Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet!
Quoting the famous words of Mork, I replynano nano. Best, John At 09:47 PM 1/8/2007, Sterling K. Webb wrote: Hi, Gerry, How big is nano again, one billionth of a ---? One billionth of a meter, or one millionth of a millimeter, so if you had nanobacteria that were 100 nm long, it would take 10,000 of them, head to tail (assuming they had heads or tails), to span one millimeter. A wavelength of visible light would be 400 nm to 770 nm (depending on its color), so a 100 nm nanobacteria would be about 1/6 the width of one wavelength of yellow light. (Do you suppose they surf?) There is a smaller unit, the angstrom, which is one ten-billionth of a meter, or ten times smaller. We're talking SMALL here -- individual atoms range from five angstroms (hydrogen) up to about 15 angstroms in size (lead). Figure atoms at one nm +/- half an nm. So a 100 nm critter is at most only 200 atoms wide and could only contain about 8 million small atoms if it were a sphere. A simple organic molecule, like cooking oil, is about 20 angstroms across; that's 2 nm. We can measure that molecular size in our backyards, by the way, by placing a tiny drop of oil of known volume on the surface of a big calm pool of water and waiting for it to spread out as far as it can go, then divide the known volume by the area of the oil-slick, which is only one molecule thick. Neat trick, eh? Who thought of that? Benjamin Franklin... Most viruses are 10 nm to 100 nm, but the record-holder is 400 nm, or bigger than some bacteria. Most bacteria range from 200 nm (the very tiniest) up to big nasty ones at 2000 nm. Helpful little animals like yeast cells (there are 600+ species of yeast) are 2000 nm, no bigger than a bacterium, up to 15,000 nm. Cells of protozoa like amoeba are 20,000 to 30,000 nm across, but every once in a while an ameoba may grow to 4,000,000 nm across --- that's 4 mm and almost big enough to have a sit-down talk with! (If they had anything to say...) Protozoa like paramecium are very complicated creatures. Even though they are only one cell, they have specialized cellular structures that function as gullets, stomachs, excretory organs, and legs. They have an interesting sex life and probably have more to say than that amoeba... The many paramecium species range from less than 100,000 nm up to as much as 500,000 nm, or big enough to see with the naked eye (well, your eyes, maybe; mine are not quite that good). One of your own 100,000 billion human body cells is on average, about 10,000 nm across and weighs, on average, about one nanogram, less if you're skinny. And, me, I'm about 1,775,000,000 nm tall. Does that put things in perspective? Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Gerald Flaherty [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 7:24 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet! The relatively recent acceptence of germs required a revolution in the medical community ushering in the modern norm where cleanliness became the imperative. So it seems plausible that self-replicating nano things might make modern science balk. How big is nano again, one billionth of a---? Jerry Flaherty __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet!
absolutely and fun too esp ben's little TIP. Jerry Flaherty - Original Message - From: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Gerald Flaherty [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Meteorite List meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 11:47 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet! Hi, Gerry, How big is nano again, one billionth of a ---? One billionth of a meter, or one millionth of a millimeter, so if you had nanobacteria that were 100 nm long, it would take 10,000 of them, head to tail (assuming they had heads or tails), to span one millimeter. A wavelength of visible light would be 400 nm to 770 nm (depending on its color), so a 100 nm nanobacteria would be about 1/6 the width of one wavelength of yellow light. (Do you suppose they surf?) There is a smaller unit, the angstrom, which is one ten-billionth of a meter, or ten times smaller. We're talking SMALL here -- individual atoms range from five angstroms (hydrogen) up to about 15 angstroms in size (lead). Figure atoms at one nm +/- half an nm. So a 100 nm critter is at most only 200 atoms wide and could only contain about 8 million small atoms if it were a sphere. A simple organic molecule, like cooking oil, is about 20 angstroms across; that's 2 nm. We can measure that molecular size in our backyards, by the way, by placing a tiny drop of oil of known volume on the surface of a big calm pool of water and waiting for it to spread out as far as it can go, then divide the known volume by the area of the oil-slick, which is only one molecule thick. Neat trick, eh? Who thought of that? Benjamin Franklin... Most viruses are 10 nm to 100 