"Scientists analyzing the dust of meteorites have discovered new clues to a long-standing mystery about how life works on its most basic, molecular level."
NASA Scientists have been studying really old space rocks for a while now and have recently discovered something that not only gives us a better idea of why life on this planet acts a certain way but (and I think more interestingly) may also help us determine whether life elsewhere in the universe is actually life from elsewhere in the universe and not simply life we've dragged along with us. The study basically comes down to "handedness" of life. As we all no doubt know, life uses 20 different combination's of Amino Acids to build proteins and proteins make up life. Amino Acids are built together in 2 ways which are mirror images of each other. Thus Amino Acids can be "lefties" or "righties" they can't however be ambidextrous as it just fails. Life on earth is a "lefty" and scientists want to know why we went left when we could have gone right. Evidently the majority of the Amino Acids that can be found on these ancient meteorites that arrived back when the earth was forming had a tendency to swing left which they believe has somthing to do with alteration by water in space. All though more research will need to be done this will narrow down the search significantly.
What this means is that the "lefty" tendency quite plausibly originated in space! What that means is that it is more likely that life exists elsewhere in our solar system (most likely on a microscopic level) but it will also make it more difficult to determine whether it is indeed an alien as other life in our solar system will probably also be lefties. If however we find a "rightie" it will all most certainly be a little green man!! (metaphorically speaking).
ScienceDaily (Mar. 18, 2009)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090317153047.htm
Daniel P. Glavin and Jason P. Dworkin. Enrichment of the amino acid L-isovaline by aqueous alteration on CI and CM meteorite parent bodies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811618106
The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the NASA Cosmochemistry program, and the NASA Astrobiology: Exobiology, and Evolutionary Biology program.
