Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Through the Wormhole

Episode 5 - How did we get here

Just concluded watching the fifth episode of 'Through the Wormhole' on
Bless the heart of the wise being who uploaded it! :)

I love the way documentaries give one so much food for thought and make scientists look like rock stars! About this particular one...
The origin of life on Earth is a much speculated and debated scientific and theosophic question. So many scenarios were played out on this episode. My take aways from it were :

  • Source 1 of the 'seed' - An experiment conducted by scientists Miller and Ueri in the 50's attempted to replicate the environment during the Hadean period of the Earth involved two flasks, one with evaporating water linked to another with suspended electrodes in it. An electric discharge kept on between the electrodes causes the boiling water to get contaminated with HCn. Also, they found amino acids in the same solutions which are the building blocks of proteins and by extension, life. But even after all these years, proteins were never found in any of the samples of liquid preserved; they remained as unaggregated amino acids itself. 
  • Source 2 of the 'seed' - Meteors bringing amino acids to Earth - It has been shown by experiment that amino acids present within the meteor would have survived the entry through the Earth's atmosphere. This could then have been the seed of life on Earth. This is another possibility for amino acids to have entered the fray of the beginnings of life on Earth ( in contrast to the above explanation).
  • Source 3 of the 'seed' - Mars could have harboured life before Earth - A meteorite that scientists have discovered the remains of in Antarctica is thought to have come from Mars. This meteorite (ALH84001) indicates signs of magnetization. Mars though is without an atmosphere today. This could indicate that it had an atmosphere and a magnetic field sometime in the past. It could have sustained life at that period. It is also logical because Mars, being half the size of Earth would have cooled faster and settled into a stable state much before Earth and hence could have had all the conditions that Earth now has inorder for it to have been inhabitable by life. It is also possible that after some time, around 4 billion years ago, when Mars started cooling even further, slowly losing its magnetic field and atmosphere, the life on Mars could have hitchhiked on a stray meteor broken out of itslef headed for Earth. This could then have been the third source of amino acids into the primordial soup that was present on Earth. We could all be martians!
  • Life could have evolved in two different forms on the same planet (Earth) - Life in extreme conditions existing in a so-called shadow ecosystem have been discovered to be compatible with arsenic! In lake Mono in California, the levels of arsenic are around 40,000 times the maximum allowable levels. These organisms were collected and subjected to even higher concentrations of arsenic; they survived nonetheless. The reason arsenic is so toxic to human beings is that it molecule is similar to phosphorous and phosphorous is an integral component of the dna molecule. If As replaces the P molecule in dna, it could kill life. So these organisms are akin to alien life form (alien in the sense that they are different to life as we know it and not that they are from outer space). If life could evolve twice over in different ways on the same planet (Earth), then it is nearly impossible to say that life hasn't evolved anywhere else in the universe!
  • Dna is a double helix while rna is a single helix. Rna's building blocks consist of sugar and and base molecules joined together. While it has been possible to create them individually, they have never been able to join them together. At the university of manchester, they tried to create an rna molecule ( something attempted by many many scientists before), but with a twist. This time, they simulated the conditions of Hadean Earth viz. heating, cooling, drying and wetting during the process and created two of the four fundamental building blocks!
The 'seed' for life is stated to be amino acids. In the episode, the sources of this seed are discussed. 'Where could the amino acids have come from?' is addressed. 
This model of the start of life is called abiogenesis i.e. creation of biological life from inanimate chemicals under naturally occurring conditions.
My questions :
  • How could it be proved that the meteorite was from Mars.
  • In the Miller-Ueri experiment all that they used was evaporating water and electricity? Those weren't the only conditions in Hadean Earth I guess.
  • Given the Miller-Ueri experiment, we know that only amino acids are not sufficient to create life. What are the other ingredients required for the same??
Links :

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

YSpeak Project 5 - Why does music affect us in the way it does

<sing this song>Rudolph the reindeer

The careless abandon and romantic nothings echoing from your grandparent’s gramophone, the muffled sounds of your parent’s favorite tunes on the radio, the songs you crooned along with as a sentimental teenager, the golden oldies you sway to on a lazy Saturday morning and the psychedelic trances you jive to at a late night party. Amazingly, we can all relate to those situations for Music it seems, is omnipresent, at every step of  the journey that we call ‘life’.

