from the in-situ-production-of-TNT-on-Mars dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A research team including research scientist Atsuko Kobayashi from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and research scientist Mizuho Koike from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, have found nitrogen-bearing organic material in carbonate minerals in a Martian meteorite. This organic material has most likely been preserved for 4 billion years since Mars' Noachian age. Because carbonate minerals typically precipitate from the groundwater, this finding suggests a wet and organic-rich early Mars, which could have been habitable and favorable for life to start.
[...] Martian meteorites are pieces of Mars' surface that were themselves blasted into space by meteor impacts, and which ultimately landed on Earth. They provide important insights into Martian history. One meteorite in particular, named Allan Hills (ALH) 84001, named for the region in Antarctica it was found in 1984, is especially important. It contains orange-coloured carbonate minerals, which precipitated from salty liquid water on Mars' near-surface 4 billion years ago. As these minerals record Mars' early aqueous environment, many studies have tried to understand their unique chemistry and whether they might provide evidence for ancient life on Mars. However, previous analyses suffered from contamination with terrestrial material from Antarctic snow and ice, making it difficult to say how much of the organic material in the meteorite were truly Martian. In addition to carbon, nitrogen (N) is an essential element for terrestrial life and a useful tracer for planetary system evolution. However, due to previous technical limitations, nitrogen had not yet been measured in ALH84001.
This new research conducted by the joint ELSI-JAXA team used state-of-the-art analytical techniques to study the nitrogen content of the ALH84001 carbonates, and the team is now confident they have found the first solid evidence for 4-billion-year-old Martian organics containing nitrogen.
-- submitted from IRC
More information: Mizuho Koike et al, In-situ preservation of nitrogen-bearing organics in Noachian Martian carbonates, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15931-4
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @08:43PM (4 children)
You know what contains nitrogen? Penguin crap.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @08:59PM (1 child)
You know what else is penguin crap? systemd
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 30 2020, @09:25PM
Bzzzzt. systemd will contain penguin crap. This is because systemd will grow to contain everything in the observable universe. Including the boot loader (systemd-boot) [freedesktop.org] and the kernel (systemd-kernel). You know how parking enforcement can put a boot on your car for unpaid parking tickets? Now you can do the same thing to your computer with systemd-boot!!
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday May 01 2020, @08:24AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @07:04PM
In the future, Linus will be forced to flee into a blackhole, sending him back in time as Tux. He will then construct Stonehenge and the Pyramids to calculate where to send the source code for Linux 10.0 and the GPLv4, now weaponized with libre AI Stallman-Clones to finally save humanity from proprietary software. Tarballs weren't available so he used penguinshit.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @09:28PM (3 children)
Given the vastness of space and how even the few planets in our solar system are like a dozen golf balls across a massive golfing estate - how a tiny rock can get thrown from Mars to Earth, hit Earth, be found, be identified as Martian, then dated...
Boggles my mind. Now we may know more about Mars, thanks to Curiousity. But they've been tagging meteorites as Martian for longer than that. Finds meteorite is desert, turns over, finds label: "Proudly made on Mars, best before 25 August 45,678,432 BC". How else can you tell?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:14PM (2 children)
I'm going to guess that rock blasted off Mars has a slightly higher chance of hitting Earth, due to the Sun's gravity being so dominant in our solar system. Once a rock starts falling towards the sun, it has a (small) chance of being caught by our gravity well.
The thing that caught my eye is that the rock may have harboured life 4 billion years ago, during a period when the Earth had only just developed a solid crust. The Late heavy bombardment was still happening too which doesn't seem conducive to life.
Life might well be very common if we look in the right places. Sending robots to look doesn't work very well though. We should send people.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 01 2020, @05:08AM (1 child)
But, what's the night life like on Mars? You won't get very many people going to Mars until there are some bars, pubs, and lounges for a guy to relax in. After a hard day's work in the Martian desert, people need to get rehydrated.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 01 2020, @05:19AM
Send them a chemputer [chemistryworld.com] and basic brewing/distilling equipment. They'll figure out a night life.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Thursday April 30 2020, @09:38PM
It seems as we progress through history, one of the findings we keep making is that we are not all that special.
At first we were the only village that mattered. Then we realized there were many villages. Then we realized we weren't the only villages, we realized we all lived on the earth. Then we looked back in time and realized we weren't the only creatures that ever existed on planet earth, in fact dinosaurs lasted longer than us humans have up to this point. We realized the earth wasn't the center of everything. We learned we are in one of many galaxies.
It seems to me that one thing we are good at is always thinking we've found the last largest halo until we look farther and things are bigger than we could have ever imagined. Today it seems fairly clear we are a single dot, less than a pixel in our little universe. Could it be that we are the special, single dot that is actually seeding the rest of existence? Probably unlikely.
Until we know for sure, I will continue to enjoy imagining that everything interacts at some level with each other, and that over time planets shed and share their local material.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @01:24AM
They took a biopsy from Ruth Bader Ginsberg's ass, and they blame it on Mars?