Study suggests cloud-to-ground lightning strikes may have generated building blocks for life on Earth

Originally published by Bob Yirka , Phys.org, on July 30, 2024

Cloud-to-ground lightning on the early Earth vs. a plasma-electrochemical setup used in this work. B) Key components of a plasma (air gap)-electrochemical setup used to conduct interfacial discharges under controlled environmental conditions. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2400819121

A large team of chemists at Harvard University has found evidence suggesting that cloud-to-ground lightning strikes may have helped generate some of the building blocks needed for life on Earth to arise.

In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes how they set up an experiment in their lab meant to mimic the conditions on early Earth and then studied the results of chemical reactions that occurred as lightning strikes were simulated.

Prior research has suggested that life may have gotten its start on Earth through materials in comets or asteroids that made their way to Earth's surface. Cloud-to-cloud lightning strikes have also been named as a possible source of such materials.

But as scientists have studied such theories, they have all become less likely possibilities—collisions from objects in space became a rare event not long after the Earth formed, for example, and lightning strikes between clouds is a very inefficient way to generate useful materials.

In this new study, the team at Harvard suggests a much more plausible scenario is cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.

Read more

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First map of every neuron in an adult brain has been produced for a fruit fly

Image
Originally published by UK Research and Innovation on October 2, 2024   3D rendering of all ~140k neurons in the fruit fly brain. Credit: Data source: FlyWire.ai; Rendering by Philipp Schlegel (University of Cambridge/MRC LMB). The first wiring diagram of every neuron in an adult brain and the 50 million connections between them has been produced for a fruit fly . This landmark achievement has been conducted by a large international collaboration of scientists , called the FlyWire Consortium , including researchers from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology ( in Cambridge, UK ), Princeton University, the University of Vermont and the University of Cambridge . It is published in a pair of papers in Nature . The diagram of all 139,255 neurons in the adult fly brain is the first of an entire brain for an animal that can walk and see . Previous efforts have completed the whole brain diagrams for much smaller brains , for example, for that of a fruit fly larva, which h
Read more

Research finds resin that destroys coronavirus on plastic surfaces

Image
O riginally published by University of Jyväskylä, on January 30, 2024 Studying the impact of rosin-functionalized plastic and standard LDPE on the structure of HCoV-OC43 using (A) TEM and (B) AFM in liquid. The scale bar corresponds to 100 nm and 1 µm in the TEM and AFM images, respectively. In panel B, the blue circle highlights a doughnut-shaped virus. (C) The histogram derived from the AFM images illustrates the average size distribution of the height of individual viruses after being flushed from their respective surfaces. Credit: Microbiology Spectrum (2024). DOI: 10.1128/spectrum.03008-23 Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland , are currently developing anti-viral surfaces to decrease the spread of infectious diseases. A recent study published in Microbiology Spectrum found that a resin ingredient is effective against coronaviruses and strongly decreases their infectivity on plastic surfaces. Viruses may persist on solid surfaces for long periods, which ma
Read more

Engineered Rabies Virus Illuminates Neural Circuitry

Image
Originally published by Hannah Thomasy, PhD, for the Scientist on June 14, 2024 Scientists turned a deadly virus into a crucial tool for understanding the wiring of the brain.   Rabies labeling helps scientists identify neurons in the primary visual cortex that connect to two different higher visual brain regions. Marina Garrett  In 1906 , pathologist Camillo Golgi and neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for their work on the structure of the nervous system . More than a century later, the puzzle of nervous system organization —the intricately tangled mess that results from each neuron’s connections to thousands of others— remains incomplete . Yet, fully developing scientific understanding of these connections is crucial , said Edward Callaway , a systems neurobiologist at the Salk Institute . “If you don’t have some knowledge about how the different parts are interacting , there’s no way to generate a hypothesis about how they’re working together .”  N
Read more