The Lab With Brad

Living cells that make their living inside other living cells

Inside the membrane of most of your cells are what look like little cells, with their own membranes and DNA. These little cell like things do important things, without which your cells couldn’t function, and you couldn’t live. The thing is, once upon a time, they really were cells in their own right, cells that one day moved inside of another cell, and never left.

Here are a couple of videos on the pearl fish and how it lives inside a sea cucumber.

Pearlfish hides inside a sea cucumber

Seeking shelter up a sea cucumber's bottom

Here’s a video about cleaner fish.

coral reef: cleaner fish; remora

Here’s an article about African buffalo, and the birds that help keep them clean.

Making New Friends: African Buffalos get all the birds

Here’s a video about several birds that have partnered symbiotically with other creatures.

Animal partnerships - David Attenborough

Here’s an article about the origin and evolution of Chloroplasts, which do photosynthesis for most modern plants.

Chloroplast evolution, structure and functions

Here’s an article comparing Chloroplast, which moved into other cells over a billion years ago, to roughly the same thing happening again, much later, only 60-millean years ago.

Small Things Considered: Play It Again, Cyan

And here are a couple of articles about the origin and evolution of mitochondria.

Origin of Mitochondria

The origin and early evolution of mitochondria

Comes the oxygen

When oxygen first began to accumulate in our oceans and our atmosphere, most of what was alive at the time couldn’t take it. The oxygen was a terrible poison. Even those life forms that could stand the extra O2, had trouble when the oxygen reacted with the iron in the ocean, and took away much of what had been food. If that wasn’t bad enough, a long ice age got started, all because of tiny microbes, too small to see with the naked eye.

Here’s a link to the episode of that other podcast that has an add for this podcast in it.

The greatest Story Never Told: episode 22.

Here’s a nifty video about the way oxygen caused problems when it first arrived.

That Time Oxygen Almost Killed Everything

And here’s an article about how lakes can switch over to the same sorts of microbes that ruled the world, back before all this troublesome oxygen changed everything.

Microbes dictate regime shifts causing anoxia in lakes and seas

Brad got older, and Phil got bolder. Since the one brother had a birthday and got all lazy, the other brother made a new show, and went all crazy. Join us while the inmate, (Phil) takes over the asylum, (the podcast.) No animals were provably harmed in the making of this show.

What was the first food?

The energy we need in order to live comes from the food we eat. Other organisms use other forms of energy. But what about the first organisms? Where did their energy come from? Along with a look at how living cells use energy, we try and figure out what was the very first food.

Here’s an article about early life, and the food they may have been eating, at least while it lasted.

Biological Evolution

Here is a short article about the DNA study that concluded that life could have started around hydrothermal vents.

We've been wrong about the origins of life for 90 years

Here’s a more technical paper on the same DNA study.

One step beyond a ribosome: The ancient anaerobic core

Here are two articles about life that can live on electric energy, without having to snag electrons from ingested substances.

Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy

These bacteria eat and breathe electricity

Here are several videos about the electric bacteria, and some of what we might be able to do with them.

Can Bacteria Live Off Electricity?

Bacteria that Eat Electricity

Electric Microbes Research

Prebiotic evolution part 2: DNA and RNA

DNA cannot copy itself. It needs enzymes, very large complicated proteins to replicate from one cell to a new one. The way the proteins are produced requires DNA and RNA. All three types of molecule have to be present in a cell for the cell to work. What exactly are DNA and RNA, and how did all this complicated business get started? Join us for the conclusion of our look at the evolution that happened before evolution.

Here’s something about how the sugar needed to make RNA has been detected in meteorites.

Ribose, a sugar needed for life, has been detected in meteorites

Here are a couple of articles about a couple of experiments, attempting to recreate some of the conditions of the early solar system, to see what sorts of molecules important for life could have formed before our planet was even here.

The "R" in RNA can easily be made in space, and that has implications for life beyond Earth

Key sugar for life on Earth could have formed in space

Here’s a bit about the phosphate backbone used by RNA and DNA.

phosphate backbone

Here’s a video on the RNA world—a notion that RNA was able to copy itself and evolve, and eventually give rise to the system that cells use today.

What Is the RNA World Hypothesis?

Prebiotic evolution part 1: proteins

Most of the way your cells do what they do is by using proteins. Proteins are made by life. But if life makes proteins and life needs proteins, where did the first proteins come from? Join us for part 1 of our investigation of the evolution before evolution—the building up of the complex chemicals needed for the beginning of life.

Here’s a lecture on prebiotic evolution.

PREBIOTIC EVOLUTION AND THE EMERGENCE OF LIFE

Here’s a slightly dated paper on prebiotic evolution.

