̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - life

Strongest hints yet of biological activity outside the solar system

sc604 — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 04:09:34 +0000

Astronomers have detected the most promising signs yet of a possible biosignature outside the solar system, although they remain cautious.

‘Missing’ sea sponges discovered

sc604 — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 12:56:30 +0000

At first glance, the simple, spikey sea sponge is no creature of mystery.

No brain. No gut. No problem dating them back 700 million years. Yet convincing sponge fossils only go back about 540 million years, leaving a 160-million-year gap in the fossil record.

In a paper released in the journal Nature, an international team including researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, have reported a 550-million-year-old sea sponge from the “lost years” and proposed that the earliest sea sponges had not yet developed mineral skeletons, offering new parameters to the search for the missing fossils.

̽��ֱ��mystery of the missing sea sponges centred on a paradox.

Molecular clock estimates, which involve measuring the number of genetic mutations that accumulate within the Tree of Life over time, indicate that sponges must have evolved about 700 million years ago. And yet, there had been no convincing sponge fossils found in rocks that old.

For years, this conundrum was the subject of debate among zoologists and palaeontologists.

This latest discovery fills in the evolutionary family tree of one of the earliest animals, connecting the dots all the way back to Darwin’s questions about when the first animals evolved and explaining their apparent absence in older rocks.

Shuhai Xiao from Virginia Tech, who led the research, first laid eyes on the fossil five years ago when a collaborator texted him a picture of a specimen excavated along the Yangtze River in China. “I had never seen anything like it before,” he said. “Almost immediately, I realised that it was something new.”

̽��ֱ��researchers began ruling out possibilities one by one: not a sea squirt, not a sea anemone, not a coral. They wondered, could it be an elusive ancient sea sponge?

In an earlier study published in 2019, Xiao and his team suggested that early sponges left no fossils because they had not evolved the ability to generate the hard needle-like structures, known as spicules, that characterise sea sponges today.

̽��ֱ��team traced sponge evolution through the fossil record. As they went further back in time, sponge spicules were increasingly more organic in composition, and less mineralised.

“If you extrapolate back, then perhaps the first ones were soft-bodied creatures with entirely organic skeletons and no minerals at all,” said Xiao. “If this was true, they wouldn’t survive fossilisation except under very special circumstances where rapid fossilisation outcompeted degradation.”

Later in 2019, Xiao’s group found a sponge fossil preserved in just such a circumstance: a thin bed of marine carbonate rocks known to preserve abundant soft-bodied animals, including some of the earliest mobile animals. Most often this type of fossil would be lost to the fossil record. ̽��ֱ��new finding offers a window into early animals before they developed hard parts.

̽��ֱ��surface of the new sponge fossil is studded with an intricate array of regular boxes, each divided into smaller, identical boxes.

“This specific pattern suggests our fossilised sea sponge is most closely related to a certain species of glass sponges,” said first author Dr Xiaopeng Wang, from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences and the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology.

Another unexpected aspect of the new sponge fossil is its size.

“When searching for fossils of early sponges I had expected them to be very small,” said co-author Alex Liu from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “ ̽��ֱ��new fossil can reach over 40 centimetres long, and has a relatively complex conical body plan, challenging many of our expectations for the appearance of early sponges”.

While the fossil fills in some of the missing years, it also provides researchers with important guidance about what they should look for, which will hopefully extend understanding of early animal evolution further back in time.

“ ̽��ֱ��discovery indicates that perhaps the first sponges were spongey but not glassy,” said Xiao. “We now know that we need to broaden our view when looking for early sponges.”

Reference:
Xiaopeng Wang et al. ‘A late-Ediacaran crown-group sponge animal.’ Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07520-y

Adapted from a Virginia Tech press release.

̽��ֱ��discovery, published in Nature, opens a new window on early animal evolution.

Xiaopeng Wang

Heliocolocellus fossil

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Ancient seafloor vents spewed tiny, life-giving minerals into Earth’s early oceans

cmm201 — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 16:38:44 +0000

Their study, published in Science Advances, examined 3.5-billion-year-old rocks from western Australia in previously unseen detail and identified large quantities of a mineral called greenalite, which is thought to have played a role in early biological processes. ̽��ֱ��researchers also found that the seafloor vents would have seeded the oceans with apatite, a mineral rich in the life-essential element phosphorus.

̽��ֱ��earliest lifeforms we know of—single-celled microorganisms, or microbes—emerged around 3.7 billion years ago. Most of the rocks that contain traces of them and the environment they lived in have, however, been destroyed. Some of the only evidence we have of this pivotal time comes from an outcrop of sediments in the remote Australian outback.

