Category Archives: Futurism

Berger Time

When Ars Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger asked Buzz Aldrin, the second man to have walked the Moon in 1969, what he would do while practicing social distancing during the coronavirus outbreak, Aldrin had some choice words: Lying on my ass and locking the door.

Aldrin is familiar with the concept of spending time in quarantine. After the Apollo 11 Command Module landed, he, along with commander Neil Armstrong and module pilot Michael Collins, had to spend three long weeks in quarantine to make sure no nasty bugs from space could spread on our planet.

The three men were first moved to the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a converted Airstream trailer pretty tight quarters for three adults. They were then airlifted to a secure building called the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Years later, once the Moon was proven to be barren of life, NASA discontinued this practice after Apollo 14.

When Berger asked Aldrin for some advice for the millions of people currently self-isolating at home, the now 90-year-old former astronaut reminisced of his own time in quarantine. Well, Mike Collins and I used to exercise and jog a little bit around the hallway.

Aldrin also questioned if his and his teams temporary home was really capable of holding microbes in.

We looked at this one crack in the floor, and there were ants crawling in and out, Aldrin said.

Most of the rest of his time, he said, was spent doing paperwork.

READ MORE: Buzz Aldrin has some advice for Americans in quarantine [Ars Technica]

More on quarantine: As Coronavirus Rages, Elon Musk Refuses to Close Tesla Factory

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The Second Man to Walk on the Moon Has Some Quarantine Advice - Futurism

Utah Jazz player Rudy Gobert, whos tested positive for the coronavirus, tweeted this weekend that he cant smell anything.

Gobert isnt alone. A growing number of doctors suspect that for many patients, the first symptom of the bug before a telltale cough or fever could be losing your sense of taste, smell, or both.

A fascinating new story in The New York Times tracked down growing worldwide evidence that those subtle symptoms could in many cases be harbingers of a coronavirus diagnosis. Some even went as far as to suggest that if you cant smell the garlic and onions youre sauting, you should consider acting as though you have the virus for the purposes of public health.

Almost everybody who is hospitalized has this same story, Italian doctor Marco Metra, whose hospital is treating hundreds of COVID-19 patients, told the Times. You ask about the patients wife or husband. And the patient says, My wife has just lost her smell and taste but otherwise she is well. So she is likely infected, and she is spreading it with a very mild form.

Experts have deemed the evidence sufficient that on Sunday, a prominent group of American head and neck doctors called for the loss of taste and smell to be added to the list of screening criteria for COVID-19.

Early-stage research in South Korea, China and Italy seems to corroborate the phenomenon, according to CNN, and the Times cited two researchers who said theyve observed the same thing in Germany.

There is good news, according to a professor of medicine at Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich who talked to the Times: most patients are regaining both their sense of taste and smell after the infection clears up.

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Doctors Think This May Be the First Symptom of the Coronavirus - Futurism

Buried in an alarming New York Times story about a looming shortage of lifesaving ventilators is this horrifying detail (emphasis ours):

For days, [exec of ventilator maker Ventec Chris] Kiple said, he has been getting nonstop phone calls from frantic hospital administrators, governors offices and other government officials looking for more machines. Hes even received inquiries from a number of wealthy individuals hoping to buy their own personal ventilators, a fallback plan in case the American hospital system buckles.

Thats right the rich are so worried that the medical system will collapse under the strain of the runaway outbreak that theyre buying up ventilators, in case they happen to get so sick that they need them.

Unspoken in the Times is a brutal implication. Most of those jetsetters wont even need the ventilators, since most COVID-19 cases are mild enough that they dont require hospitalization. And that means that each ventilator obtained as a backup plan for a terrified plutocrat wont end up in a health care facility meaning a patient, or multiple patients, could die.

In a lesser crisis, snapping up livesaving medical supplies would be just gauche. But experts are almost certain, according to the Times, that theres going to be a critical shortage of ventilators as the disease continues to spread.

