Nova what is life

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Community Hub. Nova-Life is a 3D video game of sandbox type mainly focused on the roleplay whose goals are to create a character, to find you a job and to play as if you were in real life by putting yourself in the shoes of your character and all that in multiplayer mode. All Reviews:. Popular user-defined tags for this product:. Is this game relevant to you? Sign In or Open in Steam. Languages :.

Publisher: TeamNova. Share Embed. Comets are like giant dirty snowballs made of ice and rock. Some comets that hit the early Earth were the size of mountains, and a large portion of their mass could have contained organic compounds. The destructive power of comets and meteors is astronomical. The meteor that slammed into Earth some 50, years ago, here in Arizona, blasted a hole in the ground nearly a mile wide—from here to here—and so deep it could hold a story skyscraper.

And as if that weren't enough, the force of the impact was so great that it instantly vaporized nearly the entire meteor, three hundred thousand tons of it. So it makes you wonder: if the building blocks of life were delivered courtesy of comets and meteors, could any of the tiny ingredients they carried have survived the landing?

And just what happens to things like amino acids when they slam into Earth with such devastating power? To answer those questions, one scientist came up with an ingenious experiment. Using a huge gas-powered gun, Jennifer Blank simulates the extreme pressures and temperatures that are unleashed when a comet smashes into Earth.

And we expected that, or we were hoping that, some fraction would survive. We figured the parts that didn't survive would break down into smaller components, but in fact what we found is much more exciting.

The sample consists of a solution of five different amino acids, two of them present in every living cell. The mixture is inserted into a steel capsule. The gun will send a shockwave through the capsule simulating the extreme pressures of a comet's impact. If you think about going to the bottom of the ocean, the pressures you'll have there are only a hundred times atmosphere. So these are hundreds of thousands of times atmospheric pressures. Charging now Okay, bringing up the X-rays Three, two, one, fire.

But have its contents survived the impact? The once clear solution of amino acids has turned a tarry brown color. And the analysis revealed that not only had the material withstood the colossal pressure of the impact, but it had transformed into a new compound. Amino acids, combinations of carbon and other basic elements, had fused together to form more complex molecules called peptides. Molecules like this—this is a peptide—and we show that we can use the impact energy to grow larger molecules from the simplest building blocks of life.

But the leap from non-living ingredients to a living creature, complete with DNA which allows cells to replicate, is staggeringly complex.

And because the planet was under such devastating assault from comets and meteors, the leap to life may not have taken place up here on Earth's surface. To take hold, life may have needed a safe haven, perhaps underground.

A team of scientists descends into one of the deepest mines on Earth to investigate whether microbial life can survive far below the Earth's surface. It's a unique scenario because there is nowhere else on planet Earth that allows you to have access to that sort of sample location at two, three, three and a half kilometers deep. Conditions here are extremely uncomfortable, for humans, that is.

The temperature of the rock is degrees Fahrenheit, and the air pressure is twice that at Earth's surface. Life down here survives entirely without sunlight.

If they exist, microbes need to find a way to live in pitch darkness, drawing chemical energy from water and minerals trapped in the surrounding rocks. JAMES HALL: Microorganisms have been shown potentially to be able to use these molecules to provide themselves with energy and support themselves completely independent of photosynthesis. And if we can prove that that is the case here, then that is very interesting because that adds credence to the idea that you could have life originating in the deep subsurface.

The major thing is there's such low nutrient availability, there's nothing really for these guys to continually use and process to survive, and yet somehow they do. And the question is, "How do they do it?

JAMES HALL: I'll get a very big sense of achievement if I can actually take something that's been isolated for million years, put it in the laboratory and actually find out what it is this organism needs to survive.

And they have found that these microbes are dining on a variety of strange gases. Now, for you and I that's not a very exciting diet, but what we think is that these organisms may be taking that kind of gas and actually using that as a food to survive. And the Earth's crust may not have been the only place where life could have hidden from the Heavy Bombardment.

Another safe haven may have been the ocean. Volcanic activity was intense on the early Earth. Chemicals from deep inside the planet spewed into the primitive seas. Even today, marine biologists have discovered volcanic vents on the ocean floor. Despite scalding temperatures, acid eruptions and total lack of sunlight, they found creatures of all types thriving down here. And at the bottom of the food chain are microbes that live on the noxious hydrogen sulfide gas erupting from the vents.

It has been found that organisms collected there nowadays are genetically akin to some of the earliest organisms that we think existed on the Earth.

With far fewer violent impacts on Earth, microbial life could now survive outside its protective hiding places. After it reaches Earth's surface, life would take advantage of another source of energy: the sun. Up here, microbes evolved a green pigment known as chlorophyll. This allowed them to trap sunlight and use it to drive a chemical reaction that converts carbon dioxide and water into food.

Called "photosynthesis," it was a clever invention that enabled some bacteria to grow and reproduce almost without limit. Once it started, photosynthesis was a runaway success, and today it's how all green plants make their living. As Earth cooled, this new generation of cells spread across the oceans. Immense colonies of green slime would take over the world, kicking off the greatest transformation in our planet's history.

With photosynthesis, the energy is coming from the sun, and life could spread, literally, over the entire planetary surface. These domed structures, called stromatolites, are built up layer by layer over thousands of years by tiny microbes. These microbes may be similar to life forms that dominated our planet billions of years earlier. And in the arid hills nearby, there may be evidence of these ancient creatures.