̽��ֱ��so-called Dresser Formation has been studied for years but, in the new study, researchers re-examined the rocks in closer detail, using high magnification electron microscopes to reveal tiny minerals that were essentially hidden in plain sight.

̽��ֱ��greenalite particles they observed measured just a few hundred nanometres in size—so small that they would have been washed over thousands of kilometres, potentially finding their way into a range of environments where they may have kick-started otherwise unfavourable chemical reactions, such as those involved in building the first DNA and RNA molecules.

“We’ve found that hydrothermal vents supplied trillions upon trillions of tiny, highly-reactive greenalite particles, as well as large quantities of phosphorus,” said Professor Birger Rasmussen, lead author of the study from the ̽��ֱ�� of Western Australia.

Rasmussen said scientists are still unsure as to the exact role of greenalite in building primitive cells, “but this mineral was in the right place at the right time, and also had the right size and crystal structure to promote the assembly of early cells.”

̽��ֱ��rocks the researchers studied contain characteristic layers of rusty-red, iron-rich jasper which formed as mineral-laden seawater spewed from hydrothermal vents. Scientists had thought the jaspers got their distinctive red colour from particles of iron oxide which, just like rust, form when iron is exposed to oxygen.

But how did this iron oxide form when Earth’s early oceans lacked oxygen? One theory is that photosynthesising cyanobacteria in the oceans produced the oxygen, and that it wasn’t until later, around 2.4 billion years ago, that this oxygen started to skyrocket in the atmosphere.

̽��ֱ��new results change that assumption, however, “the story is completely different once you look closely enough,” said study co-author Professor Nick Tosca from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that tiny, drab, particles of greenalite far outnumbered the iron oxide particles which give the jaspers their colour. ̽��ֱ��iron oxide was not an original feature, discounting the theory that they were formed by the activity of cyanobacteria.

“Our findings show that iron wasn’t oxidised in the oceans; instead, it combined with silica to form tiny crystals of greenalite,” said Tosca. “That means major oxygen producers, cyanobacteria, may have evolved later, potentially coinciding with the soar in atmospheric oxygen during the Great Oxygenation Event.”

Birger said that more experiments are needed to identify how greenalite might facilitate prebiotic chemistry, “but it was present in such vast quantities that, under the right conditions its surfaces could have synthesized an enormous number of RNA-type sequences, addressing a key question in origin of life research – where did all the RNA come from?”

Reference:
Rasmussen, B, Muhling, J, Tosca, N J. 'Nanoparticulate apatite and greenalite in oldest, well-preserved hydrothermal vent precipitates.' Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj4789

Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Western Australia have uncovered the importance of hydrothermal vents, similar to underwater geysers, in supplying minerals that may have been a key ingredient in the emergence of early life.

MARUM − Zentrum für Marine Umweltwissenschaften, Universität Bremen

̽��ֱ��hydrothermal vent 'Candelabra' in the Logatchev hydrothermal field on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at a water depth of 3300 metres.

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‘Bouncing’ comets could deliver building blocks for life to exoplanets

sc604 — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:10:19 +0000

In order to deliver organic material, comets need to be travelling relatively slowly – at speeds below 15 kilometres per second. At higher speeds, the essential molecules would not survive – the speed and temperature of impact would cause them to break apart.

̽��ֱ��most likely place where comets can travel at the right speed are ‘peas in a pod’ systems, where a group of planets orbit closely together. In such a system, the comet could essentially be passed or ‘bounced’ from the orbit of one planet to another, slowing it down.

At slow enough speeds, the comet would crash on a planet’s surface, delivering the intact molecules that researchers believe are the precursors for life. ̽��ֱ��results, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, suggest that such systems would be promising places to search for life outside our Solar System if cometary delivery is important for the origins of life.

Comets are known to contain a range of the building blocks for life, known as prebiotic molecules. For example, samples from the Ryugu asteroid, analysed in 2022, showed that it carried intact amino acids and vitamin B3. Comets also contain large amounts of hydrogen cyanide (HCN), another important prebiotic molecule. ̽��ֱ��strong carbon-nitrogen bonds of HCN make it more durable to high temperatures, meaning it could potentially survive atmospheric entry and remain intact.

“We’re learning more about the atmospheres of exoplanets all the time, so we wanted to see if there are planets where complex molecules could also be delivered by comets,” said first author Richard Anslow from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “It’s possible that the molecules that led to life on Earth came from comets, so the same could be true for planets elsewhere in the galaxy.”

̽��ֱ��researchers do not claim that comets are necessary to the origin of life on Earth or any other planet, but instead they wanted to place some limits on the types of planets where complex molecules, such as HCN, could be successfully delivered by comets.

