science briefing :
Monday, 20 August 2007
Alan Cane
How all life could be a feat of clay
The latest theories on the origin of life on this planet suggest an unearthly route by which matter became alive almost 4.0bn years ago.
The first, from a team led by V.N. Tsytovich at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow, suggests that simple inorganic materials might have formed a template or model for the complex organic molecules out of which all life on Earth is made.
The team discovered that in extreme conditions such as might be found at the point of a lightning strike, some inorganic materials organise themselves into microscopic shapes which can divide and evolve into more complex structures, properties usually attributed only to living things.
Prof Tsytovich says these conditions are common in outer space, giving credence to the theory popularised by Chandra Wickramasinghe and the late Fred Hoyle that life originated inside comets.
Now Prof Wickramasinghe and his group at Cardiff University are using the fact that comets are made of clay and complex organic particles to suggest the clay may have catalysed life.
They calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion to one.
Reading fortunes in annual reports
A company's annual report is more often a worthy docu ment than a good read, but University of Minnesota researchers believe it can hold clues to the future.
Rajesh Chandy of the university's management school says that "by simply counting the number of future-oriented sentences in annual reports, we can predict future innovation by the firm".
Prof Chandy examined letters sent to shareholders by the online banking industry over eight years.
He concluded he could predict the level of innovation by a company up to five years later. "Because the CEO sets the tone and culture, not thinking forward and outside the firm has major negative consequences for innovation," he says.
Turning on to evolution
Men and monkeys share essentially the same genes, but turn them on and off in different ways, according to scientists at Duke University in North Carolina.
Genes typically comprise coding regions -- which carry the information necessary to make proteins -- and adjacent regulatory regions. The latter are receptors for substances that "turn on" the genes to initiate protein production.
The group looked at the regulatory regions adjacent to more than 6,000 genes on the DNA of chimps, humans and the rhesus macaque, an Old World monkey.
They were able to show big differences in the regions regulating the coding areas for brain development and nutrition.
Evolution, it now seems clear, has fine-tuned the regulatory mechanism so the same genes can give rise to a human brain and a monkey's brain, a human digestive system and a monkey's digestive system. (FT Syndication Service)
How all life could be a feat of clay
The latest theories on the origin of life on this planet suggest an unearthly route by which matter became alive almost 4.0bn years ago.
The first, from a team led by V.N. Tsytovich at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow, suggests that simple inorganic materials might have formed a template or model for the complex organic molecules out of which all life on Earth is made.
The team discovered that in extreme conditions such as might be found at the point of a lightning strike, some inorganic materials organise themselves into microscopic shapes which can divide and evolve into more complex structures, properties usually attributed only to living things.
Prof Tsytovich says these conditions are common in outer space, giving credence to the theory popularised by Chandra Wickramasinghe and the late Fred Hoyle that life originated inside comets.
Now Prof Wickramasinghe and his group at Cardiff University are using the fact that comets are made of clay and complex organic particles to suggest the clay may have catalysed life.
They calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion to one.
Reading fortunes in annual reports
A company's annual report is more often a worthy docu ment than a good read, but University of Minnesota researchers believe it can hold clues to the future.
Rajesh Chandy of the university's management school says that "by simply counting the number of future-oriented sentences in annual reports, we can predict future innovation by the firm".
Prof Chandy examined letters sent to shareholders by the online banking industry over eight years.
He concluded he could predict the level of innovation by a company up to five years later. "Because the CEO sets the tone and culture, not thinking forward and outside the firm has major negative consequences for innovation," he says.
Turning on to evolution
Men and monkeys share essentially the same genes, but turn them on and off in different ways, according to scientists at Duke University in North Carolina.
Genes typically comprise coding regions -- which carry the information necessary to make proteins -- and adjacent regulatory regions. The latter are receptors for substances that "turn on" the genes to initiate protein production.
The group looked at the regulatory regions adjacent to more than 6,000 genes on the DNA of chimps, humans and the rhesus macaque, an Old World monkey.
They were able to show big differences in the regions regulating the coding areas for brain development and nutrition.
Evolution, it now seems clear, has fine-tuned the regulatory mechanism so the same genes can give rise to a human brain and a monkey's brain, a human digestive system and a monkey's digestive system. (FT Syndication Service)