The Origin and Early Evolution of Life: Prebiotic Chemistry, the Pre-RNA World, and Time

Here’s something about the Miller–Urey experiment, and some of the variations that have been done since.

Primordial Soup's On: Scientists Repeat Evolution's Most Famous Experiment

And here’s a little bit about the Murchison meteorite.

Meteorite That Fell in 1969 Still Revealing Secrets of the Early Solar System

Meteoritical Bulletin: Entry for Murchison

The solar system’s greatest hits

After gravity managed to make some decent sized planets, they started getting smashed together with almost planet sized bits and pieces. These impacts may be responsible for our oceans, and perhaps even for life on our planet, but it was not an easy ride. Join us for a look at some of the biggest collisions in our inner solar system, and the huge scars that were left behind.

While talking about the biggest things that have been knocking around, we also talk about some of the smallest things that have hit the earth. Here are a few articles on traces of radioactive iron60—a hard to find fingerprint from relatively nearby supernova.

Supernovae showered Earth with radioactive iron

Stardust in the Antarctic snow: Iron-60 discovery in the Antarctic provides information on the environment of solar system

Supernova left its mark in ancient bacteria

Here’s an article about one of the ways we can figure out what has hit the earth, even when the impact crater has long since eroded away.

Tiny 'spherules' reveal details about Earth's asteroid impacts

Here’s some info about Mercury's Caloris Basin.

Mercury's Caloris Basin

Here are a couple of articles about a large mass under our moon’s largest impact basin.

There’s An Enormous, Mysterious Mass Under the Moon’s Largest Crater

An 'Anomaly' the Size of Hawaii Is Buried Beneath the Moon's Biggest Crater

And here’s a bit about how Mars became the two faced planet.

Giant Asteroid Collision May Have Radically Transformed Mars

From gas and dust, to all of us

The general idea is simple—a cloud of gas and dust collapses in on itself, driven by gravity, until roughly in the middle of it, our sun began to shine. But the details are somewhat odd, especially when we compare our solar system to what we’re able to observe of planets around other stars. What triggered the original collapse? Why does our sun spin so slowly? Where did the earth’s water come from? How and why did our solar system end up with nice stable, nearly circular orbits that gave life on earth billions of years of relative peace? There’s plenty of room for competing theories and interesting side trips as we take a look at the birth of our sun and planets.

Here are a couple of articles about bacteria that have their own built-in compass.

Bacteria That Synthesize Nano-sized Compasses to Navigate Using Earth's Geomagnetic Field

Supernova left its mark in ancient bacteria

Here’s a video about how a super nova could have kicked off the birth of our sun.

Origins of the Solar System

Here are two articles about the formation of our solar system.

How Did the Solar System Form?

The origin of the Solar System

Here’s some information about extra solar planets.

Exoplanet three times the mass of Jupiter has a wild orbit

Weird Worlds? Yes -- by the Trillion

making the ingredients

Before our planet could form, all the stuff one would like to make a planet out of had to be made. Starting with hydrogen and helium, stars had to cook up the rest of the periodic table over a nice long period. Toss in some explosions and collisions, and everything we’re made of was ready to make us. But, all those giant stars couldn’t even get started, if it weren’t for a quirk of how the tiniest pieces of the universe interact. But hey, what’s a little quantum physics amongst friends?

Here’s a video on quantum tunneling.

What is quantum tunneling?

Here’s an article about how the sun needs quantum tunneling to fuse hydrogen into helium, the source of it’s light and warmth.

The Sun Wouldn’t Shine Without Quantum Physics

Here’s an article on a quasar from the early universe.

The Brightest Quasar of the Early Universe Shines with the Light of 600 Trillion Suns

And here’s something on colliding neutron stars, and the gold and other heavy elements such incidents can produce.

How a Neutron-Star Collision Created a Plume of Gold

Just after the beginning

The standard model of cosmology has been worked out, slowly and painfully and oh so very carefully. Only trouble is, some recent observations don’t quite match what the theory predicts. Join us for a timeline of the early universe, and some of what doesn’t quite match what we were expecting.

Here’s some very good background on the big bang and the standard model.

Our Expanding Universe: Age, History & Other Facts

Here’s an article on the oddball results of examining the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The Mystery of Cosmic Cold Spots Just Got Even Weirder

Here’s a short video on gravitational lensing, and how we use it.

How are Distant Galaxies Magnified Through Gravitational Lensing?

Here are a couple of articles about what we’ve seen by peering through gravitational lenses.

Some of the universe's first stars have actually been seen

Universe Quickly Spawned Stars After Big Bang, Ancient Galaxy Shows

Here are a couple of articles about using radio to find very early stars.

Astronomers detect the first stars in the universe

Astronomers May Have Found the First Stars Born After the Big Bang