Most of the comets in our Solar System sit beyond the orbit of Neptune, in what is known as the Kuiper Belt. When comets or other Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) collide, they can be pushed by Neptune’s gravity toward the Sun, eventually getting pulled in by Jupiter’s gravity. Some of these comets make their way past the Asteroid Belt and into the inner Solar System.

“We wanted to test our theories on planets that are similar to our own, as Earth is currently our only example of a planet that supports life,” said Anslow. “What kinds of comets, travelling at what kinds of speed, could deliver intact prebiotic molecules?”

Using a variety of mathematical modelling techniques, the researchers determined that it is possible for comets to deliver the precursor molecules for life, but only in certain scenarios. For planets orbiting a star similar to our own Sun, the planet needs to be low mass and it is helpful for the planet to be in close orbit to other planets in the system. ̽��ֱ��researchers found that nearby planets on close orbits are much more important for planets around lower-mass stars, where the typical speeds are much higher.

In such a system, a comet could be pulled in by the gravitational pull of one planet, then passed to another planet before impact. If this ‘comet-passing’ happened enough times, the comet would slow down enough so that some prebiotic molecules could survive atmospheric entry.

“In these tightly-packed systems, each planet has a chance to interact with and trap a comet,” said Anslow. “It’s possible that this mechanism could be how prebiotic molecules end up on planets.”

For planets in orbit around lower-mass stars, such as M-dwarfs, it would be more difficult for complex molecules to be delivered by comets, especially if the planets are loosely packed. Rocky planets in these systems also suffer significantly more high-velocity impacts, potentially posing unique challenges for life on these planets.

̽��ֱ��researchers say their results could be useful when determining where to look for life outside the Solar System.

“It’s exciting that we can start identifying the type of systems we can use to test different origin scenarios,” said Anslow. “It’s a different way to look at the great work that’s already been done on Earth. What molecular pathways led to the enormous variety of life we see around us? Are there other planets where the same pathways exist? It’s an exciting time, being able to combine advances in astronomy and chemistry to study some of the most fundamental questions of all.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the Royal Society and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Richard Anslow is a Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Reference:
R J Anslow, A Bonsor and P B Rimmer. ‘Can comets deliver prebiotic molecules to rocky exoplanets?’ Proceedings of the Royal Society A (2023). DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2023.0434

How did the molecular building blocks for life end up on Earth? One long-standing theory is that they could have been delivered by comets. Now, researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have shown how comets could deposit similar building blocks to other planets in the galaxy.

It’s possible that the molecules that led to life on Earth came from comets, so the same could be true for planets elsewhere in the galaxy

Richard Anslow

solarseven via Getty Images

Artist's impression of a meteor hitting Earth

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Explore life in the Universe with new postgraduate programme

lw355 — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 10:00:19 +0000

A new postgraduate programme will train researchers to understand life's origins, search for habitable planets and consider the most profound question of all: are we alone?

Humanity’s quest to discover the origins of life in the universe

sc604 — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 17:10:32 +0000

For thousands of years, humanity and science have contemplated the origins of life in the Universe. While today’s scientists are well-equipped with innovative technologies, humanity has a long way to go before we fully understand the fundamental aspects of what life is and how it forms.

“We are living in an extraordinary moment in history,” said Professor Didier Queloz, who directs the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe at Cambridge and ETH Zurich’s Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life. While still a doctoral student, Queloz was the first to discover an exoplanet – a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. ̽��ֱ��discovery led to him being awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the three decades since Queloz’s discovery, scientists have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets. Trillions more are predicted to exist within our Milky Way galaxy alone. Each exoplanet discovery raises more questions about how and why life emerged on Earth and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe.

Technological advancements, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and interplanetary missions to Mars, give scientists access to huge volumes of new observations and data. Sifting through all this information to understand the emergence of life in the universe will take a big, multidisciplinary network.

In collaboration with chemist and fellow Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak and astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, Queloz announced the formation of such a network at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Washington, DC. ̽��ֱ��Origins Federation brings together researchers studying the origins of life at Cambridge, ETH Zurich, Harvard ̽��ֱ��, and ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago.

Together, Federation scientists will explore the chemical and physical processes of living organisms and environmental conditions hospitable to supporting life on other planets. “ ̽��ֱ��Origins Federation builds upon a long-standing collegial relationship strengthened through a shared collaboration in a recently completed project with the Simons Foundation,” said Queloz.

These collaborations support the work of researchers like Dr Emily Mitchell from Cambridge's Department of Zoology. Mitchell is co-director of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe and an ecological time traveller. She uses field-based laser-scanning and statistical mathematical ecology on 580-million-year-old fossils of deep-sea organisms to determine the driving factors that influence the macro-evolutionary patterns of life on Earth.

