An amino acid, one of the building blocks of life, has been spotted in deep space, signalling that alien life forms could indeed exist on other planets. If the find stands up to scutiny, it means that the sorts of chemistry needed to create life are not unique to Earth, verifying one of astrobiology's cherished theories. This would add weight to the idea that life exists on other planets, or that molecules from outer space kick-started life on Earth.

According to the New Scientist, more than 130 molecules have been identified in interstellar space so far, including sugars and ethanol. But amino acids are a particular important find because they link up to form proteins, the molecule that run, and to large extend make up, human cells.

quoted from The Straits Times: Monday, July 29, 2002

This is interesting. NASA scientists are examining a seemingly magical way to produce high-quality crystals.

Perhaps a NASA laboratory is an unlikely setting for a magic show. Nevertheless, this is where Frank Szofran and colleagues are growing high-quality crystals using a method as amazing as any conjuring trick.

By carefully cooling a molten germanium-silicon mixture inside a cylindrical container, they coax it into forming a single large and extraordinarily well-ordered crystal. Such crystals have very few defects because, remarkably, they never touched the walls of the very container in which they grew.

You can read more about this on the NASA site.

Anyone, anywhere with access to a personal computer, could help find a cure for cancer by giving 'screensaver time' from their computers to the world's largest ever computational project, which will screen 250 million molecules for cancer-fighting potential.

The project is being carried out by Oxford University's Centre for Computational Drug Discovery - a unique 'virtual centre' funded by the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR), which is based in the Department of Chemistry and linked with international research groups via the world-wide web - in collaboration with United Devices, a US-based distributed computing technology company, and Intel, who are sponsoring the project.

To get the screen saver software go to United Devices. The full text of this article is on this Oxford University Chemistry page. Unfortunately Macintosh and Linux versions of the software are not yet available.

A NASA scientist has discovered sugar and several related organic compounds in two meteorites -- providing the first evidence that another fundamental building block of life on Earth might have come from outer space.

Dr. George Cooper and coworkers from the NASA Ames Research Center found the sugary compounds in two carbon-rich (or carbonaceous) meteorites. Previously, researchers had found inside meteorites other organic, carbon-based compounds that play major roles in life on Earth, such as amino acids and carboxylic acids, but no sugars.

These discoveries add an important new piece to the puzzle of the origins of life on Earth, and supports the notion that seeds of life might be spread far and wide around the cosmos.

You can read more on the NASA site.

Earth's most severe mass extinction - an event 250 million years ago that wiped out 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of land vertebrates - was triggered by a collision with a comet or asteroid, according to a team led by The University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Evidence is based upon elegant findings involving carbon molecules called buckminsterfullerenes (C₆₀, Buckyballs) with the gases helium and argon trapped inside their cage structures.

The scientists do not know the site of the impact 250 million years ago, when all Earth's land formed a supercontinent called Pangea. However, the space body left a calling card - a much higher level of complex carbon molecules called buckminsterfullerenes, or Buckyballs, with the noble (or chemically nonreactive) gases helium and argon trapped inside their cage structures. Fullerenes, which contain 60 or more carbon atoms and have a structure resembling a soccer ball or a geodesic dome, are named for Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome.

The researchers know these particular Buckyballs are extraterrestrial because the noble gases trapped inside have an unusual ratio of isotopes. For instance, terrestrial helium is mostly helium-4 and contains only a small amount of helium-3, while extraterrestrial helium - the kind found in these fullerenes - is mostly helium-3.

There are many chemical web pages that display chemical structures within the web page itself. You, the viewer can then rotate the molecule on screen, read off bond lengths and angles, and do other useful things. To do this, a free piece of software known as a plug-in is required.

There are at least two plugins available for you to use. In practice you will probably need both since they have different abilities and chemistry web site authors often cater for one rather than the other. Both are available for Macintoshes as well as PCs and bother are free.

The first available is known as Chime from MDL. On a Mac you have to use a NetScape browser in Classic mode while on a PC either NetScape or Internet Explorer is OK. The features available for Chime under MacOS and Windows differ unfortunately.

The second available is known as the Chem3D Net Plugin. On Macs and PCs either NetScape or Internet Explorer is OK.

Remember, some of what Chime can do, the Chem3D Net Plugin can not, and vice versa, so I suggest you get both (they are free).

The team of Berkeley Lab scientists that announced two years ago (1999) the observation of what appeared to be Element 118 (heaviest undiscovered transuranic element at the time) has retracted its original paper after several confirmation experiments failed to reproduce the results. This means that the pages for element 118 and parts of the data for element 116 are wrong. Please see this page for more details.