UF study suggests life on Earth sprang from borax minerals
...conditions." Ribose, like most sugars, turns into tar if not handled carefully. "It is like baking a cake too long," said Benner, a UF distinguished professor of chemistry and anatomy and cell biology. In 1995, Miller gave up trying to make ribose prebiotically, writing: "The first genetic material coul...Pollutant-eating microbe could speed gasworks cleanup
...f a bacterium that biodegrades naphthalene in coal tar contamination. Although naphthalene is not the mo...iscovered in a 40-year-old municipal gasworks coal tar disposal site in South Glens Falls, N.Y., near the west bank of the Hudson River. "Strain CJ2 alon...Science Picks--Leads, Feeds and Story Seeds (April 2003)
...aber-Tooth Cats Could Talk Long before the La Brea tar pits were a tourist attraction, when saber-tooth cats and mastodons roamed the area that is now metropolitan Los Angeles, frequent major earthquakes shook the ground. There is now strong scientific evidence, funded through a grant from the USGS, tha...JCI Table of Contents, January 2, 2003
... assumedthat nicotine was the addictive agent, and tar the carcinogen. Recentevidence, however, suggests that things are not that simple, and thatnicotine and its derivatives themselves might also promote cancerdevelopmentand progression. Phillip Dennis and colleagues at the US National CancerInstitute i......or advantageous sites without actually beating the tar out of each other," she says. "It is also just really interesting natural history." The scientists wanted to learn how social animals space themselves in groups by examining the behavior of hundreds of colonial spiders in Mexico. "In this case I was...