The reality is there is absolutely not enough, Hamilton Medical CEO Andreas Wieland told the Times. We see that in Italy, we saw that in China, we see it in France and other countries.

The phenomenon of rich scoundrels snapping them up is even more troubling when you compare it to the selfless efforts of others to get more ventilators into the medical system.

In Italy, for instance, local business are helping 3D print parts to keep ventilators running. A swathe of open source efforts have cropped up to try to build DIY ones. Even the enigmatic Elon Musk has offered to use his resources at Tesla to build some.

Hopefully the rich wont find a way to hoard those too.

Original post:
The Rich Are Trying to Buy Their Own Ventilators, in Case Everything Collapses - Futurism

SO, HERES THE IDEA: Everyone installs an app, and anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus hits a button on the app andthen anyone whos crossed paths with that person gets an alert. Sounds great in theory, but in practice there are tons of reasonable concerns, privacy and user adoption among them. And would it even work? Well, a super-squad of developers with backgrounds from MIT, Harvard, the Mayo Clinic, Google, and Facebook are trying to find out.

The app, which is available for free, and was developed by a team of 43 tech workers and academics in their spare time, is called Private Kit: Safe Paths and the beta can be downloaded now for iOS and Android.

Its developers claim to first and foremost address the privacy concerns of anyone using it by only sharing encrypted data culled by the app with a network that doesnt have any kind of central node. No one entity holds all the users data. Instead, data transfer only occurs at the choice of the users, with individualized access given to, say, researchers (or someone trying to do contact tracing).

That still doesnt solve the mitigating major issue of needing widespread adoption of the app, and they would need the backing of a massive health organization to help it. AsWiredreports, the team behind Safe Paths have already sought the approval of the World Health Organization:

[MIT Media Lab professor Ramesh Raskar] has been rallying other researchers and tech executives to the effort, and he has been in contact with the World Health Organization, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the US Department of Health and Human Services. They are giving us guidance on what will work, he says, although none has yet endorsed the idea.

And, as Wired also notes, this isnt the first time an app has been developed to potentially combat the spread of disease before, pointing to an app developed in 2011 by Cambridge University scientists called FluPhone. The problem there? Only one percent of the people in Cambridge downloaded it.

Another obvious issue with widespread adoption of an app like this isnt a matter of choice so much as resources. The solution here, to a large degree, operates on certain middle-class assumptions. We know there are large swaths of the human population even in urban centers who dont own phones, or people (like undocumented immigrants) who would potentially balk at the idea of installing anything on their phone that keeps track of their locations.

That said, these solutions, however nebulous and far-fetched, seem to be far friendlier ideas than the stark alternatives. Take the country of Israel, for example, where as The Guardian reports, they just went and decided to do, well, this:

Israels government has approved emergency measures to track people suspected or confirmed to have been infected with the coronavirus by monitoring their mobile phones, immediately raising privacy concerns in the country. The cabinet unanimously approved the use of the technology developed initially for counterterrorism purposes in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Meanwhile, as The Guardian also points out, other ostensibly less militant measures have resulted in not-so-great results. South Korea, for example, went with

messages that trace the movements of people who have recently been diagnosed with the virus. A woman in her 60s has just tested positive, reads a typical text, Click on the link for the places she visited before she was hospitalised, it adds. Clicking on the link takes the user to the website of a district office that lists the places the patient had visited before testing positive.

Needless to say, some potentially humiliating outcomes have arisen from this approach:

As South Korean media pored over their movements, citizens looked on with a mixture of horror and fascination as their private lives were laid bare, leading to speculation that they were having an affair and that [a] secretary had undergone plastic surgery.

Perhaps the lesson here is that were going to be better off choosing how to help our communities do contact tracing, ourselves, before a choice and a far worse one gets made for us.

