Sunday, October 17, 2010

Yes Gliese 581g actually is a milestone


Here's a link to an article on the Nature website which I take as confirmation that the discovery of Gliese 581g really is a significant milestone in the search for extra terrestrial life. Until I see it’s being taken seriously by Nature I'm never quite sure!  See my earlier post on this.

A paper detailing the find by Steve Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, is to be published in the Astrophysical Journal. We'll see what comment follows that.

But I've yet to see anything about the work at NUI Maynooth on the first cell with a nucleus. Here's the Maynooth press release. It concerns the event approximately two billion years ago, when two single cell organisms (prokaryotes) neither of which had a true nucleus, fused together to create a new entity, a eukaryote which had a nucleus. The eukaryote is the basic building block which in turn gave rise to all multi-cell organisms we know today – insects, plants, animals. The press release calls this the ‘single most phenomenal event in the history of life on the planet’, a moment which amounts to Nature’s ‘Big Bang’.

I'm looking for independent comment to justify this hype.
 

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