and skepticism around the world.
(snip)
There were people who found the results a little too remarkable. When Bada and Miller submitted their findings to a top-tier science journal, the article was rejected. A reviewer of the manuscript felt that those molecules must surely have formed while the samples were thawing, not while frozen at the ridiculously low temperature of -108 degrees F. So Miller, Bada, and Levy did more experiments to show that thawing played no role. They published their results in another journal, Icarus, in 2000.

The skepticism they faced was understandable. Chemical reactions do slow down as the temperature drops, and according to standard calculations, the reactions that assemble cyanide molecules into amino acids and nucleobases should run a hundred thousand times more slowly at -112 degrees F than at room temperature. By that reckoning, even if Miller had run his experiment for 250 years - let alone 25 - he should have seen nothing.

This is the main argument against Miller’s experiment, and against a cold origin of life in general. But strange things happen when you freeze chemicals in ice. Some reactions slow down, but others actually speed up-especially reactions that involve joining small molecules into larger ones. This seeming paradox is caused by a process called eutectic freezing. As an ice crystal forms, it stays pure: Only molecules of water join the growing crystal, while impurities like salt or cyanide are excluded. These impurities become crowded in microscopic pockets of liquid within the ice, and this crowding causes the molecules to collide more often. Chemically speaking, it transforms a tepid seventh-grade school dance into a raging molecular mosh pit.

“Usually as you cool things, the reaction rates go down,” concluded Leslie Orgel, who studied the origins of life at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, from the 1960s until his death last October. “But with eutectic freezing, the concentrations go up so fast that they more than make up” for the difference.

Cyanide is a good candidate as a precursor molecule in the life-in-a-freezer model for several reasons. First, planetary scientists suspect that cyanide was abundant on early Earth, deposited here by comets or created in the atmosphere by ultraviolet light or by lightning (once the atmosphere became oxygen rich, 2.5 billion years ago, the process would have stopped). Second, although cyanide is lethal to modern animals, it has a convenient tendency to self-assemble into larger molecules. Third, and perhaps most important, no matter how much cyanide rained down, it could become concentrated only in a cold environment-not in warm coastal lagoons-because it evaporates more quickly than water.

“The strong point of freezing,” according to Orgel, “is that you concentrate things very efficiently without evaporation. “Freezing also helps preserve fragile molecules like nucleobases, extending their lifetime from days to centuries and giving them time to accumulate and perhaps organize into something more interesting -like life.
(snip)

While Miller and Orgel followed their clues in the lab, other scientists pursued their obsession with life’s chilly origins to the ends of the earth.

In July 2002 a small skiff dropped Hauke Trinks on the beach of Nordaustland, a rocky island encased in glaciers and nearly devoid of plants. Trinks, then a physicist at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg in Germany, had come to Nordaustland - far north of the Arctic Circle - to peer 4 billion years back in time to an era shortly after the end of the bombardment of Earth by asteroids. According to some solar evolution models, the sun was some 30 percent dimmer at that time, providing less heat to Earth. So as soon as the hail of asteroids stopped, Earth may have cooled to an average surface temperature of -40 degrees F and a crust of ice as much as 1,000 feet thick may have covered the oceans. Many scientists have puzzled over how life could have arisen on a planet that was essentially a giant snowball. The answer, Trinks suspected, involved sea ice. (snip)

He built a makeshift lab table from planks of wood and discarded gasoline cans. He examined slices of sea ice under the microscope, his hood pulled tight around his eyes. Turning a knob with a gloved hand, he nudged a metal electrode nearly as fine as a red blood cell closer to an ice crystal. The needle on his voltmeter jerked sideways, registering a sharp drop in voltage on the crystal’s surface - evidence of a microscopic electric field that might arrange and orient molecules on the ice’s surface. (snip)

By the time Trinks returned to Hamburg in 2003, he had formulated a theory that ice was doing much more than just concentrating chemicals. The ice surface is a checkerboard of positive and negative charges; he imagined those charges grabbing individual nucleobases and stacking them like Pringles in a can, helping them coalesce into a chain of RNA. “The surface layer between ice and liquid is very complicated,” he says. “There is strong bonding between the surface of the ice and the liquid. Those bondings are important for producing long organic chains like RNA.”(snip)

Biebricher [a chemist Trinks convinced to work on his sea ice theory] sealed small amounts of RNA nucleobases - adenine, cytosine, guanine - with artificial seawater into thumb-size plastic tubes and froze them. After a year, he thawed the tubes and analyzed them for chains of RNA.