Read more from the original source:
This MIT and Harvard-Built App Could Slow the Spread of Coronavirus - Futurism

Scientists say its reasonable to assume that smoking or vaping could make COVID-19 symptoms more severe once infected, according to Scientific American.

To be clear, a direct link has yet to be investigated by researchers but theres plenty of evidence that smoking or vaping suppress immune function in the lungs and trigger inflammation.

Scientists have also found that more severe COVID-19 cases were associated with chronic lung conditions which in turn is linked to smokers and vapers as well. Some preliminary studies in China have found links between more severe COVID-19 cases and a history of smoking, but its too early to draw conclusions as many of them still await peer review.

All these things make me believe that we are going to have more severe casesespecially [in] people who are [long-term] smokers or vapers, said Melodi Pirzada, chief of pediatric pulmonology at NYU Winthrop Hospital on Long Island, to Scientific American.

Theres a very coordinated series of events that take place when you do become infected with a virus, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina Ray Pickles told Scientific American. I think once you start perturbing this sequence of events in any which way or direction, thats when things can go awry.

Scientists have found plenty of evidence for smoking being a risk factor for influenza. The link to vaping, however, is definitely less clear on the matter. Mice studies have found a link between e-cigarette aerosol lowering the chances of surviving influenza A, a common influenza virus.

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Experts: Vaping Could Make Coronavirus Infection More Severe - Futurism

Life has changed a lot in the past few days, weeks, or months, depending where you live. As efforts to contain the novel coronavirus ramp up, its likely going to change even more. But were already sick of being at home all the time, we miss our friends and families, everythings been canceled, the economy is tanking, and we feel anxious and scared about whats ahead.

We just want this to be over, and we figure its only a matter of time. Were making plans for what well do when things go back to normaland banking on that happening.

But what if life never fully goes back to how it was pre-coronavirus? What if this epidemic is a turning point, and after it the world is never the same?

More importantlyor, at least, more optimisticallywhat if the world could come out of this crisis better than it was before?

Jamie Metzl, technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical expert, entrepreneur, author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity, and Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, thinks this is possiblebut it all depends on what we do and how we behave right now. In a talk at Singularity Universitys virtual summit on COVID-19 last week, Metzl explained why he believes that were never going back to normaland what we should be doing now to make the new normal a good one.

For many of us, the most impactful geopolitical event thats happened during our lifetime was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The world changed that day, and its never returned to how it was before.

A flu-like pandemic with a relatively low mortality rate may seem minor compared to the deliberate murder of thousands of innocent people. But, Metzl said, Its my contention that this isnt a 2001 moment, this is something much bigger. I think of this as a 1941 moment.

1941 was the thick of World War II. Nobody knew what the outcome of the war was going to be, everybody was terrified, and the US and its allies were losing the war. But even in the height of those darkest of times, Metzl said, people began imagining what the future world would look.

It was 1941 when President Roosevelt gave his famous Four Freedoms speech, and when American and British leadership issued the Atlantic Charter, which set out their vision for the post-war international order. To this day, our lives exist within that order.

The situation were in right now is, of course, different; its not a war. It is, in Metzls words, a convergence of the worlds of science and biology and the world of geopolitics. And as the coronavirus crisis continues to play out, its geopolitical implications are going to become much greater.

Metzl shared a quote from Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci, written in the 1930s: The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

Oofthats a big statement.

Metzl deconstructed it. For starters, he said, the post-WWII order that weve all grown up with was dying before this virus appeared.

Post-WWII planners envisioned a world that shared sovereignty and curbed nationalism. But were now in a period of dramatic re-nationalization of the world, with populist, extremist, or authoritarian leaders in power from Brazil to the US to China, and many countries in between.

Institutions intended to foster global cooperation (like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization) have been starved in the context of this re-nationalization, and as a result we dont have effective structures in place to address global crisesand not just coronavirus. Think of climate change, protecting the oceans, preparing for a future of automation and AI; no country can independently take on or solve these massive challenges.

