Lifeboat Foundation

Exciting.

The search for the chemical origins of life represents a long-standing and continuously debated enigma. Despite its exceptional complexity, in the last decades the field has experienced a revival, also owing to the exponential growth of the computing power allowing for efficiently simulating the behavior of matter—including its quantum nature—under disparate conditions found, e.g., on the primordial Earth and on Earth-like planetary systems (i.e., exoplanets). In this minireview, we focus on some advanced computational methods capable of efficiently solving the Schrödinger equation at different levels of approximation (i.e., density functional theory)—such as ab initio molecular dynamics—and which are capable to realistically simulate the behavior of matter under the action of energy sources available in prebiotic contexts.

After lightning struck a tree in New Port Richey, Florida, a team of scientists from the University of South Florida (USF) discovered that this strike led to the formation of a new phosphorous material in a rock. This is the first time such a material has been found in solid form on Earth and could represent a member of a new mineral group.

“We have never seen this material occur naturally on Earth – minerals similar to it can be found in meteorites and space, but we’ve never seen this exact material anywhere,” said study lead author Matthew Pasek, a geoscientist at USF.

According to the researchers, high-energy events such as lightning can sometimes cause unique chemical reactions which, in this particular case, have led to the formation of a new material that seems to be transitional between space minerals and minerals found on Earth.

Electric vehicles feature lithium-ion battery packs today. They are heavy. But in the future lithium-air batteries that are more energy dense, lighter, and smaller could revolutionize EV design.

Lithium-air provides 4x greater energy density, and gets the oxygen needed in the chemical process from the surrounding air.

While a pandemic unleashed by a disease from the distant past sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, scientists warn that the risks, though low, are underappreciated. Chemical and radioactive waste that dates back to the Cold War, which has the potential to harm wildlife and disrupt ecosystems, may also be released during thaws.

Permafrost covers a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere, having underpinned the Arctic tundra and boreal forests of Alaska, Canada and Russia for millennia. It serves as a kind of time capsule, preserving — in addition to ancient viruses — the mummified remains of a number of extinct animals that scientist have been able to unearth and study in recent years, including two cave lion cubs and a woolly rhino.

Warmer temperatures in the Arctic are thawing the region’s permafrost — a frozen layer of soil beneath the ground — and potentially stirring viruses that, after lying dormant for tens of thousands of years, could endanger animal and human health.

Continue reading “Scientists have revived a ‘zombie’ virus that spent 48,500 years in permafrost” »

A group of molecular and chemical biologists at the University of California, San Diego, has found possible evidence of interdomain horizontal gene transfer leading to the development of the eye in vertebrates. In their study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Chinmay Kalluraya, Alexander Weitzel, Brian Tsu and Matthew Daugherty used the IQ-TREE software program to trace the evolutionary history of genes associated with vision.

Ever since scientists proved that humans, along with other animals, developed due to evolutionary processes, one problem has stood out—how could evolution possibly account for the development of something as complicated as the eyeball? Even Charles Darwin was said to be stumped by the question. In recent times, this seeming conundrum has been used by some groups as a means to discredit evolutionary theory altogether. In this new effort, the team in California sought to answer the question once and for all.

Their work began with the idea that vision in vertebrates may have got its start by using light-sensitive genes transferred from microbes. To find out if that might be the case, the team submitted likely human gene candidates to the IQ-TREE program to look for similar genetic sequences in other creatures, most specifically, microbes.

Nearly 200 years since its discovery, industry rarely uses the carbon–carbon bond-forming Kolbe reaction – but now US researchers have shown it can sustainably make valuable substances.

Phil Baran’s team at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla has done away with high voltages and platinum electrodes best established in the Kolbe reaction. In doing so, the researchers have made it much more versatile. ‘The most important feature is the ability to take waste or similarly priced products convert them into extremely high value materials,’ Baran tells Chemistry World.

Using artificial intelligence, an international team analyzed the chemical composition of extremely metal-poor stars, finding that the first stars in the Universe were likely born in groups rather than individually. This method will be applied to future observations to better understand the early Universe.

An international team has used artificial intelligence to analyze the chemical abundances of old stars and found indications that the very first stars in the Universe were born in groups rather than as isolated single stars. Now the team hopes to apply this method to new data from on-going and planned observation surveys to better understand the early days of the Universe.

After the Big Bang, the only elements in the Universe where hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Most of the other elements making up the world we see around us were produced by nuclear reactions in stars. Some elements are formed by nuclear fusion at the core of a star, and others form in the explosive supernova death of a star. Supernovae also play an important role in scattering the elements created by stars, so that they can be incorporated into the next generation of stars, planets, and possibly even living creatures.

As quantum advantage has been demonstrated on different quantum computing platforms using Gaussian boson sampling,^1–3 quantum computing is moving to the next stage, namely demonstrating quantum advantage in solving practical problems. Two typical problems of this kind are computational-aided material design and drug discovery, in which quantum chemistry plays a critical role in answering questions such as ∼Which one is the best?∼. Many recent efforts have been devoted to the development of advanced quantum algorithms for solving quantum chemistry problems on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices,^2,4–14 while implementing these algorithms for complex problems is limited by available qubit counts, coherence time and gate fidelity. Specifically, without error correction, quantum simulations of quantum chemistry are viable only if low-depth quantum algorithms are implemented to suppress the total error rate. Recent advances in error mitigation techniques enable us to model many-electron problems with a dozen qubits and tens of circuit depths on NISQ devices,⁹ while such circuit sizes and depths are still a long way from practical applications.

The difference between the available and actually required quantum resources in practical quantum simulations has renewed the interest in divide and conquer (DC) based methods.^15–19 Realistic material and (bio)chemistry systems often involve complex environments, such as surfaces and interfaces. To model these systems, the Schrödinger equations are much too complicated to be solvable. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics be developed.²⁰ One popular scheme is to divide the complex problem under consideration into as many parts as possible until these become simple enough for an adequate solution, namely the philosophy of DC.²¹ The DC method is particularly suitable for NISQ devices since the sub-problem for each part can in principle be solved with fewer computational resources.^{15–18,22–25} One successful application of DC is to estimate the ground-state potential energy surface of a ring containing 10 hydrogen atoms using the density matrix embedding theory (DMET) on a trapped-ion quantum computer, in which a 20-qubit problem is decomposed into ten 2-qubit problems.¹⁸

DC often treats all subsystems at the same computational level and estimates physical observables by summing up the corresponding quantities of subsystems, while in practical simulations of complex systems, the particle–particle interactions may exhibit completely different characteristics in and between subsystems. Long-range Coulomb interactions can be well approximated as quasiclassical electrostatic interactions since empirical methods, such as empirical force filed (EFF) approaches,²⁶ are promising to describe these interactions. As the distance between particles decreases, the repulsive exchange interactions from electrons having the same spin become important so that quantum mean-field approaches, such as Hartree–Fock (HF), are necessary to characterize these electronic interactions.

The remarkable physicochemical properties of the natural nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, define modern biology at the molecular level and are widely believed to have been central to life’s origins. However, their ability to form repositories of information as well as functional structures such as ligands (aptamers) and catalysts (ribozymes/DNAzymes) is not unique. A range of nonnatural alternatives, collectively termed xeno nucleic acids (XNAs), are also capable of supporting genetic information storage and propagation as well as evolution. This gives rise to a new field of “synthetic genetics,” which seeks to expand the nucleic acid chemical toolbox for applications in both biotechnology and molecular medicine. In this review, we outline XNA polymerase and reverse transcriptase engineering as a key enabling technology and summarize the application of “synthetic genetics” to the development of aptamers, enzymes, and nanostructures.

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