These rocks have remained unchanged for three and a half billion years. Here it's possible to walk on the surface of early Earth. Martin Van Kranendonk spends months at a time in this wilderness, studying the geology and producing maps.

In a secret location in these hills is what could be one of the greatest geological discoveries of all time. And at this outcrop we can see two different types of structures that these creatures formed. First are these black mats that have wrinkly textures all through it, and the second are these larger domes that form these broad structures.

The most likely way these things formed is by the growth of microbes. And not far away are fossilized ripple marks which suggest they might have grown in shallow water. And there is nothing else that we can think of which would make that except something that was growing on the bottom of the ocean. And that thin layer on top is made up of microscopic blue-green bacteria called "cyanobacteria. They secrete a sticky coating to shield them from ultraviolet radiation. As tiny pieces of dust and sediment settle on top of the sticky cells, the bacteria migrate closer to the surface to reach the light.

The layers of sediment build up by about half a millimeter a year. These structures contain living microbes, just as they have for thousands of years. And the structures that you see around me, compared to their size, are enormous.

It'd be like if humans made a skyscraper that was a hundred and five kilometers high by seventy kilometers across. These are massive structures for the size of the organisms that make them. It seems likely that these structures were formed by some type of microbe living on the early Earth, perhaps even by the ancestors of today's cyanobacteria.

And layers that were laid down year after year, and the fact that they're all different sizes on this one surface, shows that there was a colony of microorganisms growing on this one bedding plane. And that's really fascinating because it means that life evolved on this planet very early and very fast. Over time, stromatolites spread out across the planet. As a byproduct of photosynthesis, the ancient bacteria produced a waste gas: oxygen. The oxygen was absorbed into the oceans at first.

There, it combined with iron erupting from undersea volcanoes to form iron oxide particles that fell to the ocean floor. Over the next several hundred million years the planet literally rusted.

There may have been other forces at work, but eventually, all the iron was turned into oxide, building up layer after layer, one of the most valuable mineral deposits on Earth, iron ore. Located in Western Australia, this is one of the world's largest iron mines. So, it kind of starts to shut things down. Rubisco certainly is. So, by oxygenating the atmosphere via photosynthesis, you now have a huge amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, but you need a carbon dioxide to make the reaction work.

The result gets shipped out through a couple other parts of the cell to where the mess is taken apart and recycled, all of which consumes a lot of energy. So, if you could fix this inefficiency problem, the plant might make more soybeans, corn, whatever it is? Then they will have that energy to put towards something that we will consider useful, like making more food for us to eat. So, right now, we have this tested in a couple of model species.

Amanda and Paul take me to the greenhouse to see one example. In soybeans, a 25 percent reduction could result in plants that produce more than million more bushels a year. And likely, so will be the reach of any of its discoveries. But work like theirs is not without controversy. The laws governing genetically modified crops vary from country to country, especially when it comes to labeling their use in food, and there have been objections to some companies that patent their new crops and control who can plant them.

But the general scientific consensus is that they are no more dangerous than conventional crops, though they need to be carefully studied for potential health and environmental effects. The U. An overwhelming percentage of corn, soybeans and cotton grown in the United States is genetically modified. As a scientist, I feel those concerns have very little validity, although clearly people have become very concerned, particularly in Europe.

Of course, in this part of the world, genetically modified crops have been grown for over 20 years. This technology has spread throughout the Americas. And this opposition to G. And I fear that this could risk people starving when we could actually be giving them seed which would allow them to feed themselves into the future.

Back then, scientists believe, photosynthetic cyanobacteria began cranking out oxygen as a waste product. Atmospheric research planes venture up here but not much else.

The ozone comes from a process even higher up in the stratosphere. There, solar radiation busts up O2 molecules into individual oxygen atoms. They drift down to the ozone layer, where they convert O2 into O3, ozone. Think of, like, a sunscreen, you know, how we use sunscreen on our skin? On the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light sits here, but U. Scientists divide it roughly into three kinds, A, B and C. Kerry tells me how all this relates to ozone. The most dangerous kind, U.

But oxygen accumulating in the atmosphere and the rise of the ozone layer changed all that. The layer blocks all the U. The net result is a conversion of that harmful radiation into heat. Despite the ozone layer, we can still get hit by unhealthy amounts of U.

Without that global protection, the grand story of evolution that began from single-cell ocean-dwelling life and led to the wondrous complexity of multicellular animals occupying land, sea and sky would probably never have been told. Yeah, yeah. There are other elements in the human body, but these are the main six. And, of course, a good chunk of me, by mass, is good old H2O. To learn more about them, biologist Monica Hall-Porter, formerly at Lasell University, now at the University of Texas, offers to show me around a local…supermarket?

I ask you about the molecules of my body and you bring us to a grocery store. And if you take a look around the grocery store, there are many examples of those macromolecules here. Proteins are the molecules that actually do work in cells, so, not just composing muscle, but also the proteins that serve as the structural proteins in our hair and our fingernails. But in addition to their role in cell membranes and long-term energy storage, you know, body fat, they also provide protection for internal organs.

It contains genetic instructions for making proteins. Life on Earth exists in a spectacular variety of forms, but in the end, it all depends on the arrangement of a handful of different small molecules, the nucleotides in the nucleic acids D. So, when you said we were going to extract D. DAVID POGUE: As it turns out, using some easily available household items, like plastic bags, detergent, rubbing alcohol, cheesecloth and strawberries, along with a little bit of waiting time, you, too, can catch a glimpse of the code of life, D.

Pretty amazing!