Not all is lost, though. There are some positive pieces of this globalization story that we also need to be mindful of, Metzl said.

When the Spanish flu pandemic hit in 1918, there were only 2 billion people on Earth, and of those 2 billion only 30 percent were literate.; the brain pool for solving problems was about 600 million people.

Now we have a global population of 7.5 billion and an 86 percent literacy rate, which means over 6.5 billion people can be part of the effort to fix whats broken. Just as crucially, were more connected to each other than weve ever been. It used to take thousands of years for knowledge to transfer; now it can fly across the world over the internet in minutes. The pandemic moves at the speed of globalization, but so does the response, Metzl said. The tools were bringing to this fight are greater than anything our ancestors could have possibly imagined.

But at the same time were experiencing this incredible bottom-up energy and connectivity, were also experiencing an abysmal failure of our top-down institutions.

Have you felt afraid these last few days and weeks? I sure have. The economy is tanking, people are losing their jobs, people are getting sick, and we dont know the way out or how how long its going to last. In the meantime, a lot of unexpected things will happen.

There will be an economic slowdown or recession, and there will be issues with our healthcare systemsand these are just the predictable things. Metzl believes well also see significant second and third-order effects. If the poorer parts of the world get hit hard by the virus, we may see fragile states collapsing, and multi-lateral states like the European Union unable to support the strain. Our democracies are going to be challenged, and there may be soft coups even here in the US, Metzl said. Speaking of challenges to democracy, there are actors whose desires and aspirations are very different from our own, and this could be a moment of opportunity for them.

The world is not going to snap back to being exactly like it was before this crisis happened, Metzl said. Were going to come out of this into a different world.

We dont know exactly what that world will look like, but we can imagine some of it. Basically, take the trends that were already in motion and hit the fast-forward button. Virtualization of events, activities, and interactions. Automation of processes and services. Political and economic decentralization.

But for the pieces of the future that were unsure of, now is 1941. Now is the time when we need to think about what we would like the new world to look like, and start planning for it and building it, Metzl said.

In hindsight, its easy to picture a far better response and outcome to the COVID-19 outbreak. What if, three months ago, thered been a global surveillance system in place, and at the first signs of the outbreak, an international emergency team led by the World Health Organization had immediately gone to Wuhan?

Weall of usneed to re-invigorate a global system that can engage people inclusively across differences and across countries, Metzl said. We need to be articulating our long-term vision now so that we can evaluate everything against that standard.

Theres not a total lack of a positive long-term vision now; the UN sustainable development goals, for example, call for gender equality, no poverty, no hunger, decent work, climate action, and justice (among other goals) around the world.

The problem is that we dont have institutions meaningful enough or strong enough to effect realization of these principles; theres a mismatch between the global nature of the problems were facing and the structure of national politics.

Just as our old normal was the new normal for our grandparents in the mid-1900s, this new normal that feels so shocking to us right now will simply be normal for our children and grandchildren. But there are some criticaland wonderfuldifferences between the mid-1900s and now.

We have more educated people, stronger connections, faster sharing of information, and more technological tools and scientific knowledge than ever before in history. The number of people who can be part of this conversation is unprecedented, Metzl said. We couldnt have done this in the industrial age or even the nuclear age. Theres never been this kind of motivation combined with this capacity around the world.

In 1941, the global planning process was top-down: a small group of powerful, smart people decided how things would be then took steps to make their vision a reality. But this time will be different; to succeed, the new global plan will need to have meaningful drive from the bottom up.

We need to recognize a new locus of power, Metzl said. And its us. Nobody is going to solve this for us. This is our moment to really come together.

Image Credit: Joseph Redfield Nino from Pixabay

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After Coronavirus the World Will Never Be the Same. But Maybe, It Can Be Better - Singularity Hub

A challenge for Cummings and his team in season three was maintaining what he calls the language of style developed in season two for the Delos Corporation now that the world has been so greatly expanded. The Mesa, where Delos houses its laboratories and offices inside the Westworld theme park, is a palette of blacks, reds, whites, and grays. When we got out into the real world, we got very challenged by the fact that the palette is kind of exploding, Cummings explains. The solution was to keep color and life in certain environments, then return to the established color palette when inside the Delos Corporation offices.

