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Credit: ESO/A. Roquette
GIANTS IN HISTORY
THE CHEMIST WHO PROBED THE ORIGINS OF LIFE Cyril Andrew Ponnamperuma (16 October 1923 – 20 December 1994) was a Sri Lankan chemist who was interested in the origins of life on Earth. His research in chemical evolution showed how inanimate molecules may have given rise to the building blocks of life, a process known as abiogenesis. About 4 billion years ago, chemicals from Earth’s atmosphere came in contact with energy in warm oceans. In this 'primordial soup', atoms and molecules came together to form the precursors of life, which subsequently evolved into living things. While at Ames Laboratory, Ponnamperuma synthesized the building blocks of RNA and DNA as well as the universal energy currency ATP, further showing that organic matter may have originated from chemical compounds. Later in his career, Ponnamperuma embraced the idea that hydrothermal deep-sea vents were the cradles of life, where early organisms exploited chemical gradients to drive synthesis of ATP. Ponnamperuma was also actively involved in astrobiology research and was the principal investigator for analysis of lunar soil brought to Earth by Project Apollo.
FIRST DETECTION OF GAMMA-RAY BURST AFTERGLOW IN VERY-HIGH-ENERGY GAMMA LIGHT
An international team of researchers have observed a gamma-ray burst, an extremely energetic flash following a cosmological cataclysm, emitting very-high-energy gammarays long after the initial explosion. Credit: Kagoshima University
PLANETS AROUND A BLACK HOLE? CALCULATIONS SHOW POSSIBILITY OF BIZARRE WORLDS
Theoreticians in two different fields defied the common knowledge that planets orbit stars like the Sun. They proposed the possibility of thousands of planets around a supermassive black hole. Credit: UNIST
ASIA RE SEA RC H N EWS
ORIGINS OF ULTRA-HIGH-ENERGY COSMIC RAY HOTSPOT
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Credit: NASA
Among many particles arriving from outer space, there are ones with the extremely high energy that travel at nearly the speed of light. A new study, based on measurements from the Telescope Array experiment (pictured), suggests that those particles come from the filaments of galaxies connected to the Virgo Cluster.
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