Speaking at AAAS, Mitchell took participants back to four billion years ago when Earth’s early atmosphere - devoid of oxygen and steeped in methane – showed its first signs of microbial life. She spoke about how life survives in extreme environments and then evolves offering potential astrobiological insights into the origins of life elsewhere in the universe.

“As we begin to investigate other planets through the Mars missions, biosignatures could reveal whether or not the origin of life itself and its evolution on Earth is just a happy accident or part of the fundamental nature of the universe, with all its biological and ecological complexities,” said Mitchell.

̽��ֱ��founding centres of the Origins Federation are ̽��ֱ��Origins of Life Initiative (Harvard ̽��ֱ��), Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life (ETH Zurich), the Center for the Origins of Life ( ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago), and the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge).

̽��ֱ��Origins Federation will pursue scientific research topics of interest to its founding centres with a long-term perspective and common milestones. It will strive to establish a stable funding platform to create opportunities for creative and innovative ideas, and to enable young scientists to make a career in this new field. ̽��ֱ��Origins Federation is open to new members, both centres and individuals, and is committed to developing the mechanisms and structure to achieve that aim.

“ ̽��ֱ��pioneering work of Professor Queloz has allowed astronomers and physicists to make advances that were unthinkable only a few years ago, both in the discovery of planets which could host life and the development of techniques to study them,” said Professor Andy Parker, head of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. “But now we need to bring the full range of our scientific understanding to bear in order to understand what life really is and whether it exists on these newly discovered planets. ̽��ֱ��Cavendish Laboratory is proud to host the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe and to partner with the Origins Federation to lead this quest.”

Scientists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, ETH Zurich, Harvard ̽��ֱ��, and the ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago have founded the Origins Federation, which will advance our understanding of the emergence and early evolution of life, and its place in the cosmos.

ETH Zurich/NASA

L-R: Emily Mitchell, Didier Queloz, Kate Adamal, Carl Zimmer

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Seawater could have provided phosphorous required for emerging life

cmm201 — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 13:40:56 +0000

Their results, published in the journal Nature Communications, show that seawater might be the missing source of phosphate, meaning that it could have been available on a large enough scale for life without requiring special environmental conditions.

“This could really change how we think about the environments in which life first originated,” said co-author Professor Nick Tosca from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences.

̽��ֱ��study, which was led by Matthew Brady, a PhD student from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, shows that early seawater could have held one thousand to ten thousand times more phosphate than previously estimated — as long as the water contained a lot of iron.

Phosphate is an essential ingredient in creating life’s building blocks — forming a key component of DNA and RNA — but it is one of the least abundant elements in the cosmos in relation to its biological importance. When in its mineral form, phosphate is also relatively inaccessible — it can be hard to dissolve in water so that life can use it.

Scientists have long suspected that phosphorus became part of biology early on, but they have only recently begun to recognize the role of phosphate in directing the synthesis of molecules required by life on Earth. “Experiments show it makes amazing things happen – chemists can synthesize crucial biomolecules if there is a lot of phosphate in solution,” said Tosca.

But the exact environment needed to produce phosphate has been a topic of discussion. Some studies have suggested that when iron is abundant then phosphate should actually be even less accessible to life. This is, however, controversial because early Earth would have had an oxygen-poor atmosphere where iron would have been widespread.

To understand how life came to depend on phosphate, and the sort of environment that this element would have formed in, they carried out geochemical modelling to recreate early conditions on Earth.

“It’s exciting to see how simple experiments in a bottle can overturn our thinking about the conditions that were present on the early Earth,” said Brady.

In the lab, they made up seawater with the same chemistry thought to have existed in Earth’s early history. They also ran their experiments in an atmosphere starved of oxygen, just like on ancient Earth.

̽��ֱ��team’s results suggest that seawater itself could have been a major source of this essential element.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean that life on Earth started in seawater,” said Tosca, “It opens up a lot of possibilities for how seawater could have supplied phosphate to different environments— for instance, lakes, lagoons, or shorelines where sea spray could have carried the phosphate onto land.”

Previously scientists had come up with a range of ways of generating phosphate, some theories involving special environments such as acidic volcanic springs or alkaline lakes, and rare minerals found only in meteorites.

“We had a hunch that iron was key to phosphate solubility, but there just wasn’t enough data,” said Tosca. ̽��ֱ��idea for the team’s experiments came when they looked at waters that bathe sediments deposited in the modern Baltic Sea. “It is unusual because it's high in both phosphate and iron — we started to wonder what was so different about those particular waters.”