Maeve Millay (played by Thandie Newton) at La Fbrica, which the Westworld team augmented to create a more futuristic version.

The offices themselves were filmed at the Santiago Calatravadesigned City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain. Also featured prominently this season is Ricardo Bofills masterpiece La Fbrica, which Cummings was able to secure after Ingels introduced him to Bofills son, Carlos. We used parts of the real place, and then created a futuristic [version] of it through an additional set, Cummings says. The whole place is this wonderful, weird, Industrial-meets-postmodern-Gothic thing. Its very interesting.

This Wallace E. Cunninghamdesigned residence in Encinitas, California, was the perfect fit for the aesthetic of season three.

Another location used was a Wallace E. Cunninghamdesigned residence in Encinitas, California, that features a concrete, floating staircase and expansive use of glass. One reason we were attracted to it is because it incorporated the language of the corporate offices and the Delos Corporation we had done the year before, Cummings says. It incorporated a lot of the design details that we had already been putting into this season, too.

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Cummings and set decorator Julie Ochipinti achieved a sense of orderly futurism by placing large LED panels on walls both decoratively and as a source of light. In order to tie things together, we created our own lighting, Cummings adds. Custom lighting pieces were manufactured by Damon Liebowitz, while Ochipinti sourced the rest from Y Lighting and A&R Lighting. We stressed a lot of vertical, linear-looking lighting explains Cummings. We avoided candles, and added a lot of underlighting and built-in lighting.

Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) at the Wallace E. Cunninghamdesigned residence in Encinitas, California.

For furniture and accessories, Ochipinti used Muji, HD Buttercup, Hammer and Spear, JF Chen, and Tortoise. We simply couldnt rebuild all the furniture given the scale of things, Cummings says with a laugh, referencing the shoots in Singapore, Spain, and Los Angeles. This year was really a global endeavor, he concludes. I didnt actually sleep very much.

Originally posted here:
For Westworld Season 3, Los Angeles of 2058 Was Built With Input From Bjarke Ingels - Architectural Digest

This weekend, a report by the French Ministry of Health claimed that the use of ibuprofen the active ingredient in Advil and other anti-inflammatory drugs could worsen the symptoms of COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by coronavirus sweeping the entire globe right now.

In light of a letter published in the journal The Lancet advising against the use of ibuprofen, Frances health minister Olivier Veran tweeted on Saturday that in case of fever, take paracetamol [commonly known as Tylenol] If you are already taking anti-inflammatory drugs, ask your doctors advice.

On Tuesday, the World Health Organization followed suit and is officially recommending against taking ibuprofen to treat symptoms of COVID-19 at least until further notice. WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters that experts were looking into this to give further guidance, as quoted by Science Alert.

In the meantime, we recommend using rather paracetamol, and do not use ibuprofen as a self-medication, Lindmeier said. Thats important.

Before the WHOs recommendation, Reckitt Benckiser (RB), producer of the popular ibuprofen drug Nurofen, said that there still was no evidence to support forgoing the over-the-counter drug (and its also worth noting that RB has an interest in promoting its own product).

Appropriate use of ibuprofen and paracetamol is still currently being recommended by most European health authorities as part of the symptomatic treatment of COVID-19, the company wrote in a statement. RB is not aware of any evidence that ibuprofen adversely impacts the outcome in patients suffering from COVID-19 infection.

We do not currently believe there is any proven scientific evidence linking over-the-counter use of ibuprofen to the aggravation of COVID-19, the statement read.

Other experts agree the speculation is baseless at least for now.

