Thank you for reading at a cost of 13 million dollars and for 10 years.. Cambridge launches a huge project to find out how life began…
Basrawi News Encyclopedia – Written by: Yara Imad / Basrawi News Encyclopedia – Follow-up
The British newspaper, The Times, said in a report published on Friday, January 14, 2022, that the “Leverholm Center for Life in the Universe” has approved a budget of 10 million pounds, regarding 13 million dollars, for a large team of academics at the University of Cambridge and one of the pioneers of science Chemist and Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist, in order to find out how life began on Earth.
The new Leverhulm Center for Life in the Universe will attempt to identify the elements and conditions that gave rise to life on Earth, and thus estimate whether similar processes led to life in the universe.
A project to find out how life began on Earth
The center’s 10-year project, to be officially launched in late 2022, will bring together chemists and biologists studying the origins of life on Earth, astronomers studying the atmospheres of distant planets, astrobiologists searching for microorganisms on Mars, and geologists with experience in how Mars is formed. Earth and what its first atmosphere looked like.
It will also bring together academics in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to study the meaning of life from a philosophical perspective, including Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, who participated in a NASA-funded program to assess the religious implications of discovering life on other planets.
Scientists, who usually work in the “silos” of their specialties, will collaborate, for the first time under one banner, to share their experiences and help each other search for the origins of life on Earth and its possible existence elsewhere in the universe.
Examination of the components of living organisms
While chemists, including Dr John Sutherland, an expert in the Chemical Origins of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, have spent decades examining the basic compounds, conditions and biological functions needed to create the first single-celled organisms, which arose nearly four billion years following they cooled Earth enough to have water in liquid form.
Their expertise will also help astronomers such as Dr. Didier Queloz – winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the first planet outside our solar system in 1995 – decide what to look for in the atmospheres of distant planets. These envelopes will soon be carefully examined for signs of habitability with the James Webb Space Telescope.
It will also help guide teams tracking Mars rovers such as Perseverance and Rosalind Franklin, which will launch in late 2022, as to the organic chemistry markers to look for in Martian soil.
On the other hand, if the required chemical signs are found in these distant worlds, they will not only provide evidence that life may have begun to develop on those planets, but will also be “conclusive” evidence that chemists are on the right path to solving the mystery of the beginning of life on Earth, according to what Sutherland told The Times.
Funding for this project comes from the Leverhulme Trust, a charitable foundation set up by soap tycoon Lord Leverhulme in the 1920s.
Thank you for reading at a cost of 13 million dollars and for 10 years.. Cambridge launches a huge project to find out how life began… End of the story
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