Showing posts with label origin of life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label origin of life. Show all posts

Monday, January 16, 2023

New Discovery in the Chemistry of Life (Point of Inquiry podcast)

Graham Cooks and his team at Purdue University have discovered a chemical process that has exciting implications for people who believe that life could have emerged spontaneously and through natural means. The idea that the building blocks of life started in a primordial ocean now has a competitor: airborne tiny water droplets.

In this episode of Point of Inquiry, Jim Underdown speaks to chemistry professor and researcher Graham Cooks about his work in mass spectrometry and his discovery that adds an important piece of the puzzle of how life came to be. Does this find have religious implications?
Interview: 


Sunday, January 8, 2023

The fountain of life: Water droplets hold the secret ingredient for building life

“This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” said Graham Cooks, the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s College of Science. “This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water. This is a dramatic discovery.”


Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Life on Earth might have formed out of thin air and water | Popular Science

"This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life," Graham Cooks, an author of the study and professor of analytical chemistry at Purdue, said in a press release. "This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water. This is a dramatic discovery."


Monday, January 10, 2022

How could the Big Bang arise from nothing?

My understanding is that nothing comes from nothing. For something to exist, there must be material or a component available, and for them to be available, there must be something else available. Now my question: Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material?

Monday, January 18, 2021

Elucidating the Agenda of James Tour: A Defense of Abiogenesis

The origin of life! How did we get here? How did the first living organism come about? Can it have happened spontaneously? Isn't life way too complex for that to happen? It seems ridiculous, right? Well, no. Not if you understand biochemistry, which creationists do not. But every once in a while, a hero emerges from academia to champion the cause of the creationist, and lend some illusory credence to their views. In this case, that hero is James Tour, a synthetic organic chemist who insists that abiogenesis is impossible, and he should know better than anyone, because he's a chemist. I was made aware of Dr. Tour after a couple hundred people linked me to a video of his in an empty argument from authority, insisting that because a chemist confirms their religious bias, they must be right. But is Dr. Tour a bit biased himself? Let's find out precisely what his agenda is, shall we?

Friday, August 31, 2018

PWNing Pence

On July 11th 2002, then-Representative Mike Pence testified before the House of Representatives that public schools should teach the theory of evolution as if it were only one of multiple hypotheses regarding the origins of species. Now that Trump the Chump has chosen Pence the Dense as his vice presidential running mate, I felt obliged to address now-Governor Pence's willful ignorance and deliberate misrepresentation of evolution.....
https://youtu.be/SkUgDCk0Xi4

Saturday, July 7, 2018

Story of Life Episode 2: From Chemicals to Cells

How can we get from chemicals to cells? This is the story of life from prebiotic chemistry to protocells and the beginning of biology....
https://youtu.be/ckrBhL2T95A

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Where Did Life Come From? (feat. PBS Space Time and Eons!)

The origin of life is one of the most important mysteries in all of science. When did life begin? How did life first evolve from chemistry? Where did life get started? In some primordial soup or somewhere else? Let’s journey back to the origin of life, as best as we know it, from the RNA world do the last universal common ancestor of everything alive today.....
https://youtu.be/_uAJY1mqtw4

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Sonochemical Synthesis: Did Life Originate Inside Collapsing Bubbles? | American Council on Science and Health

The origin of life is a profound mystery. Once life arose, natural selection and evolution took over, but the question of how a mixture of various gases created life-giving molecules that arranged into structures capable of reproducing themselves remains unanswered.

Many theories have been proposed, some of which are popular (e.g., RNA World), and some of which are a far-fetched (e.g., aliens). Unlike politics, more ideas are not necessarily better; in science, a diversity of theories tends to betray the reality that scientists have no idea what's going on.....
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/09/29/sonochemical-synthesis-did-life-originate-inside-collapsing-bubbles-11902


Thursday, October 20, 2016

Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins Kill god - Greatest Hits

Two of the most clever and entertaining non-believers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, dismantle assorted religious Kooks and their man-made texts with the finesse of Olympic Samurais, dicing religious dogma into microscopic particles too small to be retrieved by even the sharpest religiously-minded creature, e.g. those with IQ's between 0 and 36 (beneath Moron Level). As religiosity increases, intelligence drops, like a grand piano off a cliff...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckK5XC7zNaw&spfreload=10

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Carl Sagan on religion - A Universe Not Made For Us MUST WATCH!!

This is part 1 of Callum C. J. Sutherland's tribute series to Carl Sagan. One of several excellent playlists dedicated to Carl Sagan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfm0GCvsIVA


Thursday, September 15, 2016

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Proton Gradients and the Origin of Life

Where did complex life originate? The New York Times reports on new research from a team led by William Martin of Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf:...
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/07/proton-gradients-and-origin-life



Thursday, May 12, 2016

Probability we're the only intelligent life ever? Really low, say astronomers.

Astronomers revised the half-century old Drake equation, which attempts to calculate the probability of the existence of advanced alien civilizations, to determine whether any such civilizations have existed at any point in the history of the universe.

They found that the chances that a human civilization evolved on Earth and nowhere else in the universe are less than about one in 10 billion trillion....
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0501/Are-we-the-only-intelligent-life-in-cosmos-Probably-not-say-astronomers









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