Sugars, 'Gum,' Stardust Found In NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples (nasa.gov)
- Reference: 0180289229
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/12/04/2237242/sugars-gum-stardust-found-in-nasas-asteroid-bennu-samples
- Source link: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/osiris-rex/sugars-gum-stardust-found-in-nasas-asteroid-bennu-samples/
"All five nucleobases used to construct both DNA and RNA, along with phosphates, have already been found in the Bennu samples brought to Earth by OSIRIS-REx," said lead scientist Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. "The new discovery of ribose means that all of the components to form the molecule RNA are present in Bennu."
The findings have been published in [2]three [3]new [4]papers by the journals Nature Geosciences and Nature Astronomy. NASA also published a [5]video on YouTube detailing the discovery.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/osiris-rex/sugars-gum-stardust-found-in-nasas-asteroid-bennu-samples/
[2] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01838-6
[3] http://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02694-5
[4] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02688-3
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LyH6jTefU8
Life is extremely improbable (Score:2)
All life on Earth has a common origin. This is easily provable --- we all have nearly the same ribosome sequence. No organisms have ever been found with a wildly different ribosome code (let alone different molecular/genetic system). It's virtually impossible for that to happen unless life emergence was EXTREMELY improbable and we got super lucky. Not unless there's only one way to make a ribosome ... which too is a provably ridiculous and incorrect assertion. Now how the hell is that? It means no other mec
Re: (Score:2)
> LUCA's descendants were able to go to every possible life niche on Earth and displace all other types of life? That makes very little sense.
It makes perfect sense, you explained clearly how it could happen.
The reasonable way of looking at it is, "What is the probability of that happening?" That's a scientific question.
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"Not unless there's only one way to make a ribosome ... which too is a provably ridiculous and incorrect assertion."
But there may have been an optimal ribosome for the conditions at the time, and even in disparate populations that one optimal (or a close enough version of it, the word "nearly" is doing a lot of work in your post) could have displaced all other versions, until the initially separate populations merged and created the consistency in origin we see today.
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> Bro, that sound plausible to you? Think about what you're saying .. LUCA's descendants were able to go to every possible life niche on Earth and displace all other types of life? That makes very little sense.
It actually makes a lot of sense to me for the simple fact that expanding into new niches is generally going to require evolving through natural selection to be able to thrive in that niche. Also because, to my knowledge, we have not found any niches anywhere on Earth without life as we know it that are not under such extreme conditions that it is unlikely for other forms of life to stand a chance.
I am not saying that other versions of life have definitely developed on Earth before. I am simply saying that,
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> Think about what you're saying .. LUCA's descendants were able to go to every possible life niche on Earth and displace all other types of life? That makes very little sense.
That is what I think happened. It took some time (millions of years) for LUCA to emerge, once it did it would have quickly spread across the planet, quickly being more millions of years. LUCA would have evolved, some being fitter than others: faster, more robust metabolism - these would have out competed less fit LUCA descendants and also non LUCA that was getting going.
That is not to say that non LUCA descendants do not exist in some niche somewhere - but we have not seen them - yet. So apply [1]Occam's razor [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
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It's not that life is improbable, it's that the first mover has too big of an advantage. Darwin famously said something about if new life emerged today from "primordial soup", it would just get eaten before it even had a chance.
Are the samples representative? (Score:1)
Whenever I hear that sample x shows y, my first question is how representative is the sample?
Things like how was the sample taken, sample container specification, handling of the sample and the list goes on.
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I agree, we have to read the papers wherein they published their protocols and also trust the scientists did procedures as specified and everyone handled things with high skepticism. I assume they had a control container that came back with the capsule that had non-Bennu asteroid simulant in order to verify their cleanliness procedures.
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I shared the link for a paper referenced within the main paper about the design of the sampling facility [1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com]
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.13973
Nasa wasting money again (Score:2)
In these harsh economic times it is disgusting to see NASA once again wasting taxpayers money by making asteroids out of sugar when HFCS is much cheaper.
I'm not saying we're aliens (Score:3)
But that's my great great great grandpa.
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My take is completely different. If the building blocks of Life are so abundant, obviously, they are forming spontaneously without biological predecessor. We are built from ribose, nucleobases and phosphates, because they are everywhere. (And this throws a big wrench into the idea of Silicon based life, because we don't see the silicon equivalents of our base molecules appearing in comets and asteroids.)
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Read my other comment.