some time ago scientists began experiments

Some time ago, scientists began experiments to find out (1)_____ it would be possible to set up a "village" under the sea. A special room was built and lowered (2)_____ the water of Port Sudan in the Red Sea. For 29 days, five men lived (3)_____ a depth of 40 feet. 5 JavaScript Questions and Answers to Test Your Skills In such a case this doesn't yield a negative number for n (as you speculated in your question), but rather yields undefined.. the final assessment may be a final exam, a final project, or a combination of both an exam and a view copy of copy of optics lab_ refraction of light (a) (1) ubio labs power bank reset code screening is how you But the road to understanding climate change stretches back to the tweed-clad middle years of the 19th century—when Victorian-era scientists conducted the first experiments proving that runaway CO2 could, one day, cook the planet. In other words, " global warming was officially discovered more than 100 years ago ." * * * Some time ago, scientists began experiments to find out whether itwould be possible to set up a village under the sea. a five roomhouse was built in a garage workshop and lowered into the waterport suden in the red sea. for 29 days, five men lived at a depthof 40 feet. at a much lower level two more divers stayed for a weekin a smallar house. on returning to the surface the men said thatthey had experienced no difficulty in breathing and had mademany interesting scientific observation. the Some time ago, scientists began experiments to find out (33)______ it would be possible to set up a "village" under the sea. A special room was built and lowered (34)______ the water of Port Sudan in the Red Sea. For 29 days, five men lived at a depth of 40 feet. Vay Tiền Online H5vaytien. Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word for each of the blanks from 1 to time ago, scientists began experiments to find out 1______ it would be possible to set up a “village” under the sea. A special room was built and lowered 2______ the water of Port Sudan in the Red Sea. For 29 days, five men lived at a depth of 40 feet. At a 3______ lower level, another two divers stayed for a week in a smaller “house”. On returning to the surface, the men said that they had experienced no difficulty in breathing and had 4______ many interesting scientific observations. The captain of the party, Commander Cousteau, spoke of the possibility of 5______ the seabed. He said that some permanent stations were to be set up under the sea, and some undersea farms would provide food for the growing population of the world. A century ago, people needed help to understand science. Much as they do today. Then as now, it wasn’t always easy to sort the accurate from the erroneous. Mainstream media, then as now, regarded science as secondary to other aspects of their mission. And when science made the news, it was often then as now garbled, naïve or dangerously misleading. Scripps, a prominent newspaper publisher, and William Emerson Ritter, a biologist, perceived a need. They envisioned a service that would provide reliable news about science to the world, dedicated to truth and clarity. For Scripps and Ritter, science journalism had a noble purpose “To discover the truth about all sorts of things of human concern, and to report it truthfully and in language comprehensible to those whose welfare is involved.” And so Science Service was born, 100 years ago — soon to give birth to the magazine now known as Science News. In its first year of existence, Science Service delivered its weekly dispatches to newspapers in the form of mimeographed packets. By 1922 those packets became available to the public by subscription, giving birth to Science News-Letter, the progenitor of Science News. Then as now, the magazine’s readers feasted on a smorgasbord of delicious tidbits from a menu encompassing all flavors of science — from the atom to outer space, from agriculture to oceanography, from transportation to, of course, food and nutrition. In those early days, much of the new enterprise’s coverage focused on space, such as the possibility of planets beyond Neptune. Experts shared their views on whether spiral-shaped clouds in deep space were far-off entire galaxies of stars, like the Milky Way, or embryonic solar systems just now forming within the Milky Way. Articles explored the latest speculation about life on Venus here and here or on Mars. Regular coverage was also devoted to new technologies — particularly radio. One Science Service dispatch informed readers on how to make their own home radio set — for $6. And in 1922 Science News-Letter reported on an astounding radio breakthrough a set that could operate without a battery. You could just plug it in to an electrical outlet. To celebrate our upcoming 100th anniversary, we’ve launched a series that highlights some of the biggest advances in science over the last century. Visit our Century of Science site to see the series as it unfolds. Much of the century’s scientific future was presaged in those early reports. In May 1921, an article on recent subatomic experiments noted the “dream of scientist and novelist alike that man would one day learn how … to utilize the vast stores of energy inside of atoms.” In 1922 Science Service editor Edwin Slosson speculated that the “smallest unit of positive