For decades researchers had tried to coax RNA chains to form under all sorts of conditions without using enzymes; the longest chain formed, which Orgel accomplished in 1982, consisted of about 40 nucleobases. So when Biebricher analyzed his own samples, he was amazed to see RNA molecules up to 400 bases long. In newer, unpublished experiments he says he has observed RNA molecules 700 bases long. Biebricher’s results are so fantastic that some colleagues have wondered whether accidental contamination played a role…(snip)

Biebricher had loaded the deck somewhat, because he wasn’t growing RNA chains from nothing. Before he froze his samples, he added an RNA template - a single-strand chain of RNA that guides the formation of a new strand of RNA. (snip)

Ice may prove the crucial ingredient here, too. Deamer and his former student Pierre-Alain Monnard (now at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) have run experiments frozen at 0 degrees F for a month, without the aid of templates. In those relatively brief experiments they already see RNA molecules up to 30 bases long, at least as long as other researchers have seen in similar experiments without ice.

How do you get from tiny snippets of RNA to longer, well-crafted chains that could have acted as the first enzymes, doing fancy things like copying themselves?(snip)

A young scientist named Alexander Vlassov stumbled upon a possible answer. He was working at SomaGenics, a biotech company in Santa Cruz, California, to develop RNA enzymes that latch on to the hepatitis C virus. His RNA enzymes were behaving strangely: They normally consisted of a single segment of RNA, but every time he cooled them below freezing to purify them, the chain of RNA spontaneously joined its ends into a circle, like a snake biting its tail. As Vlassov worked to fix the technical glitch, he noticed that another RNA enzyme, called hairpin, also acted strangely. At room temperature, hairpin acts like scissors, snipping other RNA molecules into pieces. But when Vlassov froze it, it ran in reverse: It glued other RNA chains together end to end.

Vlassov and his coworkers, Sergei Kazakov and Brian Johnston, realized that the ice was driving both enzymes to work in reverse. Normally when an enzyme cuts an RNA chain in two, a water molecule is consumed in the process, and when two RNA chains are joined, a water molecule is expelled. By removing most of the liquid water, the ice creates conditions that allow the RNA enzyme to work in just one direction, joining RNA chains.
(snip)
These findings inspired a theory that the first, extremely inefficient RNA enzymes got help from ice, which created an environment that encouraged short segments of RNA to stick together and behave as a single, larger RNA molecule. “Freezing stabilizes the complexes formed from multiple pieces of RNA,” concludes Kazakov. “So small pieces of RNA could be enzymes, not just large 50-base molecules.”
(snip)

All these processes would occur in microscopic pockets of liquid within the ice. “You have billions and billions of different possibilities,” Trinks says, “because you have billions of these small channels,” each like a microscopic test tube containing a unique RNA experiment. On the young Earth, pockets of liquid could have expanded into a network of channels that mixed their contents during freeze-thaw cycles, like day-night temperature changes in summer. In winter, the liquid pores would have contracted and become isolated again, returning to their separate experiments. With all the mixing, something special might eventually have formed: an RNA molecule that made rough copies of itself. And as Earth warmed, these molecules might have found a home in newly thawed seas or ponds, where something even more complex might have emerged - such as a cell-like membrane. “You have something that is multiplying itself, and you have variation that is inherited,” says Antonio Lazcano, a biology researcher and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City. “There you have the onset of Darwinian evolution. I’m willing to call that living.”

To read the entire 4 page article, see here.

