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Anthonyzolla

14 Apr 2025 - 02:58 pm

Scientists redid an experiment that showed how life on Earth could have started. They found a new possibility
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In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” Dr. Henry Frankenstein howling his triumph was an electrifying moment in more ways than one. As massive bolts of lightning and energy crackled, Frankenstein’s monster stirred on a laboratory table, its corpse brought to life by the power of electricity.

Electrical energy may also have sparked the beginnings of life on Earth billions of years ago, though with a bit less scenery-chewing than that classic film scene.

Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest direct fossil evidence of ancient life — stromatolites, or microscopic organisms preserved in layers known as microbial mats — is about 3.5 billion years old. However, some scientists suspect life originated even earlier, emerging from accumulated organic molecules in primitive bodies of water, a mixture sometimes referred to as primordial soup.

But where did that organic material come from in the first place? Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in ancient Earth’s oceans and spontaneously produced the organic molecules.

Now, new research published March 14 in the journal Science Advances suggests that fizzes of barely visible “microlightning,” generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have been potent enough to cook up amino acids from inorganic material. Amino acids — organic molecules that combine to form proteins — are life’s most basic building blocks and would have been the first step toward the evolution of life.

Carlosnip

14 Apr 2025 - 02:50 pm

Mindful wellness challenges
If you’re the type of person who thrives on challenges and pushing your limits, this doesn’t mean you need to shy away from wellness challenges altogether. But before diving in, take a step back and ask yourself if you’re pursuing the challenge for the right reasons, McGregor said.
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Some people want to try these challenges because they believe something is missing from their life, and they’re looking to attain “worth” or receive validation, McGregor noted.

A good way to assess your motivation is by considering whether the challenge will benefit your health or if it’s about showcasing your accomplishments on social media or some other reason.

Before trying any new trend, make sure you have the foundation to handle it and be aware of any potential risks, McGregor said.

For casual runners, this might mean signing up for a 5K but building your endurance gradually while incorporating other strength training exercises into your routine. For more intense challenges, such as a marathon, McGregor encourages people to consult with professionals or a coach who can monitor your progress and condition along the way.

Focusing on sustainable habits
Both McGregor and Curran emphasize the importance of fostering sustainable health habits before embarking on more extreme challenges.

Rather than chasing the idea of being “healthy,” McGregor suggests focusing on actual healthful behaviors and starting small.

If you’re a highly sedentary person and want to add more movement to your day, try doing lunges while brushing your teeth or taking short walks throughout your typical routine.

Kennethpum

14 Apr 2025 - 01:40 pm

Challenging our perceptions of ‘perfection’
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With health influencers raising the bar for success, the wellness space now often feels like a performative space where people strive to showcase peak physical and mental strength.

While seeing others’ achievements can be motivating, it can also be discouraging if your progress doesn’t match theirs.

Each person is chasing the perfect version of themselves — whether it’s a body or a lifestyle — which is dangerous because this is typically an impossible or dangerous version to achieve, Curran said. He added that this type of comparison creates a dangerous cycle in which people constantly feel dissatisfied with their own progress.

“It’s a fantasy in many ways, and once you start chasing after it, you constantly find yourself embroiled in a sense of doubt and deficit,” he said.

Curran also noted that wellness challenges can be particularly damaging for women who struggle with perfectionism, as they tend to be bombarded with impossible beauty standards and societal expectations.

Renee McGregor, a UK-based dietitian who specializes in eating disorders and athlete performance, encourages people to approach wellness trends with curiosity and skepticism. That’s because some influencers and celebrities could be promoting products because there’s a financial benefit for them.

“The thing to ask yourself about the person you’re taking advice from is what do they gain from it?” McGregor said. “If they are going to gain financially, then you know that they (could be willing) to sell you a lie.”
Whether you want to try a new challenge or product that promises amazing results, McGregor suggests doing your research and seeking diverse perspectives, including consulting with doctors when possible.

Jamestep

14 Apr 2025 - 12:20 pm

Wellness perfectionism doesn’t exist. Focus on these sustainable habits
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ou’re scrolling through your phone when you stumble upon the next viral trend: an influencer claiming that following their incredibly strict diet will help you achieve their jaw-dropping physique. Or you see a fresh-faced runner swearing you can run a marathon without any training — just like they did.

Whether or not you’re actively searching for wellness advice, it’s nearly impossible to avoid hearing about the latest health craze making bold guarantees of transformation.

As you wonder if these claims hold any truth, you might also question why people often feel motivated to dive into intense challenges — when seemingly simple habits, such as getting enough sleep or eating more vegetables, often feel much harder to tackle.

Many of us are drawn to these extreme challenges because we’re craving radical change, hoping it will help prove something to ourselves or to others, experts say.

“We always see these kinds of challenges as opportunities for growth, particularly if we’re in a phase of our life where we’ve let ourselves go,” said Dr. Thomas Curran, associate professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an expert on perfectionism. “Maybe we feel that we need to be healthier, or we just had a breakup or (major) life event.”
With social media amplifying these movements, it’s easy to see why people are increasingly drawn to the idea of achieving the “perfect” version of themselves. But before jumping into a new wellness challenge, it’s important to take a moment, reflect on your goals, and consider where you’re starting from.

