Could alien life exist in the form of DNA-shaped dust?
Aug 12th, 2007 | By CentroN | Category: Physics, Research, ScienceNewScientist.com news service
Stephen Battersby
Could alien life exist in the form of dancing specks of dust? According to a new simulation, electrically charged dust can organise itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave in many ways like living organisms, reproducing and passing on information to one another.
“This came as a bit of a surprise to us”, says Gregor Morfill of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. He and colleagues have built a computer simulation to model what happens to dust immersed in an ionised gas, or plasma. Read more