electricity” the proton might “be a complex of many positive and negative particles,” a dim but prescient preview of the existence of quarks. True, some prognostications did not age so well. A 1921 prediction that the United States would be forced to adopt the metric system for commercial transactions is still awaiting fulfillment. A simple, common, international auxiliary language — “confidently predicted” in 1921 to become “a part of every educated person’s equipment” — remains unestablished today. And despite serious considerations of calendar reform by astronomers and church dignitaries reported in May 1922, well over 1,000 of the same old months have since passed without the slightest alteration. On the other hand, “the favorite fruit of Americans of the generations to follow us will be the avocado,” as predicted in 1921, is possibly arguable, though there was no mention of toast — just the suggestion that “a few crackers and an avocado sprinkled with a little salt make a hearty and well-balanced lunch.” One happily false prognostication was the repeated forecast of the rise of eugenics as a “scientific” endeavor. Subscribe to Science News Get great science journalism, from the most trusted source, delivered to your doorstep. “The organization of an artificial selection is only a question of time. It will be possible to renew as a whole, in a few centuries, all humanity, and to replace the mass by another much superior mass,” a “distinguished authority on anthropo-sociology” declared in a Science Service news item from 1921. Another eugenicist proclaimed that “Eugenic Science” should be applied to “shed the light of reason on the primeval instinct of reproduction,” so that “disgenic marriages” would be banned just as bigamy and incest are. In the century since, thanks to saner and more sophisticated knowledge of genetics and more social enlightenment in general, eugenics has been disavowed by science and is now revived in spirit only by the ignorant or malevolent. And during that time, real science has progressed to an elevated degree of sophistication in many other ways, to an extent almost unimaginable to the scientists and journalists of the 1920s. It turns out that the past century’s groundbreaking experimental discoveries, revolutionary theoretical revelations and prescient speculations have not eliminated science’s familiarity with false starts, unfortunate missteps and shortsighted prejudices. When Science Service now Society for Science launched its mission, astronomers were unaware of the extent of the universe. No biologist knew what DNA did, or how brain chemistry regulated behavior. Geologists saw that Earth’s continents looked like separated puzzle pieces, but declared that to be a coincidence. Modern scientists know better. Scientists now understand a lot more about the details of the atom’s interior, the molecules of life, the intricacies of the brain, the innards of the Earth and the expanse of the cosmos. Yet somehow scientists still pursue the same questions, if now on higher levels of theoretical abstraction rooted in deeper layers of empirical evidence. We know how the molecules of life work, but not always how they react to novel diseases. We know how the brain works, except for those afflicted by dementia or depression or when consciousness is part of the question. We know a lot about how the Earth works, but not enough to always foresee how it will respond to what humans are doing to it. We think we know a lot about the universe, but we’re not sure if ours is the only one, and we can’t explain how gravity, the dominant force across the cosmos, can coexist with the forces governing atoms. It turns out that the past century’s groundbreaking experimental discoveries, revolutionary theoretical revelations and prescient speculations have not eliminated science’s familiarity with false starts, unfortunate missteps and shortsighted prejudices. Researchers today have expanded the scope of the reality they can explore, yet still stumble through the remaining uncharted jungles of nature’s facts and laws, seeking further clues to how the world works. To paraphrase an old philosophy joke, science is more like it is today than it ever has been. In other words, science remains as challenging as ever to human inquiry. And the need to communicate its progress, perceived by Scripps and Ritter a century ago, remains as essential now as then. Trustworthy journalism comes at a price. Scientists and journalists share a core belief in questioning, observing and verifying to reach the truth. Science News reports on crucial research and discovery across science disciplines. We need your financial support to make it happen – every contribution makes a difference. Subscribe or Donate Now In 1952, atomic scientists came together on the 10th anniversary of the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction, which took place Dec. 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago. Courtesy of University of Chicago Photographic Archive hide caption toggle caption Courtesy of University of Chicago Photographic Archive In 1952, atomic scientists came together on the 10th anniversary of the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction, which took place Dec. 