Jasoncauri

14 Apr 2025 - 11:30 am

Water and life
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Lightning is a dramatic display of electrical power, but it is also sporadic and unpredictable. Even on a volatile Earth billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life — a fact that has cast doubt on such theories in the past, Zare said.

Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.

“Microdischarges between obviously charged water microdroplets make all the organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment,” Zare said. “We propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life.”

However, even with the new findings about microlightning, questions remain about life’s origins, he added. While some scientists support the notion of electrically charged beginnings for life’s earliest building blocks, an alternative abiogenesis hypothesis proposes that Earth’s first amino acids were cooked up around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, produced by a combination of seawater, hydrogen-rich fluids and extreme pressure.

Researchers identified salt minerals in the Bennu samples that were deposited as a result of brine evaporation from the asteroid’s parent body. In particular, they found a number of sodium salts, such as the needles of hydrated sodium carbonate highlighted in purple in this false-colored image – salts that could easily have been compromised if the samples had been exposed to water in Earth’s atmosphere.

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Yet another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules didn’t originate on Earth at all. Rather, they formed in space and were carried here by comets or fragments of asteroids, a process known as panspermia.

“We still don’t know the answer to this question,” Zare said. “But I think we’re closer to understanding something more about what could have happened.”

Though the details of life’s origins on Earth may never be fully explained, “this study provides another avenue for the formation of molecules crucial to the origin of life,” Williams said. “Water is a ubiquitous aspect of our world, giving rise to the moniker ‘Blue Marble’ to describe the Earth from space. Perhaps the falling of water, the most crucial element that sustains us, also played a greater role in the origin of life on Earth than we previously recognized.”

Edwardvok

14 Apr 2025 - 09:26 am

New design revealed for Airbus hydrogen plane
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In travel news this week: Bhutan’s spectacular new airport, the world’s first 3D-printed train station has been built in Japan, plus new designs for Airbus’ zero-emission aircraft and France’s next-generation high-speed trains.

Grand designs
European aerospace giant Airbus has revealed a new design for its upcoming fully electric, hydrogen-powered ZEROe aircraft. powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

The single-aisle plane now has four engines, rather than six, each powered by their own fuel cell stack.

The reworked design comes after the news that the ZEROe will be in our skies later than Airbus hoped.

The plan was to launch a zero-emission aircraft by 2035, but now the next-generation single-aisle aircraft is slated to enter service in the second half of the 2030s.

Over in Asia, the Himalayan country of Bhutan is building a gloriously Zen-like new airport befitting a nation with its very own happiness index.

Gelephu International is designed to serve a brand new “mindfulness city,” planned for southern Bhutan, near its border with India.

In rail travel, Japan has just built the world’s first 3D-printed train station, which took just two and a half hours to construct, according to The Japan Times. That’s even shorter than the whizzy six hours it was projected to take.

France’s high-speed TGV rail service has revealed its next generation of trains, which will be capable of reaching speeds of up to 320 kilometers an hour (nearly 200 mph).

The stylish interiors have been causing a stir online, as has the double-decker dining car.

Finally, work is underway in London on turning a mile-long series of secret World War II tunnels under a tube station into a major new tourist attraction. CNN took a look inside.

Freddiebup

14 Apr 2025 - 09:14 am

Some scientists believe that fatty acids such as decanoic acid and dodecanoic acid formed the membranes of the first simple cell-like structures on Earth, Pearce said.
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“(This is) the closest we’ve come to detecting a major biomolecule-related signal — something potentially tied to membrane structure, which is a key feature of life,” Pearce said via email. “Organics on their own are intriguing, but not evidence of life. In contrast, biomolecules like membranes, amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars are central components of biology as we know it, and finding any of them would be groundbreaking (we haven’t yet).”
Returning samples from Mars
The European Space Agency plans to launch its ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to the red planet in 2028, and the robotic explorer will carry a complementary instrument to SAM. The rover LS6 will have the capability to drill up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) beneath the Martian surface — and perhaps find larger and better-preserved organic molecules.

While Curiosity’s samples can’t be studied on Earth, the Perseverance rover has actively been collecting samples from Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake and river delta, all with the intention of returning them to Earth in the 2030s via a complicated symphony of missions called Mars Sample Return.
Both rovers have detected a variety of organic carbon molecules in different regions on Mars, suggesting that organic carbon is common on the red planet, Williams said.

While Curiosity and Perseverance have proven they can detect organic matter, their instruments can’t definitively determine all the answers about their origins, said Dr. Ashley Murphy, postdoctoral research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Murphy, who along with Williams previously studied organics identified by Perseverance, was not involved in the new research.

“To appropriately probe the biosignature question, these samples require high-resolution and high-sensitivity analyses in terrestrial labs, which can be facilitated by the return of these samples to Earth,” Murphy said.