For those who might not have known…

A beautiful response…

It’s time to raise our voice in prayer,
And pray to–well, there’s no one there.
No god to urge to do our bidding;
Go on and pray–just know you’re kidding.

It’s time to all sit on our asses,
And pray forgiveness for trespasses
(Or is that to forgive our debtor?
Who cares, as long as we feel better.)

It’s time we all embrace god fully,
Feel all righteous, good, and holy–
Or be some atheistic jerk,
Roll up your god-damned sleeves, and work!

It’s time to say “I do not care
To join you in this day of prayer.”
Sure, a day off looks like fun,
But there is work that must be done.

Our problems will not fix themselves
There is no god to send in elves
To do the work of human ranks
So… join, today, in prayer? No thanks.

And another good response…

Women Seeking Abortions Must Have Ultrasounds Against Their Will

Under the guise of obtaining informed patient consent, this new law requires doctors to withhold pregnancy termination until an ultrasound is performed. The law states that either an abdominal or vaginal ultrasound, whichever gives the best image of the fetus, must be done. Neither the patient nor the doctor can decide which type of ultrasound to use, and the patient cannot opt out of the ultrasound and still have the procedure. In effect, then, the legislature has mandated that a woman have an instrument placed in her vagina for no medical benefit. The law makes no exception for victims of rape and incest. By existing law, women already must be told where to find information about fetal development and referred to locations for a free ultrasound before a termination can be scheduled. […] In a further reversal of standard medical practice, this bill defines failure to perform this unnecessary medical procedure as “unprofessional conduct” and suggests that the state medical board may remove the physician’s license. Failure to perform the ultrasound also leads to fines beginning at $10,000 and increasing to more than $100,000. By comparison, the highest fine for negligent homicide or driving under the influence in Oklahoma is $1,000.

“Whichever gives the best image of the fetus” — ah, yes, a woman now has to get more stuff shoved into her (against her will) to compound her decision to get an abortion. How nice.

Why not just cut to the chase? Let those goddam sexually active women have their abortions, and then we’ll just smack the shit out of them for ever having sex.

WASHINGTON – NASA released this week (March 7, 2008) five years of data collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) that refines our understanding of the universe and its development. It is a treasure trove of information, including at least three major findings:

* New evidence that a sea of cosmic neutrinos permeates the universe
* Clear evidence the first stars took more than a half-billion years to create a cosmic fog
* Tight new constraints on the burst of expansion in the universe’s first trillionth of a second

“We are living in an extraordinary time,” said Gary Hinshaw of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Ours is the first generation in human history to make such detailed and far-reaching measurements of our universe.”

WMAP measures a remnant of the early universe - its oldest light. The conditions of the early times are imprinted on this light. It is the result of what happened earlier, and a backlight for the later development of the universe. This light lost energy as the universe expanded over 13.7 billion years, so WMAP now sees the light as microwaves. By making accurate measurements of microwave patterns, WMAP has answered many longstanding questions about the universe’s age, composition and development.

The universe is awash in a sea of cosmic neutrinos. These almost weightless sub-atomic particles zip around at nearly the speed of light. Millions of cosmic neutrinos pass through you every second.

“A block of lead the size of our entire solar system wouldn’t even come close to stopping a cosmic neutrino,” said science team member Eiichiro Komatsu of the University of Texas at Austin.

WMAP has found evidence for this so-called “cosmic neutrino background” from the early universe. Neutrinos made up a much larger part of the early universe than they do today.

Microwave light seen by WMAP from when the universe was only 380,000 years old, shows that, at the time, neutrinos made up 10% of the universe, atoms 12%, dark matter 63%, photons 15%, and dark energy was negligible. In contrast, estimates from WMAP data show the current universe consists of 4.6% percent atoms, 23% dark matter, 72% dark energy and less than 1 percent neutrinos.

Cosmic neutrinos existed in such huge numbers they affected the universe’s early development. That, in turn, influenced the microwaves that WMAP observes. WMAP data suggest, with greater than 99.5% confidence, the existence of the cosmic neutrino background - the first time this evidence has been gleaned from the cosmic microwaves.