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago. Courtesy of University of Chicago Photographic Archive Seventy-five years ago this week, scientists from the University of Chicago created the first controlled, self-sustained nuclear chain reaction, a feat that was essential in the development of an atomic bomb during World War II. Enrico Fermi and his team of physicists secretly conducted the Chicago Pile 1 experiment on a squash court under the stands of a football stadium on Dec. 2, 1942. The anniversary of this unprecedented achievement comes as tensions escalate between the and North Korea, which launched a new ballistic missile on Tuesday. The 1942 test was a crucial first step in the creation of nuclear weapons by the endeavor known as the Manhattan Project, says Eric Isaacs, executive vice president of research, innovation and national laboratories at the University of Chicago. "The way I like to think about it is It was not enough to power a light bulb, but it changed the world," he tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. "It changed, obviously, the world because the war ended some years later with the bomb." Enrico Fermi, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and the winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics, led the team of scientists which succeeded in obtaining the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on Dec. 2, 1942. Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory hide caption toggle caption Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory The coordinated effort to harness nuclear energy began in 1939 after scientists in Europe demonstrated fission of a nucleus for the first time, Isaacs explains. Many scientists in the were expatriates, some of whom were refugees from fascist Europe, and they quickly realized the potential that Germany could build a bomb. According to NPR contributor Marcelo Gleiser, Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd first proposed the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, "whereby neutrons released from radioactive atomic nuclei would hit other heavy nuclei causing them to split fission into smaller nuclei. Every time this splitting happened, a little bit of energy was released. "Szilárd knew that the possibility of a chain reaction represented a shift in world history," Gleiser, a professor of physics at Dartmouth College, writes. "An explosive device with an uncontrolled chain reaction would have devastating consequences." A group of scientists persuaded Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist of the day, to write President Franklin Roosevelt urging him to launch a major bomb-making effort. The letter essentially said, "If we don't build a bomb, Germany will first." Fermi's pile experiment, which served as the framework for modern nuclear reactors, generated only about a half watt of power, University of Pennsylvania physics and astronomy professor Gino Segre writes in the Chicago Tribune The experiment focused on a crude pile — a 20-foot-high structure made of close to 40,000 graphite bricks, weighing 20 pounds each and embedded with a total of almost 100,000 pounds of uranium. Thirteen-foot control rods, ready to be pushed in or out depending on the neutron count, protruded from the pile. Fermi, cool and collected throughout the experiment, gave orders from the balcony above the squash court. The 49 attending scientists and observers fully trusted this Nobel Prize winner, called the "Pope of Physics" by his admiring peers because of his scientific infallibility. At 325 in the afternoon, after ordering the last control rod to be pulled halfway out, Fermi announced the pile had "gone critical." The chain reaction gradually accelerated, reaching dangerous levels ever more quickly. After the neutron count dramatically intensified at 349 Fermi continued to run the pile for nearly 5 minutes before calling a halt to the experiment. But those minutes marked the beginning of a new era. A drawing of Chicago Pile 1, the nuclear reactor that scientists used to achieve the first controlled, self-sustaining chain reaction on Dec. 2, 1942. Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory hide caption toggle caption Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory A drawing of Chicago Pile 1, the nuclear reactor that scientists used to achieve the first controlled, self-sustaining chain reaction on Dec. 2, 1942. Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory While the reaction only produced a small amount of energy, Isaacs says the event was a "remarkable engineering feat" that dramatically changed the landscape of science. Three years later, the dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Despite the unprecedented destruction created by the bomb, Isaacs says nuclear power plants, as well as other nuclear materials, wouldn't exist without Fermi's experiment. The experiment demonstrated that generating "nuclear power releasing the energy of one nucleus is not nearly enough," Isaacs explains. "You have to re-release the energy of many, many nuclei to create the kind of energy that are required for nuclear-produced electricity." At a time when there is rising concern about the temperament of world leaders in control of nuclear weapons, Isaacs says the scientists who worked on the pile experiment "realized the devastating consequences of the kind of energy they could release with fission." But the fear that drove them to move forward, Isaacs says, fundamentally