Music is often touted as the universal language, the underlying stream that runs through all of humanity from time immemorial which binds us together in uncanny harmony. A recently conducted experiment in the Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm, provided quantitative evidence of the universality of music. A ragtag bunch of volunteers ranging from musical virtuosos to seven year old children, were asked to manipulate songs to enhance the poignancy of specific emotions, like happiness, sadness, anger etc. All of them, landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out the intended emotion. This indicates that music contains some hidden information that evokes similar response irrespective of age, personality, taste or training.

But, what is the use of Music? Why would anyone want to learn about minor modes, tonic triads or dominant ninths? Learning geometry may be useful for saaaay, building pyramids. Playing with Lego blocks can foster a realization of space. But how does one understand time? That is where music comes in. Paradoxically enough, it also teaches us the rigors of mathematics at the same time as encouraging creativity. Other functional uses of music encompass teaching us to get along with others and suppressing anxiety and stress. Some say that music, by virtue of its individualistic appeal and interminable conundrums is a world shaper; one that can make or break civilizations.

ASK THE AUDIENCE A QUESTION….Name one of your favorite songs..Why do you like it?
This brings us to an interesting question. Why do we like certain tunes? Is it because of structural features that they might contain? Or is it because they resemble other tunes that we like? In language, unlike music, there are specific syntaxes that define the permissibility and sensibility of one’s utterance. Music, does not have a fixed set of essential features or a rigid structure.
Let us turn our attention to the second possibility of new favorites resembling our old pet loves. This approach brings up more questions than answers! What do we define as musical resemblance? Well, it is related to how an individual represents melodies in his/her mind. Unfortunately though, nothing spells UNIQUE as much as music does and in each of our minds, different parts of our brain store distinct rhythms, modes and harmonies in unique ways. Beyond that, individuals differ even more. Some cringe at the symmetry that others barely discern, others are elated by a subtle whale song in the background that is imperceptible to most. How do we harmonize the each fading memory of a tune with the next one to be heard? If we like new tunes because they resemble old ones, how then, does our initial liking for music begin? Do we associate some tunes with pleasant experiences? Are they somehow related to our mother’s voice or heartbeat? Are there themes that we find innately likeable? These and many more could hold truth simultaneously, for the only thing that we know with any certainty about our mind is that it is interminably complex.

Music affects us in ways that are more substantial, direct and poignant than just about every stimuli. Plato allegedly said, “Let me handle the music for one generation and I will control Rome”. We may have conquered the moon, yet we are quite far from understanding music and the mind! Rest assured though, that we don’t need to understand the Beatles to love their Music!

The inchoate list of incipient curiosity (in no particular order)

An ever growing list of random things that I would want to learn/do/see

  1. Learn origami
  2. Learn Sanskrit ( more than my rudimentary level)
  3. Learn a martial art
  4. Learn to play the guitar
  5. Watch all the episodes of 'Through the wormhole' (for some reason, I always catch the first 10 minutes or the last 15!)
  6. Visit the valley of Kings
  7. Relativity and beyond
  8. Quantum computing/mechanics
  9. Unification of relativity and qm, the purpose of lhc
  10. Explore the history of the world
  11. Tricks that the brain play on our consciousness...unexplained phenomenon attributed to our insufficient understanding of the brain....
  12. Learn Haskell
  13. Touch and play with snow 
  14. Learn to play chess decently well
  15. Create a Daneel Olivaw 
  16. Be a published author of short stories
  17. Learn the detailed history behind each of the references in Billy Joel's 'We didn't start the fire'