A Key Property of Life Has Been Detected From High Altitude For The First Time

[DocM]

Remember in Star Trek when Kirk, Picard, etc. would ask if there were life signs on whatever world, moon, etc. from space? 

 

Absent detecting cities, roads, radio or other such signs of advanced lifeforms, how could they possibly do that?  How to detect small critters, microbe colonies, plants, etc?

 

Time to start work on some new  instruments...this time to detect life signs in the form of homochirality using circular polarization.

 

Certainly not the full Star Trek package, but a start.

 

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-detected-a-key-property-of-life-from-high-altitudes

 

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A Key Property of Life Has Been Detected From High Altitude For The First Time

 

Hold up your hands in front of your face. For most people, they will be mirrored copies of each other: You can hold them palm-to-palm and they will match up, but you cannot superimpose them.

 

Molecules also exhibit this handedness, or chirality. [...]

 

Natural amino acids - the building blocks of proteins - are almost always left-handed, or sinistral. Natural sugars like those that make up RNA and DNA, on the other hand, are almost always right-handed, or dextral. If you replace any of these molecules with the other form, the whole system breaks down.

 

This quirk is called homochirality. [...]

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"When light is reflected by biological matter, a part of the light's electromagnetic waves will travel in either clockwise or counterclockwise spirals," explained physicist Lucas Patty of the University of Bern in Switzerland.

 

"This phenomenon is called circular polarization and is caused by the biological matter's homochirality. Similar spirals of light are not produced by abiotic non-living nature."

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