changed the role of science in our society. "There were very loud debates going on amongst the scientists about whether we should use a bomb, whether we shouldn't use a bomb, how it should be done," he says, "and in fact, out of World War II, one of the things that emerged was the engagement of scientists in discussions around policy." A fossil collector since childhood, Bob Hazen has come up with new scenarios for life's beginnings on earth billions of years ago. Amanda Lucidon A hilly green campus in Washington, houses two departments of the Carnegie Institution for Science the Geophysical Laboratory and the quaintly named Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. When the institution was founded, in 1902, measuring the earth’s magnetic field was a pressing scientific need for makers of nautical maps. Now, the people who work here—people like Bob Hazen—have more fundamental concerns. Hazen and his colleagues are using the institution’s “pressure bombs”—breadbox-size metal cylinders that squeeze and heat minerals to the insanely high temperatures and pressures found inside the earth—to decipher nothing less than the origins of life. Hazen, a mineralogist, is investigating how the first organic chemicals—the kind found in living things—formed and then found each other nearly four billion years ago. He began this research in 1996, about two decades after scientists discovered hydrothermal vents—cracks in the deep ocean floor where water is heated to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit by molten rock. The vents fuel strange underwater ecosystems inhabited by giant worms, blind shrimp and sulfur-eating bacteria. Hazen and his colleagues believed the complex, high-pressure vent environment—with rich mineral deposits and fissures spewing hot water into cold—might be where life began. Hazen realized he could use the pressure bomb to test this theory. The device technically known as an “internally heated, gas media pressure vessel” is like a super-high-powered kitchen pressure cooker, producing temperatures exceeding 1,800 degrees and pressures up to 10,000 times that of the atmosphere at sea level. If something were to go wrong, the ensuing explosion could take out a good part of the lab building; the operator runs the pressure bomb from behind an armored barrier. In his first experiment with the device, Hazen encased a few milligrams of water, an organic chemical called pyruvate and a powder that produces carbon dioxide all in a tiny capsule made of gold which does not react with the chemicals inside that he had welded himself. He put three capsules into the pressure bomb at 480 degrees and 2,000 atmospheres. And then he went to lunch. When he took the capsules out two hours later, the contents had turned into tens of thousands of different compounds. In later experiments, he combined nitrogen, ammonia and other molecules plausibly present on the early earth. In these experiments, Hazen and his colleagues created all sorts of organic molecules, including amino acids and sugars—the stuff of life. Hazen’s experiments marked a turning point. Before them, origins-of-life research had been guided by a scenario scripted in 1871 by Charles Darwin himself “But if and oh! what a big if! we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes....” In 1952, Stanley Miller, a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Chicago, attempted to create Darwin’s dream. Miller set up a container holding water representing the early ocean connected by glass tubes to one containing ammonia, methane and hydrogen—a mixture scientists of the day thought approximated the early atmosphere. A flame heated the water, sending vapor upward. In the atmosphere flask, electric sparks simulated lightning. The experiment was such a long shot that Miller’s adviser, Harold Urey, thought it a waste of time. But over the next few days, the water turned deep red. Miller had created a broth of amino acids. Forty-four years later, Bob Hazen’s pressure bomb experiments would show that not just lightning storms but also hydrothermal vents potentially could have sparked life. His work soon led him to a more surprising conclusion the basic molecules of life, it turns out, are able to form in all sorts of places near hydrothermal vents, volcanoes, even on meteorites. Cracking open space rocks, astrobiologists have discovered amino acids, compounds similar to sugars and fatty acids, and nucleobases found in RNA and DNA. So it’s even possible that some of the first building blocks of life on earth came from outer space. Hazen’s findings came at an auspicious time. “A few years before, we would have been laughed out of the origins-of-life community,” he says. But NASA, then starting up its astrobiology program, was looking for evidence that life could have evolved in odd environments—such as on other planets or their moons. “NASA [wanted] justification for going to Europa, to Titan, to Ganymede, to Callisto, to Mars,” says Hazen. If life does exist there, it’s likely to be under the surface, in warm, high-pressure environments. Back on earth, Hazen says that by 2000 he had concluded that “making the basic building blocks of life is easy.” A harder question How did the right building blocks get incorporated? Amino acids come in multiple forms, but only some are used by living things to form proteins. How did they find each other? In