Its all anecdote, and fake news off the anecdotes, Garret FitzGerald, chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania told The New York Times, also before the WHOs recommendation. Thats the world we are living in.

Link:
WHO Recommends Avoiding Ibuprofen to Treat COVID-19 Symptoms - Futurism

Liam Wong who hails from the Capital but studied in Dundee has had a glittering career since graduating in 2010, becoming the youngest director ever at videogames giant Ubisoft, and getting listed as one of Forbes magazines influential 30 under 30.

His photobook TO:KY:OO became the most crowdfunded book in the UK, raising 140,000 more than four times its original target.

It presents the city of Tokyo in a way it has rarely been seen, charting a stunning, neon-soaked journey through its nightlife.

Liam said: I wanted to take real moments and transform them into something surreal, to make the viewer question the reality depicted in each photograph.

This body of work encompasses my three years as a photographer and ultimately the completion of my photo series.

TO:KY:OO also features a foreword by Hideo Kojima, the legendary videogame developer behind titles such as Metal Gear Solid 5 and Death Stranding, and a cover quote from Syd Mead, a Hollywood visual futurist best known for his designs in sci-fi movies such as Blade Runner, Aliens and Tron.

Liam now splits his time between the UK and Asia and maintains strong links with Abertay.

He said: If I hadnt gone to Abertay Im unlikely to be doing any of what I do now. Its been instrumental. I didnt know what I wanted to do after I left high school, and the university set me on the path that Ive followed. I always enjoy returning to Abertay and Dundee to see whats new.

After receiving critical acclaim for his photography, he is planning to branch into a new industry.

Liam added: Im aiming to venture into film. Its not something Ive done before, but it is something that really interests me. Ill continue on with my art and photography projects though, and Im working on a game with friends that I hope to publish in the future.

Liam, now a freelance art designer and photographer, has recently been working on a series of high profile projects including Cyberpunk 2077, which is projected to be one of 2020s biggest videogames.

For more information about Liam, visit http://www.liamwong.com

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Liam Wong gets to the art of the matter with his Tokyo photo fantasies - Edinburgh News

The Allende meteorite, one of the two meteorites that scientists claim to have found proteins in. Image via Wikimedia Commons/ Popular Mechanics.

Meteorites, or rocks from outer space, can contain valuable clues about how life began on Earth. Various organic molecules and even amino acids have often been found inside meteorites. Now, Harvard University researchers claim theyve discovered the first-ever complete proteins in two meteorites. While this isnt yet proof of life itself, proteins do play a key role inside the cells of living creatures. These recently found proteins are the most complex organic molecules found so far, if the results hold up to further scrutiny (already being debated).

The intriguing discovery was first announced by Dan Robitski in an article for Futurism on February 27, 2020.

The research paper was submitted to the preprint server arXiv on February 22, 2020, and it has yet to be peer-reviewed or published in a journal. The team included researchers from Harvard University and biotech companies PLEX Corporation and Bruker Scientific.

The research team, led by Malcolm McGeochof PLEX, found the protein which they named hemolithin inside two meteorites, Acfer 086 and Allende. Acfer 086 was found in Algeria in 1990 and Allende was discovered in Mexico in 1969. The researchers state that they are confident the proteins did not originate on Earth, saying:

This is the first report of a protein from any extraterrestrial source.

They also say that the building blocks of the proteins amino acids are chemically different from those on Earth, with isotopes indicating an extraterrestrial origin.

Computer models of the hemolithin protein molecule that researchers say they have discovered in two meteorites. Image via McGeoch et al./ Astrobiology Web.

