Mysterious Quasicrystals May Have Fallen From Space, Study Says - International Business Times

A new study indicates that quasicrystals, a type of mineral once thought to be "impossible" in nature, is of extraterrestrial origin and probably around 4.5 billion years old.

Found in Russia's Koryak mountains,the quasicrystals may have fallen to Earth from space, according to a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The crystals had only been created in laboratories before geologists found them entertwined with a silica mineral that forms only at high pressures, and might have been created by a collision with chondrite body.

Scientists say that unlike conventional crystals, quasicrystals contain mathematically regular but unique units that never appear twice, unlike regular crystals which are made up of regular, repeating units.

Quasicrystals first became known to science in early 1980s when researcher Daniel Shechtman created them in his laboratory. Since then scientists replicated Schechtman's findings in labs.

Two years ago, a fragment of rock from Russia's Koryak mountains which because the first example of a naturally-occuring quasicrystal.

A team of researchers carried out an analysis of the sample based on the theory that the quasicrystal is part of a meteorite that fell to Earth.

According to a New Scientist report, the researchers say "the rock has experienced the extreme pressures and temperatures typical of the high-speed collisions that produce meteoroids in the asteroid belt."

In addition, the relative abundances of different oxygen isotopes in the rock matched those of other meteorites rather than the isotope levels of rocks from Earth, the report said.

The scientists added that the pattern of oxygen isotopes are typical of ancient meteorites called carnonaceous chondrites, which were formed at the birth of the Solar System, making the quasicrystal around 4.5 billion years old.

The findnigs of theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt's study, who spent weeks tracing the origins of the world's only known natural example of a quasicrystal, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mountain View SETI Instutute Loses Funding - Mothball Allen Telescope Array

Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into "hibernation," safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.

The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite.

They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized -- and some will be in the "habitable zone," where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it.

"There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tarter, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."

SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project's suspension to "the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock. "...

This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It's no good to have it sit idle.

"We have the radio antennae up, but we can't run them without operating funds," he added. "Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company."

The SETI Institute's mission is to explore the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. This is a profound search, it believes, because it explains our place among the stars.

The program, located on U.S. Forest Service land near Mount Lassen, uses telescopes to listen for anything out of the ordinary -- a numerical sequence of "beeps," say, or crackly dialogue from an alien version of a disembodied "Charlie" talking to his "Angels." The entire program was set up to prove what once seemed unthinkable: In the universe, we are not alone.

Lack of funding
But funding for SETI has long been a headache for E.T.-seekers. NASA bankrolled some early projects, but in 1994, Sen. Richard Bryan of Nevada convinced Congress that it wasn't worth the cost, calling it the "Great Martian Chase" and complaining that not a single flying saucer had applied for FAA approval.

However, successful private funding came from donors such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, allowing SETI to raise $50 million to build the 42 dishes.

Plans called for construction of 350 individual radio antennas, all working
in concert. But what's lacking now is funding to support the day-to-day costs of running the dishes.

This is the responsibility of UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory, but one of the university's major funders, the National Science Foundation, supplied only one-tenth its previous support. Meanwhile, the state of California has also cut funding.

About $5 million is needed over the next two years, according to Tarter. She hopes the U.S. Air Force will help, because the array can be used to track satellite-threatening debris in space. But budgets are tight there as well.

Astronomers mourn
The Allen array is not the only radio telescope facility that can be used for SETI searches. But it is the best; elsewhere, scientists have to borrow time on other telescopes.

Meanwhile, other SETI projects will continue, such as the "setiQuest Explorer" (www.setiquest.org), an application that allows citizen scientist volunteers to look for patterns from existing data that might have been missed by existing algorithms. Through a new partnership with "Galaxy Zoo" (www.galaxyzoo.org), this project runs in real time, so discoveries can be followed up on immediately.

Bay Area astronomers mourned the hiatus of the SETI program and expressed concern about the future.

Rob Hawley of the Peninsula Astronomical Society called it "unfortunate. The Allen scope was a wonderful experiment. "... Hubble gets all the press, but there are lots of limitations."

Amateur astronomer Sarah Wiehe of Palo Alto said, "just knowing SETI is there was significant for us. This is a setback."

"If we miss a distant signal," she added, "it would be a terrible loss."

what it means
SETI's mission to explore the prevalence of life in the universe, including about 1,235 possible planets recently discovered, is compromised, according to scientists.

what's next
The program needs about $5 million over the next two years to support the telescope facility.

online extra
To learn more about SETI and its programs, go to www.seti.org 


You can also check out the Guardian article here

NASA Search for ET: Conference announcement

"NASA will hold a news conference at 2 pm EST (1900 GMT) on Thursday, December 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life," it said on its website.
 
Space enthusiasts and believers in alien life took to the blogosphere in a flurry of speculation over the potential meaning of the announcement, though NASA declined to elaborate further.
 
Those scheduled to speak included Mary Voytek, who heads NASA's astrobiology program; Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology research fellow from the US Geological Survey; and Pamela Conrad, an astrobiologistat NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
 
Astrobiology relates to the study of life in the universe, including its origin and evolution, where it is located and how it might survive in the future

Caution Mars samples: Bio-Hazard?

If NASA aims to bring Mars samples back to Earth, it should prepare for the possibility that the samples could include organisms that might endanger humans and other terrestrial life, a new report by the US National Research Council says. To prevent potential contamination by any Martian life, the report argues that early in the mission, NASA should begin building a secure facility on Earth to house the samples.

Within the next two decades, NASA hopes to launch a mission to Mars that could return the first pristine samples of Martian atmosphere, rocks and soil. These samples could be used to perform tests that may be impossible with lightweight robotic explorers, such as definitively measuring rock ages and, potentially, finding the first evidence of Martian life.

But the hazards such life might pose to terrestrial life are unknown. If self-replicating organisms are brought back to Earth, there could be a slim but non-zero chance that they could infect Earth organisms or compete with them in a way that could affect Earth's ecosystems.

"Given that this is a very high-stakes game where we're talking about a potentially global problem, we have to be inherently conservative," says Jack Farmer of Arizona State University in Tempe, who chaired the committee of 10 experts behind the report, which was commissioned by NASA.

Darwinian Nodes of Action

Charles Darwin
The principles of life on Earth may also be applied to life on other planets, with some exceptions. I am including here an extract from Marc D Hauser's book on Moral Minds. He is influenced in turn by the work of Eduard Tinkelpaugh, the 1920's psychologist, famous for his work with examining the intelligence levels of primates and monkeys.

'We do not know what it is like to have a primate experience of expectation, satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Tinkelpaugh proposed that the primate brain has evolved to respond to actions and events and set up expectations about, the causes and consequences to detect violations, using mimicry, learned behaviour and experiences.

I have listed the 5 principles of living as a primate, emanating from the studies of Tinkelpaugh, Darwin and others. These studies involved intelligent animals, primarily primates but occasionally dolphins and birds (Ravens and Jays).

Principle 1 - If an object moves on its own, it is an animal or part of an animal

Principle 2 - If an object moves in a particular direction towards another object or location, the targeted direction picks out or implies the object's goal

Principle 3 - If an object moves 'flexibly', changing direction in response to environmental objects or events, then it is rational

Principle 4 - If one object's action is followed closely by a second object's action, the second object's action is perceived as a socially intelligent response

Principle 5 - If an object is self-propelled, goal-directed and flexibly responsive to environmental constraints and events, then the object has the potential to cause harm or comfort to other similar objects.

Now you have some insight into the simple rules of thought and behaviour a primate is subject to. Can we now apply these principles more wildly and include them in the search for socially intelligent extra-terrestrial life?