a windowed corner of a lab building at the Carnegie Institution, Hazen is drawing molecules on a notepad and sketching the earliest steps on the road to life. “We’ve got a prebiotic ocean and down in the ocean floor, you’ve got rocks,” he says. “And basically there’s molecules here that are floating around in solution, but it’s a very dilute soup.” For a newly formed amino acid in the early ocean, it must have been a lonely life indeed. The familiar phrase “primordial soup” sounds rich and thick, but it was no beef stew. It was probably just a few molecules here and there in a vast ocean. “So the chances of a molecule over here bumping into this one, and then actually a chemical reaction going on to form some kind of larger structure, is just infinitesimally small,” Hazen continues. He thinks that rocks—whether the ore deposits that pile up around hydrothermal vents or those that line a tide pool on the surface—may have been the matchmakers that helped lonely amino acids find each other. Rocks have texture, whether shiny and smooth or craggy and rough. Molecules on the surface of minerals have texture, too. Hydrogen atoms wander on and off a mineral’s surface, while electrons react with various molecules in the vicinity. An amino acid that drifts near a mineral could be attracted to its surface. Bits of amino acids might form a bond; form enough bonds and you’ve got a protein. Back at the Carnegie lab, Hazen’s colleagues are looking into the first step in that courtship Kateryna Klochko is preparing an experiment that—when combined with other experiments and a lot of math—should show how certain molecules stick to minerals. Do they adhere tightly to the mineral, or does a molecule attach in just one place, leaving the rest of it mobile and thereby increasing the chances it will link up to other molecules? Klochko gets out a rack, plastic tubes and the liquids she needs. “It’s going to be very boring and tedious,” she warns. She puts a tiny dab of a powdered mineral in a four-inch plastic tube, then adds arginine, an amino acid, and a liquid to adjust the acidity. Then, while a gas bubbles through the solution, she waits...for eight minutes. The work may seem tedious indeed, but it takes concentration. “That’s the thing, each step is critical,” she says. “Each of them, if you make a mistake, the data will look weird, but you won’t know where you made a mistake.” She mixes the ingredients seven times, in seven tubes. As she works, “The Scientist” comes on the radio “Nooooobody saaaaid it was easyyyy,” sings Coldplay vocalist Chris Martin. After two hours, the samples go into a rotator, a kind of fast Ferris wheel for test tubes, to mix all night. In the morning, Klochko will measure how much arginine remains in the liquid; the rest of the amino acid will have stuck to the mineral powder’s tiny surfaces. She and other researchers will repeat the same experiment with different minerals and different molecules, over and over in various combinations. The goal is for Hazen and his colleagues to be able to predict more complex interactions, like those that may have taken place in the earth’s early oceans. How long will it take to go from studying how molecules interact with minerals to understanding how life began? No one knows. For one thing, scientists have never settled on a definition of life. Everyone has a general idea of what it is and that self-replication and passing information from generation to generation are key. Gerald Joyce, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, jokes that the definition should be “something like that which is squishy.’” Hazen’s work has implications beyond the origins of life. “Amino-acids-sticking-to-crystals is everywhere in the environment,” he says. Amino acids in your body stick to titanium joints; films of bacteria grow inside pipes; everywhere proteins and minerals meet, amino acids are interacting with crystals. “It’s every rock, it’s every soil, it’s the walls of the building, it’s microbes that interact with your teeth and bones, it’s everywhere,” Hazen says. At his weekend retreat overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, Hazen, 61, peers through binoculars at some black-and-white ducks bobbing around in circles and stirring the otherwise still water. He thinks they’re herding fish—a behavior he’s never seen before. He calls for his wife, Margee, to come take a look “There’s this really interesting phenomenon going on with the buffleheads!” Living room shelves hold things the couple has found nearby beach glass, a basketful of minerals, and fossilized barnacles, coral and great white shark teeth. A 15-million-year-old whale jawbone, discovered on the beach at low tide, is spread out in pieces on the dining room table, where Hazen is cleaning it. “It was part of a living, breathing whale when this was a tropical paradise,” he says. Hazen traces his interest in prehistory to his Cleveland childhood, growing up not far from a fossil quarry. “I collected my first trilobite when I was 9 or 10,” he says. “I just thought they were cool,” he says of the marine arthropods that went extinct millions of years ago. After his family moved to New Jersey, his eighth-grade science teacher encouraged him to check out the minerals in nearby towns. “He gave me maps and he gave me directions and he gave me specimens, and my parents would take me to these