nm, but the record-holder is 400 nm, or bigger than some bacteria. Most bacteria range from 200 nm (the very tiniest) up to big nasty ones at 2000 nm. Helpful little animals like yeast cells (there are 600+ species of yeast) are 2000 nm, no bigger than a bacterium, up to 15,000 nm. Cells of protozoa like amoeba are 20,000 to 30,000 nm across, but every once in a while an ameoba may grow to 4,000,000 nm across --- that's 4 mm and almost big enough to have a sit-down talk with! (If they had anything to say...) Protozoa like paramecium are very complicated creatures. Even though they are only one cell, they have specialized cellular structures that function as gullets, stomachs, excretory organs, and legs. They have an interesting sex life and probably have more to say than that amoeba... The many paramecium species range from less than 100,000 nm up to as much as 500,000 nm, or big enough to see with the naked eye (well, your eyes, maybe; mine are not quite that good). One of your own 100,000 billion human body cells is on average, about 10,000 nm across and weighs, on average, about one nanogram, less if you're skinny. And, me, I'm about 1,775,000,000 nm tall. Does that put things in perspective? Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Gerald Flaherty [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 7:24 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet! The relatively recent acceptence of germs required a revolution in the medical community ushering in the modern norm where cleanliness became the imperative. So it seems plausible that self-replicating nano things might make modern science balk. How big is nano again, one billionth of a---? Jerry Flaherty __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet!
Hi, The whole question of the reality of nanobacteria has been with us for sometime now. The concept of some form of microbial (?) life many times smaller than the smallest bacteria originates with a Texas geologist (Folk), who found fossil traces in Italian carbonates. The smallest known bacteria are as large as the largest viruses. Pox viruses, which cause diseases such as smallpox, can be 300 nanometers across their longest axis. There are bacteria as small as 200 nm. Viruses can get much smaller, however; the picornaviruses, a group that includes polio and hepatitis A, can be as small as 24 to 35 nm. The proposed nanobacteria are about 100 nanometers across, which would mean they would have perhaps one eighth of the volume of the smallest known bacteria, which is impossibly small for a form of life, say microbiologists. Of course, you should bear in mind that, just as paleontologists don't like physicists and astronomers proposing asteroids as dinosaur killers, biologists don't like geologists proposing any new life forms that the biologists may have missed. In 1998 the debate got real when Olavi Kajander and Neva Ciftcioglu of the University of Kuopio in Finland claimed to have found nanobacteria, surrounded by a calcium-rich mineral called apatite, in human kidney stones. Medically, the cause of kidney stones has been an unsolved mystery for a century. Objections were quick in coming. Many of the supposed nanobacteria were less than 100 nm across, smaller than many viruses, which cannot replicate independently. Microbiologically, to contain the DNA and proteins needed to function, a cell must be at least 140 nm across. If these are bacteria, they are miracles of packaging. These particles are self replicating, that is without doubt, [University of British Columbia microbiologist Yossef] Av Gay says. But finding out what is inside them is complicated... The story seems to be gearing toward the idea that these are not bacteria, but maybe a new living form. It is a very interesting story, but you won't get the answer now. Nanobacteria, or whatever form of life they are, have now been found in kidney stones, deep ocean sediments, a mile deep in solid rock, in human arterial plaque, gallstones, mine sludge, psammona bodies (calcified structures in ovarian cancer), and of course, first and foremost, they, or rather their traces, are the evidence of life in the famous Alan Hills Martian meteorite. It is the claim of nanobacteria that chiefly fuels opposition to the meteorite discovery claim, as a great many biologists are virulently opposed to the notion of nanobacteria. There is no dount in my mind that the acceptance of that claim will wait until the notion of such small life is accepted (and understood). Don't hold your breath. Many decades ago an Australian pathologist discovered that a bacteria (H. pylori) was the cause of stomach ulcers, a disorder thought by medical science to be without an infectious cause. It took nearly two decades and hundreds of positive trials to convince the over-grown and slow-moving consensus of science. Yet, today, after twenty more years since it was ccepted as the cause of ulcers, if