NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  1. Content with the tag: “amino acid

  2. Building Blocks of Life Created in "Impossible" Place


    A typical example of a meteorite remnant linked to asteroid 2008 TC3, with a dark scruffy texture. Credit: Peter Jenniskens

    Researchers from the NASA Astrobiology Program have discovered amino acids in a meteorite where none were expected.

    “This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.” Glavin is lead author of a paper on this discovery appearing December 15 in Meteoritics and Planetary Science. “Finding them in this type of meteorite suggests that there is...

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    Source: [NASA Press Release]

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  3. Miller-Urey Revisited


    Members of NAI’s Carnegie Institution of Washington, Indiana University, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Teams and their colleagues have revisited the Miller-Urey experiments, and found some surprising results.

    A classic experiment proving amino acids are created when inorganic molecules are exposed to electricity isn’t the whole story, it turns out. The 1953 Miller-Urey Synthesis had two sibling studies, neither of which was published. Vials containing the products from those experiments were recently recovered and reanalyzed using modern technology. The results are reported in this week’s Science.

    One of the unpublished experiments by...

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    Source: [Indiana University Press Release]

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