Much of what WMAP reveals about the universe is because of the patterns in its sky maps. The patterns arise from sound waves in the early universe. As with the sound from a plucked guitar string, there is a primary note and a series of harmonics, or overtones. The third overtone, now clearly captured by WMAP, helps to provide the evidence for the neutrinos.

The hot and dense young universe was a nuclear reactor that produced helium. Theories based on the amount of helium seen today predict a sea of neutrinos should have been present when helium was made. The new WMAP data agree with that prediction, along with precise measurements of neutrino properties made by Earth-bound particle colliders.

Another breakthrough derived from WMAP data is clear evidence the first stars took more than a half-billion years to create a cosmic fog. The data provide crucial new insights into the end of the “dark ages,” when the first generation of stars began to shine. The glow from these stars created a thin fog of electrons in the surrounding gas that scatters microwaves, in much the same way fog scatters the beams from a car’s headlights.

“We now have evidence that the creation of this fog was a drawn-out process, starting when the universe was about 400 million years old and lasting for half a billion years,” said WMAP team member Joanna Dunkley of the University of Oxford in the U.K. and Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. “These measurements are currently possible only with WMAP.”

A third major finding arising from the new WMAP data places tight constraints on the astonishing burst of growth in the first trillionth of a second of the universe, called “inflation”, when ripples in the very fabric of space may have been created. Some versions of the inflation theory now are eliminated. Others have picked up new support.
[Religionists, take note, when scientists get new evidence that shows their work to be in error, they toss that work and go in a new direction!}

“The new WMAP data rule out many mainstream ideas that seek to describe the growth burst in the early universe,” said WMAP principal investigator, Charles Bennett, of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. “It is astonishing that bold predictions of events in the first moments of the universe now can be confronted with solid measurements.”

(snip)

Prior to the release of the new five-year data, WMAP already had made a pair of landmark finds. In 2003, the probe’s determination that there is a large percentage of dark energy in the universe erased remaining doubts about dark energy’s very existence. That same year, WMAP also pinpointed the 13.7 billion year age of the universe.

For more info see here.
Hat tip to quantum flux for bringing this to my attention!

I’m really surprised that the LA Times would print such bullshit. After commenting on the recent movie Fitna, this idiot says the following:

Recently, however, it seems as if Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you’ve seen these too. The fish symbol is “updated” with little feet coming off the bottom, and “IXOYE” or “Jesus” is replaced with either “Darwin” or “Evolve.” I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers. The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing random motorists that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims. As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.” But the most annoying aspect of the Darwin fish is the false bravado it represents. It’s a courageous pose without consequence. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap. […] The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

So, pointing out the stupidity of a religion that could actually result in your death? Good, respectable. Pointing out the stupidity of a religion that maybe won’t kill you — but, alternatively, and more than likely, would exclude you from traditional financial, familial, professional, and social dynamics? Now, that’s just offensive and disrespectful.

Girl Dies After Parents Pray for Healing Instead of Seeking Medical Help

WESTON, Wis. — An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday. Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday. “She got sicker and sicker until she was dead,” he said. Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. The girl’s parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to “apparently they didn’t have enough faith,” the police chief said. They believed the key to healing “was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray,” he said. […] The girl has three siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 16, the police chief said. “They are still in the home,” he said. “There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see.”

Ummm, I think you might have to look again, Chief. Maybe this time look just a little bit harder, Genius.

Or should I say, “Moron?” Or maybe “Idiot?” I’m not exactly sure who’s more stupid, Chief. The idiots who killed her, or the complete fucking numbnuts who claims that there’s “no abuse.”

You got a college degree, Chief? Or did you jump into Cop School right after high school? If you actually do have a degree (which I doubt), you might want to go back and see if the “school” is still around. They might have been one of those Plaza Schools I used to see in Flori-duh. (You know, the ones right next to the grocery stores.)

Or did you get your degree through the mail? That sometimes happens.

Etch-a-Sketch clocks for everybody!…