you go to a doctor with your ulcer, he will likely NOT treat you for your H. pylori infection -- forty years after the discovery. And that was just the discovery of a perfectly ordinary bacteria. Maybe in another 40 years... Interestingly, there are currently TWO biological mysteries that revolve around the question of very small agents. There's the whole nanobacteria question and there is the question of the particulate agents of the dozen or so known spongiform encephalopathies, something about 1/3 the size of a large virus; in other words, about the same size as small nanobacteria. The currently popular theory is that the agent is an abnormally folded protein called a prion. However, despite the prion theory winning its advocate the Nobel Price more than a decade ago, it has never achieved a demonstrated proof (in vitrio or in vivo). Very embarassing. And, after a decade, the prion theory has generated no advances of any kind. (Even Einstein had to wait 15 years to get his Nobel for relativity, from 1905 until 1919, when there was finally an experimental proof.) The answers, whatever they are, will probably take decades to turn up. Sterling K. Webb - Mayo Clinic finds DNA in nanobacteria, 2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3729487.stm Nanobacteria discovered in mine sludge; too small to be seen under a microscope, they are found by their DNA: December, 2006: http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20061121184849data_trunc_sys.shtml - - Original Message - From: doctor death [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com Sent: Sunday, January 07, 2007
Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet!
Hi, Gerry, How big is nano again, one billionth of a ---? One billionth of a meter, or one millionth of a millimeter, so if you had nanobacteria that were 100 nm long, it would take 10,000 of them, head to tail (assuming they had heads or tails), to span one millimeter. A wavelength of visible light would be 400 nm to 770 nm (depending on its color), so a 100 nm nanobacteria would be about 1/6 the width of one wavelength of yellow light. (Do you suppose they surf?) There is a smaller unit, the angstrom, which is one ten-billionth of a meter, or ten times smaller. We're talking SMALL here -- individual atoms range from five angstroms (hydrogen) up to about 15 angstroms in size (lead). Figure atoms at one nm +/- half an nm. So a 100 nm critter is at most only 200 atoms wide and could only contain about 8 million small atoms if it were a sphere. A simple organic molecule, like cooking oil, is about 20 angstroms across; that's 2 nm. We can measure that molecular size in our backyards, by the way, by placing a tiny drop of oil of known volume on the surface of a big calm pool of water and waiting for it to spread out as far as it can go, then divide the known volume by the area of the oil-slick, which is only one molecule thick. Neat trick, eh? Who thought of that? Benjamin Franklin... Most viruses are 10 nm to 100 nm, but the record-holder is 400 nm, or bigger than some bacteria. Most bacteria range from 200 nm (the very tiniest) up to big nasty ones at 2000 nm. Helpful little animals like yeast cells (there are 600+ species of yeast) are 2000 nm, no bigger than a bacterium, up to 15,000 nm. Cells of protozoa like amoeba are 20,000 to 30,000 nm across, but every once in a while an ameoba may grow to 4,000,000 nm across --- that's 4 mm and almost big enough to have a sit-down talk with! (If they had anything to say...) Protozoa like paramecium are very complicated creatures. Even though they are only one cell, they have specialized cellular structures that function as gullets, stomachs, excretory organs, and legs. They have an interesting sex life and probably have more to say than that amoeba... The many paramecium species range from less than 100,000 nm up to as much as 500,000 nm, or big enough to see with the naked eye (well, your eyes, maybe; mine are not quite that good). One of your own 100,000 billion human body cells is on average, about 10,000 nm across and weighs, on average, about one nanogram, less if you're skinny. And, me, I'm about 1,775,000,000 nm tall. Does that put things in perspective? Sterling K. Webb --- - Original Message - From: Gerald Flaherty [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Sterling K. Webb [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 08, 2007 7:24 PM Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Strangest link between life on earth and mars yet! The relatively recent acceptence of germs required a revolution in the medical community ushering in the modern norm where cleanliness became the imperative. So it seems plausible that self-replicating nano things might make modern science balk. How big is nano again, one billionth of a---? Jerry Flaherty __ Meteorite-list mailing list Meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