As the abstract for the paper explains:

This paper characterizes the first protein to be discovered in a meteorite. Amino acid polymers previously observed in Acfer 086 and Allende meteorites have been further characterized in Acfer 086 via high precision MALDI mass spectrometry to reveal a principal unified structure of molecular weight 2320 Daltons that involves chains of glycine and hydroxy-glycine residues terminated by iron atoms, with additional oxygen and lithium atoms. Signal-to-noise ratios up to 135 have allowed the quantification of iron and lithium in the various MALDI fragments via the isotope satellites due to their respective minority isotopic masses 54Fe and 6Li. Analysis of the complete spectrum of isotopes associated with each molecular fragment shows 2H enhancements above terrestrial averaging 25,700 parts per thousand (sigma = 3,500, n=15), confirming extraterrestrial origin and hence the existence of this molecule within the asteroid parent body of the CV3 meteorite class. The molecule is tipped by an iron-oxygen-iron grouping that in other terrestrial contexts has been proposed to be capable of absorbing photons and splitting water into hydroxyl and hydrogen moieties.

Confirmation of a complete protein in a meteorite would be exciting. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, have been found in meteorites before, but this would be the first time that enough of them were found in a long enough chain to be considered a complete protein. Shorter chains of amino acids, typically less than 50, are called peptides.

New types of amino acids had also been previously found in the Murchison meteorite, as reported in 2017, but they still didnt form complete proteins.

Vice also ran an article about the protein discovery on February 28, 2020, quoting study co-author Julie McGeoch, a molecular biologist at Harvard University:

At this point, we need other scientists to employ our careful methods to repeat our results.

Confirmation from other scientists, or not, will be important in follow-up studies. Only then will it be accepted as hard evidence of proteins being able to exist in meteorites or even other rocky extraterrestrial bodies as well.

Amino acids make up both peptides and proteins. Peptides are shorter chains of amino acids while proteins have longer chains of a minimum of 40-100 amino acids. Image via Peptide Sciences.

The reported discovery is not just happenstance, according to the researchers, but the result of more than ten years of study.

McGeoch and his team wanted to see if they could isolate complete proteins from the meteorite samples, not just amino acids as had been found previously. If the findings are accurate, then it would seem they succeeded. The Bruker company provided the very best mass spectrometry, according to McGeoch.

One concern that would come up, of course, would be whether the proteins could be the result of contamination from Earth. So how did the researchers determine whether that was the case or not?

They calculated its deuterium/hydrogen ratio (D/H), the ratio between deuterium (heavy hydrogen, 2H) and hydrogen (1H) in natural waters and other fluids. According to the researchers, the analysis revealed very high extraterrestrial D/H ratios. That would suggest that the protein is much older than Earth, perhaps formed in the disk of dust and gas that surrounded the early sun as the solar system was first forming. It may even have originated earlier, in interstellar molecular clouds.

Some meteorites have also been found to contain stardust grains or presolar grains tiny particles originating from interstellar gas before the sun first formed.

Meteors bombarded the early Earth billions of years ago. Did they help life to begin on our planet? Image via Shutterstock/ Live Science.

The hemolithin is also interesting because it may able to split water into its separate oxygen and hydrogen molecules. That kind of splitting process is known to have helped life first develop on Earth. That capability of hemolithin is still speculation at this point, however, according to McGeoch:

If true, this could be a chemical energy source, which is the most important ingredient for a biochemical process leading on to life.

There is already some pushback on the claims, including from Regius Professor Lee Cronin, who stated on Twitter that the proteins are probably actually proteinoids, protein-like, often cross-linked molecules formed abiotically from amino acids that can form without any involvement of biology.

If it is confirmed, however, that these meteorites contain actual proteins, that would have significant implications for the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, as well as for how life first originated on Earth. Meteorites rained down on the early Earth billions of years ago, bringing amino acids and other organic molecules with them. Just how this ties in with the development of life, or to what extent, still isnt well understood. But if meteorites also provided proteins, that would certainly make things even more interesting.

Bottom line: Scientists at Harvard University have reported, for the first time, the discovery of complete proteins inside two meteorites.

Source: Hemolithin: a Meteoritic Protein containing Iron and Lithium

Via Futurism

Via Vice

Continued here:
Have the first proteins been found in meteorites? - EarthSky