Josephpoica

14 Apr 2025 - 09:09 am

Greenland’s leader says US officials’ visit is ‘highly aggressive.’ Trump says it’s ‘friendliness, not provocation’
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Greenland’s prime minister said a planned visit to the island by US officials, including second lady Usha Vance, is “highly aggressive,” plunging relations to a new low after President Donald Trump vowed to annex the autonomous Danish territory.

But despite the backlash, Trump has insisted the visit is about “friendliness, not provocation” – and claims the US team was “invited.”

Vance, the wife of US Vice President JD Vance, will travel to Greenland this week to watch the island’s national dogsled race and “celebrate Greenlandic culture and unity,” according to a statement from the White House. National security adviser Mike Waltz is also expected to visit the territory this week, according to a source familiar with the trip.

Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede called the US delegation’s trip to the island “highly aggressive” in an interview with Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq on Sunday, and raised particular objection to Waltz’s visit.

“What is the national security adviser doing in Greenland? The only purpose is to demonstrate power over us,” Egede said. “His mere presence in Greenland will no doubt fuel American belief in Trump’s mission — and the pressure will increase.”

Trump claimed on Monday that people in Greenland have responded warmly to the US’s recent interest in the territory. “They’re calling us. We’re not calling them. And we were invited over there,” he said.

“We’re dealing with a lot of people from Greenland that would like to see something happen with respect to them being properly protected and properly taken care of,” Trump told reporters following a meeting with his Cabinet.

“I think Greenland is going to be something that maybe is in our future,” Trump added.

The president said he believes Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be traveling to Greenland too.

Trump’s idea to annex Greenland has thrown an international spotlight on the territory, which holds vast stores of rare earth minerals critical for high-tech industries, and has raised questions about the island’s future security as the US, Russia and China vie for influence in the Arctic. Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in the US taking the island by force or economic coercion, even as Denmark and Greenland have firmly rejected the idea.

Kevinagefe

14 Apr 2025 - 05:34 am

Why there’s a huge collection of vintage cars stored in the middle of the desert
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Back at the turn of the 21st century, Qatar was a country with few cultural attractions to keep visitors and residents entertained. Yet the Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani Museum — known as the FBQ Museum — was a place that most people visited as an alternative to the then-still rather ramshackle National Museum of Qatar.

You had to make an appointment, and drive out into the desert, getting lost a few times along the way, but then you were welcomed to the lush Al Samriya Farm with a cup of tea and some cake. The highlight was being allowed into a space crammed full with shelves and vitrines holding all sorts of eclectic artifacts from swords to coins — with the odd car and carriage standing in the grounds.

It wasn’t necessarily the kind of museum you’d find elsewhere in the world, but it was definitely a sight that needed seeing.

Today, it has grown and now claims to be one of the world’s largest private museums. It holds over 30,000 items, including a fleet of traditional dhow sailboats, and countless carpets. There’s also an entire house that once stood in Damascus, Syria.

There are archaeological finds dating to the Jurassic age, ancient copies of the Quran, a section that details the importance of pearling within Qatar’s history, and jewelry dating to the 17th century.

There are also items from 2022’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar including replica trophies, balls used in the games, entry passes, football jerseys and even shelves full of slightly creepy dolls and children’s plush animals.

Some of the more disturbing exhibits include various items of Third Reich paraphernalia in the wartime room, and, strangely enough, several showcases of birds’ legs with marking rings on them. Basically, whatever you can think of, you have a very good chance of finding it here.

Rumor even has it that behind a locked door is a room filled with the late Princess Diana’s dresses and other memorabilia, accessible only to a select few visitors. Another door hides a room, no longer open to the public, filled with collectibles of the late Saddam Hussein.

Leonardboali

14 Apr 2025 - 04:48 am

Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here’s what it’s like to visit
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A few months ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world’s northerly reaches at this time of year.

But President Donald Trump’s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.

Denmark, for whom Greenland is an autonomous crown dependency, has protested it’s not for sale. Officials in Greenland, meanwhile, have sought to assert the territory’s right to independence.

The conversation continues to intensify. A contentious March 28 visit to a US military installation by Usha Vance, the second lady, accompanied by her husband, Vice President JD Vance, was the latest in a series of events to focus attention on Trump’s ambitions for Greenland.

The visit was originally planned as a cultural exchange, but was shortened following complaints from Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede.

Had the Vances prolonged their scheduled brief visit, they would’ve discovered a ruggedly pristine wildernesses steeped in rich Indigenous culture.

An inhospitable icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to dwell along the shorelines in brightly painted communities. Here, they spend brutally cold winters hunting seals on ice under the northern lights in near perpetual darkness. Although these days, they can also rely on community stores.

The problem for travelers over the years has been getting to Greenland via time-consuming indirect flights. That’s changing. Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-delayed international airport. From June 2025, United Airlines will be operating a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk.

Two further international airports are due to open by 2026 — Qaqortoq in South Greenland and more significantly in Ilulissat, the island’s only real tourism hotspot.