places,” says Hazen. “So I just got hooked.” After taking a paleontology class together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hazen and Margee Hindle, his future wife, started collecting trilobites. They now have thousands. “Some of them are incredibly cute,” says Hazen. “This bulbous nose—you want to hug them.” There are trilobites all over Hazen’s office and a basement guest room at the Hazens’ Bethesda, Maryland, home—they cover shelves and fill desk drawers and cabinets. There’s even trilobite art by his now grown children, Ben, 34, who is studying to be an art therapist, and Liz, 32, a teacher. “This is the ultimate cute trilobite,” he says, reaching into a cabinet and taking out a Paralejurus. “How can you not love that?” Hazen calls himself a “natural collector.” After he and Margee bought a picture frame that just happened to hold a photograph of a brass band, they started buying other pictures of brass bands; eventually they wrote a history of brass bands—Music Men—and a time in America when almost every town had its own. Bob has played trumpet professionally since 1966. He has also published a collection of 18th-and 19th-century poems about geology, most of which, he says, are pretty bad “And O ye rocks! schist, gneiss, whate’er ye be/Ye varied strata, names too hard for me”. But the couple tend not to hold on to things. “As weird as this sounds, as a collector, I’ve never been acquisitive,” Bob says. “To have been able to hold them and study them up close is really a privilege. But they shouldn’t be in private hands.” Which is why the Hazen Collection of Band Photographs and Ephemera, ca. 1818-1931, is now at the National Museum of American History. Harvard has the mineral collection he started in eighth grade, and the Hazens are in the process of donating their trilobites to the National Museum of Natural History. After considering, for some time, how minerals may have helped life evolve, Hazen is now investigating the other side of the equation how life spurred the development of minerals. He explains that there were only about a dozen different minerals—including diamonds and graphite—in dust grains that pre-date the solar system. Another 50 or so formed as the sun ignited. On earth, volcanoes emitted basalt, and plate tectonics made ores of copper, lead and zinc. “The minerals become players in this sort of epic story of exploding stars and planetary formation and the triggering of plate tectonics,” he says. “And then life plays a key role.” By introducing oxygen into the atmosphere, photosynthesis made possible new kinds of minerals—turquoise, azurite and malachite, for example. Mosses and algae climbed onto land, breaking down rock and making clay, which made bigger plants possible, which made deeper soil, and so on. Today there are about 4,400 known minerals—more than two-thirds of which came into being only because of the way life changed the planet. Some of them were created exclusively by living organisms. Everywhere he looks, Hazen says, he sees the same fascinating process increasing complexity. “You see the same phenomena over and over, in languages and in material culture—in life itself. Stuff gets more complicated.” It’s the complexity of the hydrothermal vent environment—gushing hot water mixing with cold water near rocks, and ore deposits providing hard surfaces where newly formed amino acids could congregate—that makes it such a good candidate as a cradle of life. “Organic chemists have long used test tubes,” he says, “but the origin of life uses rocks, it uses water, it uses atmosphere. Once life gets a foothold, the fact that the environment is so variable is what drives evolution.” Minerals evolve, life arises and diversifies, and along come trilobites, whales, primates and, before you know it, brass bands. Helen Fields has written about snakehead fish and the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils for Smithsonian. Amanda Lucidon is based in Washington, / To mimic conditions for life on early earth, Bob Hazen, in his Carnegie lab, used a "pressure bomb" to heat and compress chemicals. Amanda Lucidon / A fossil collector since childhood, Hazen, shown here inspecting ancient seashells on Chesapeake Bay, has come up with new scenarios for life's beginnings on earth billions of years ago. Amanda Lucidon / Scientists are searching for life's origins beyond the "warm little pond" that, 140 years ago, Charles Darwin speculated was the starting place. Kateryna Klochko, in Hazen's lab, combines mineral dust and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Amanda Lucidon / Some meteorites, shown here is a magnified cross section of one found in Chile, contain amino acids, raising the possibility that life was seeded from space. Amanda Lucidon / Despite high temperatures and pressures, deep-sea hydrothermal vents harbor living things. Science Source / Hazen began collecting trilobites—extinct marine arthropods like this Paralejurus—when he was a child. Amanda Lucidon / The first organic molecules may have needed rocks to bring them together, says Hazen, with his wife Margee near their Chesapeake Bay weekend retreat. But the relationship goes both ways once living things were established, they created new minerals. Amanda Lucidon Get the latest Science stories in your inbox. Recommended Videos Filed Under Earth Science

some time ago scientists began experiments