A To Z Challenge: Xenobiology And XNA

Xenobiology, also known as astrobiology and exobiology, is the study of alien life, including how life may have originated on Earth. It encompasses physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, and biology. Technically, xenobiology has nothing to study other than Earth itself--planets are continually being discovered, but they're very far away. However, research into the history of development of life on this planet has begun to yield possibilities for how it may have formed on others.

A new development in the field of xenobiology is XNA. DNA is the fundamental building block of life on Earth, so messing with it is obviously an idea with some risks involved. XNA, a synthetic material that stands for xeno nucleic acids, could be an interesting solution toward designing new life and preventing damage to existing DNA. It can store information the same way DNA can, and has the potential for being the basis of new life--but if two organisms, one with DNA and the other XNA, interacted, they could come into contact without affecting the other's genetic material, acting as a so-called "genetic firewall".

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Sources:
http://www.xenology.info/Papers/Xenobiology.htm
http://www.redorbit.com/education/reference_library/space_1/space_sciences/2574862/xenobiology_exobiology/
http://education-portal.com/articles/Xenobiology_Education_Requirements_and_Career_Information.html
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/exobiology/about/
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/about-astrobiology/
http://www.universetoday.com/46851/exobiology/
http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiology/
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/NM/miller.php
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9941-instant-expert-astrobiology.html
http://scienceblogs.com/oscillator/2010/04/07/xenobiology/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909387/
http://io9.com/5903221/meet-xna-the-first-synthetic-dna-that-evolves-like-the-real-thing

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Would you be comfortable with synthetic organisms existing alongside natural ones? Do you think humanity will ever come into contact with alien life?


-----The Golden Eagle

An Update: Poll Results, Writing, And Random Stuff

I haven't done one of these kinds of updates in a while. Here we go:

As for the poll "Do you think people will ever live someplace other than Earth?" I had up for July, here are the results, out of a total of 62 votes:

Yes--and I think it's important that we do (17 votes, 27%)
It's possible (28 votes, 45%)
No, not really (12 votes, 19%)
No--and I don't think we should (4 votes, 6%)
I don't know (1 vote, 1%)

Thank you for voting, to the readers who did--62 is the most votes a poll on my blog has ever gotten.

I hadn't expected so many of you to think that moving off of Earth was important. Personally, I agree with the majority--I do think it's possible (even likely) that humans will be living on other planets or in spacecraft or in orbit; and in the very, very long-term (should an asteroid hit Earth or there's some kind of other disaster which is not impossible), yes, moving off the planet might be a good idea. Someday. But regardless, should technology reach that point where we can move elsewhere, I hope to be around when we're traveling to new frontiers.

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I started a new novel on Monday.

It's going well so far, and I've got the plot for the story set out from beginning to end. I'm excited about the project, since it's in first person, present tense, something I haven't tried before. And in case you're wondering, it's SF, Young Adult, and the main character is a girl. The antagonist is a tyrant who took over the city in a coup de tat over twenty years ago and now aims to control the planet.

Yes, he's just a lovely fellow.

I want to finish this novel by November, so I can start something brand new for NaNoWriMo. (Hey, it's only three months away! Not too early to start planning for it . . . right? I have even come up with a potential idea for that story.)

(SOURCE)

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The grass is probably thanking the sky right now. It's been hot and dry and hot and sunny and also warm for the past week(s), and it's finally cloudy and rainy, so the water doesn't just run off without being absorbed.

(SOURCE)

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Well, at least the stock market went down only 500 points. It wasn't the enormous percentage drop that happened in 2008 . . . though it came pretty close. Thank you, Washington D. C., for stalling until the very date USA was set to default on its 14+ trillion dollar debt. It certainly helped the stability of things. Not.

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I have decided I really like Blogger's new format. It's faster and sleeker than the old one, and while I sort of wish there were scroll bars in the Post Editor, I do like that the edges shift as a part of your window does. The old one didn't go anywhere. I keep forgetting to add tags, though, since they're over to the right and not below anymore.

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So: what do you think of the idea of living on another planet, or in space? How's your writing going--have you got any new projects in the works? Is the economy getting better, or do you think we're going into a double-dip recession? What do you think of Blogger, now that it's been around for a while?


Finally, have you done anything exciting lately? :)


Hope you're all having a great weekend, bloggers!


-----The Golden Eagle

A-Z Blogging Challenge: W Stands For: Water

Water is one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms: H20.

(SOURCE)

Because of the way the hydrogen atoms are attached, water molecules have a slight positive charge and a slight negative charge, which attracts the other water molecules around them. The polar nature of water means it has a high surface tension--and that tension decreases with temperature. This is why hot water cleans better, since there's less surface tension and the water can get into all the smaller pores and whatnot. Soaps and detergents also lower surface tension.

(SOURCE)

Water has three states of matter. There's water as a solid (ice), water as a liquid (which is what we usually know it as), and water as gas (steam). Water going from solid to liquid is melting, liquid to gas is evaporating, gas to liquid is condensation, gas to solid is frost formation, and solid to gas is sublimation.

(SOURCE)

Water forms from the nuclear fusion at the core of stars. When the hydrogen that's fused into helium is used up and the helium begins to fuse, oxygen is produced. Then iron is formed, and there are no stable reactions possible to fuse the iron, so the star explodes. The supernova remnants get thrown out through space and the elements (including oxygen) are free in the interstellar medium. And since hydrogen is three times more abundant than helium, oxygen and hydrogen eventually bind together.

***Due to problems with bandwidth (the site inserted an image in here that said "STOP THIEF"--or, more accurately, it was "STOP THEIF") I removed this image. Check link below to see the image.***

(SOURCE)

Because water is (at least here on Earth, and it's likely to be the same elsewhere) vital for life, there's a hunt on to find it in other places throughout the universe. Some places it has been found include the Moon (more famously in the form of NASA's LCROSS spacecraft which purposefully crashed into the surface), comets, and Mars. There are signs of water on Europa and Ganymede (Jupiter's moons), and the spectrum (the wavelength of light emitted by atoms) of water has been found in interstellar clouds.

(SOURCE)

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Sources:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/surten.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2O
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water
http://www.uni.edu/~iowawet/H2OProperties.html
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/physicsuniverse.html

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Do you think we'll find out for sure that there are large quantities of water on other planets? Do you think we'll ever be using water from other planets or moons to help us travel through space?


-----The Golden Eagle

NaNoWriMo Update And Other

*whew* Week 1 has passed! Now, just 3 more weeks (and then some) to go . . . but I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to write 50,000 words by the end of the month, seeing as I already have 21,536 words under my belt. That's the most I've ever written in a week! A new record!

This is me:

Yah. So, I'm doing pretty good.

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You know that poll on the sidebar? "Is Pluto A Planet"? It closed a while ago; I set it up because I was curious to see what people think after having read The Pluto Files. (Funny, informative, and interesting book--written by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, probably one of my favorite scientists.)

Well, the results are in, and 38% of you say it is a planet, 22% say it isn't, 8% think it's a Kuiper Belt Object, 22% of you say it's a dwarf planet, and 8% of you say it's a planet and a KBO.

Where do I fall? I think it should be a KBO. It's a small ball of ice, smaller than other objects that aren't planets.

If you didn't get a chance to vote, tell me: what do you think?


-----The Golden Eagle