In their experiments, the researchers added different amounts of iron to a range of synthetic seawater samples and tested how much phosphorous it could hold before crystals formed and minerals separated from the liquid. They then built these data points into a model that could predict how much phosphate ancient seawater could hold.

̽��ֱ��Baltic Sea pore waters provided one set of modern samples they used to test their model. “We could reproduce that unusual water chemistry perfectly,” said Tosca. From there they went on to explore the chemistry of seawater before any biology was around.

̽��ֱ��results also have implications for scientists trying to understand the possibilities for life beyond Earth. “If iron helps put more phosphate in solution, then this could have relevance to early Mars,” said Tosca.

Evidence for water on ancient Mars is abundant, including old river beds and flood deposits, and we also know that there was a lot of iron at the surface and the atmosphere was at times oxygen-poor, said Tosca.

Their simulations of surface waters filtering through rocks on the Martian surface suggest that iron-rich water might have supplied phosphates in this environment too.

“It’s going to be fascinating to see how the community uses our results to explore new, alternative pathways for the evolution of life on our planet and beyond,” said Brady.

Reference:
Matthew P Brady et al. 'Marine phosphate availability and the chemical origins of life on Earth.' Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32815-x

̽��ֱ��problem of how phosphorus became a universal ingredient for life on Earth may have been solved by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cape Town, who have recreated primordial seawater containing the element in the lab.

This could really change how we think about the environments in which life first originated

Nick Tosca

NASA

Artist Concept of an Early Earth

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Cambridge launches new Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 15:11:51 +0000

̽��ֱ��Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe will bring together an international team of scientists and philosophers, led by 2019 Nobel Laureate Professor Didier Queloz.

Thanks to simultaneous revolutions in exoplanet discoveries, prebiotic chemistry and solar system exploration, scientists can now investigate whether the Earth and the processes that made life possible are unique in the Universe.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has recently launched the Initiative for Planetary Science and Life in the Universe (IPLU) to enable cross-disciplinary research on planetology and life in the Universe.

Building on IPLU’s activities, the new Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe will support fundamental cross-disciplinary research over the next 10 years to tackle one of the great interdisciplinary challenges of our time: to understand how life emerged on Earth, whether the Universe is full of life, and ask what the nature of life is.

̽��ֱ��Centre will include researchers from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Earth Sciences, Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Institute of Astronomy, Department of Zoology, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of Divinity, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

“ ̽��ֱ��Centre will act as a catalyst for the development of our vision to understanding life in the Universe through a long-term research programme that will be the driving force for international coordination of research and education,” said Queloz, Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Cavendish Laboratory and Director of the Centre.

Research within the Centre will focus on four themes: identifying the chemical pathways to the origins of life; characterising the environments on Earth and other planets that could act as the cradle of prebiotic chemistry and life; discovering and characterising habitable exoplanets and signatures of geological and biological evolution; and refining our understanding of life through philosophical and mathematical concepts.

̽��ֱ��Centre will collaborate with researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Colorado Boulder (USA), ̽��ֱ�� College London, ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Harvard ̽��ֱ�� (USA) and the Centre of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey (USA).

“Understanding the reactions that predisposed the first cells to form on Earth is the greatest unsolved mystery in science,” said programme collaborator Matthew Powner from ̽��ֱ�� College London. “Critical challenges of increasing complexity must be addressed in this field, but these challenges represent one of the most exciting frontiers in science.”

Carol Cleland, Director of the Center for the Study of Origins and Professor of Philosophy at the ̽��ֱ�� of Colorado Boulder, also collaborator on the programme said: “ ̽��ֱ��new Centre is unique in the breadth of its interdisciplinarity, bringing together scientists and philosophers to address central questions about the nature and extent of life in the universe.

“Characteristics that scientists currently take as fundamental to life reflect our experience with a single example of life, familiar Earth life. These characteristics may represent little more than chemical and physical contingencies unique to the conditions under which life arose on Earth. If this is the case, our concepts for theorising about life will be misleading. Philosophers of science are especially well trained to help scientists 'think outside the box' by identifying and exploring the conceptual foundations of contemporary scientific theorising about life with an emphasis on developing strategies for searching for truly novel forms of life on other worlds.”

Didier Queloz is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

With a £10 million grant awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is to establish a new research centre dedicated to exploring the nature and extent of life in the Universe.

̽��ֱ��Centre will act as a catalyst for the development of our vision to understanding life in the Universe through a long-term research programme that will be the driving force for international coordination of research and education

Didier Queloz

ESO/M Kornmesser

Artists’s impression of the rocky super-Earth HD 85512 b

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