Here's the latest, for your amusement:
DISTURBING: Why Are "After School Satan Clubs" Growing At Public Schools?
More “After School Satan Clubs” backed by the far-left group The Satanic Temple (TST) are popping up in public school districts across the country, and chaos seems to follow the clubs wherever they go. Is one coming for your town?
]]>I love how "far left" has come to mean "cares about people" as a way to distinguish it from the rest of US politics.
Many links found, not sure where the original quote above came from: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/after-school-satan-clubs/
]]>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/asteroid-organic-chemistry
The tl;dr, an especially important one for wannabe asteroid miners, is the last paragraph: "If your image of outer space is of something stark, clean, and black-and-white, revise those thoughts. We find ourselves, as I once put it, in a galaxy full of gunk."
Carbonaceous chondrites an waste dumps at unregulated chemical companies have a lot in common. Living on such an asteroid would be stimulating for all the wrong reasons.
]]>I like the recent suggestion that liquid nitrogen was good for washing moon dust off. Gives a decent idea of just how much fun the stuff is. And how capable a moon suit needs to be.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230228085113.htm
]]>Well those things are very complicated. So the universe being billions of years old tend to maybe allow for that.
]]>"Take a few million comets, some balls of rock, mix vigorously then leave to settle. A froth will form on one of the balls of rock".
]]>Experimental biologists haven't been standing still in the last 70 years. (Here in the US the creationists are very angry about this and are flailing around with increasingly incoherent protests.) Last month I saw an article on improved cell wall synthesis under early-Earth conditions but the only thing I can find now is behind a pay wall. Recently there's been some interesting proto-life chemistry found, showing both self replication and metabolism. This one doesn't seem to be a precursor to our kind of life but it's an interesting proof of concept that demonstrates raw chemicals can do the kinds of things they'd have to do before coming together as life.
]]>As Scott noted, it's been done. Miller-Urey experiments would be lab exercises now, except that they take so long to run.
The more fundamental point, which is why I'm writing this, is that biochemists, despite their truthful protestations that cells are more complicated than any human really understands, know huge amounts about the chemistry of life. They can make defensible hypotheses about why some set of amino acids works better than others, and they can demonstrate their ideas in the lab. Basically, the set we have produces proteins that tend to spontaneously fold into complex structures, while many other sets produce blobular strands that are indistinguishable from denatured soup. Such snot blobs can be biologically active, but the point is that different suites of amino acids differ wildly in what one can do with them.
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