Podcast: Play in new window | Download | EmbedSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Dr. Meg invites you to explore one of the most deeply personal and often overlooked aspects of human experience: the profound…

FIRST ON DAILY SIGNAL—The head of the U.S. Census Bureau is set to face questions from Congress on Dec. 5 regarding its overcounting of residents of blue states and undercounting of those in red states.…

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download | EmbedSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Podcast Index | The U.S. medical system has lost its way, corrupted by financial entanglements with Big Medicine. The Centers…

The leftist media are describing President-elect Donald Trump’s second-term Cabinet picks and transition as a “fascist” onslaught, but the American people disagree. That’s according to a number…

A dash of humor for your Thanksgiving table. Now, we don’t need measurements here in the rural Heartland. We just do it like our grandmas and great-grandmas did, and it comes out just fine. If you have…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | EmbedSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podcast Index | TuneIn | In this episode of America Out Loud PULSE, we review several of the…

We’ve known for a while that complex chemistry occurs in space. Organic molecules have been detected in cold molecular clouds, and we have even found sugars and amino acids, the so-called “building blocks of life,” within several asteroids. The raw ingredients of terrestrial life are common in the Universe, and meteorites and comets may have even seeded Earth with those ingredients. This idea isn’t controversial. But there is a more radical idea that Earth was seeded not just with the building blocks of life but life itself. It’s known as panspermia, and a recent study has brought the idea back to popular science headlines. But the study is more subtle and interesting than some headlines suggest. Panspermia became popular in the 1800s and 1900s when it became clear that life arose surprisingly early on Earth. On a geologic scale, cellular life appears almost as soon as Earth cooled enough to support it. Given the complexity of DNA and living cells, how could such a thing have evolved so quickly? In the panspermia model, life evolved either in space or on some distant world, and was carried to Earth within asteroids or comets. We know that some living things can survive the harsh vacuum of space, so perhaps we have some alien, extraterrestrial origin. But there are reasons to be skeptical. For one, the transition from organic to biological chemistry may be remarkably adaptive. While life appears to have appeared suddenly on Earth, that may be precisely what you’d expect. Without an example of extraterrestrial life, we simply don’t know. And while life can survive in space for a limited time, it’s not likely to survive for the millions of years it would take for an asteroid to traverse the solar system, much less the billions of years it would take to travel between star systems. Still, one step toward proving panspermia would be to gather material from an asteroid and find out it has life, and that’s exactly what this latest study found. The Hayabusa2 mission, launched in 2014, landed on a small asteroid named Ryugu in 2018 and returned a sample of material to Earth in 2020. The sample was kept sterile the whole time, hermetically sealed for the journey back, and only opened in a pure nitrogen clean room using sterilized equipment. The sample was as clean and uncontaminated as we could get. When the team prepared a sample and looked at it under an electron microscope, they found rods and filaments of organic matter consistent with microbial life. In other words, the team found life on an asteroid. Except they likely didn’t. The size distribution is consistent with terrestrial life. Credit: Genge, et al One thing to keep in mind is that microbial life is incredibly robust. It exists everywhere and spreads rapidly. You can find the stuff in the cores of nuclear power plants, in hot thermal vents, and in the cleanest clean room. And even if you sterilize something, microbial life will find a way. When the team found life on their sample, the first thing they did was to look for evidence of contamination, and there was plenty of evidence to be found. To begin with, the size distribution of the organic rods and filaments found in the sample is consistent with those commonly deposited by terrestrial life. Their data also found evidence of a growth and decline period of about five days, which is also consistent with Earth life. If the Ryugu samples had truly evolved beyond Earth, they would be genetically separated from us by millions or billions of years. Their size and growth rate wouldn’t match those of our common microbes. So the best explanation is that the sample became contaminated despite our best efforts. While the study doesn’t support the panspermia model, it does tell us two important things. The first is that our sterilization procedures are likely inadequate. We may have already spread life to the Moon and Mars inadvertently. The second is that asteroids have organic materials that could sustain terrestrial life. That’s good news if we want to establish ourselves elsewhere in the solar system. Earth life may not have begun in space, but it could very well end up there. Reference: Genge, Matthew J., et al. “Rapid colonization of a space?returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganisms.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science (2024). The post Asteroid Samples Returned to Earth Were Immediately Colonized by Bacteria appeared first on Universe Today.

"We're all at the mercy of the cowbell sketch in different ways," Buck Dharma says. Continue reading…

Writing songs for one of his best friends. Brent Cobb is one of the most talented songwriters in country music. Aside from being a phenomenal artist, Cobb shines when putting pen to paper and has written some heaters throughout his career. Last fall, Cobb shared with Whiskey Riff that his songwriting process is unlike most artists' and that he tends to come up with the melody first. "I'll let my emotion bring up a melody and I'll try and just let it naturally happen. That might be a whistle or might humming something. Then, once the melody happens, I'll pick up the guitar and try and find some chords to go around it. And then I try and pay attention to whatever that subconscious emotion that the melody is bringing up, and then I try and fit words and syllables to that melody like a puzzle..." Cobb has penned profound songs like "Patina," "Black Creek," "Shine On Rainy Day," and his most recent single, "Snakebite." But while he has written an expansive catalog on his own, his work with the Steel Woods' founder, the late, great Jason "Rowdy" Cope, is pure country gold. When Cobb penned "Let The Rain Comes Down," Cobb told Whiskey Riff that Whiskey Myers initially wanted to cut it, but his friend Rowdy had asked him to hold it for The Steel Woods. That single would later go on to be one of their biggest hits. "I recorded a version of it, and then they recorded a version of it, and then Whiskey Myers, they wanted to record a version of it…they’re our buddies, you know.  But I remember Rowdy hitting me up, and he was like, “Hey man, I heard Whiskey Myers wanted to record a version of ‘Let The Rain Come Down.' He was like, ‘Don’t let them have it…it’s going to be a big song for us.'” But that was not the only time Cobb and Cope created magic. On a recent sit-down with The Watering Hole Podcast, Brent Cobb told the hosts, Rhett and Jager, about how "Better In The Fall" came to be. "Yeah, I wrote that song sitting on my parents' front porch. I'd been out to L.A. already; this was probably 2006 or 2007, and I had made that first album. Me and Rowdy, Jason Cope, who is the founder of The Steel Woods, he was already planning a band, already The Steel Woods. He didn't have a name for it yet, but he was already building that thing. Rowdy was a profound influence on my writing. He was like my older brother, you know? Not just musically but as a person. I was sort of writing it with those chord changes in a way that I would think, 'Well Rowdy would like this.' When Rowdy and them, when he finally got that band put together, and he met Wes and he had the band put together, he was looking for songs. He had studio time saved up at Blackbird, and he called me up and was like, 'Alright, I'm pulling the trigger on all of this. You got any songs?' And that was one of the ones I sent; man, they cut the hell out of it." While Jason Cope is sadly no longer with us on this earth, his legacy lives on through The Steel Woods' music, and his presence was there each night the group graced a stage. Although The Steel Woods recently played their last show at The Ryman, Rowdy and Brent Cobb's magic will be enjoyed beyond their touring days. Check out the entire episode while you're here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o89_B-99tpg