ARGONNE, Illinois — In the basement of a nondescript building here at Argonne National Laboratory, nickel particles in a beaker are building themselves into magnetic snakes that may one day give clues about how life originally organized itself.

These chains of metal particles look so much like real, living animals, it is hard not to think of them as alive. (See exclusive video below.) But they are actually bits of metal that came together under the influence of a specially tuned magnetic field.

"It behaves like some live object," says physicist Alex Snezhko. "It moves. It crashes onto free-floating particles and absorbs them."

On the spectrum of scientific endeavor, this is very far upstream in the realm where people are just trying to figure how stuff works and why. There is some talk of applications, but at the heart of it, this is really just pure research. Snezhko and fellow physicist Igor Aronson — both tall, thin men who have matching Russian accents and familial rapport — have discovered something really cool, and they're trying to simply figure out what's behind it. Along the way, they could learn something fundamental about how the world works.



Read the full article, plus video here

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/snakes.html?npu=1&mbid=yhp

i think it is interesting. We can predict what lifeforms look like with this discovery when we find another earth like planet.

your assertion is based from the bible. :lmfao:

fact
:lmfao:

retarded thread



Keep your retard comments to yourself......

WTF, it sounds pretty cool. But they're not even concerned with applications, they're trying to find how it might relate to "the big picture", and it's just "pure research"??? What a bunch of crap, they're either on drugs or spent way too much time in the lab, they should have the funding pulled.

Well, you sure have your capitalist hat on!
Raally, sometimes people are driven just to know, not for profit....especially colleges.

Well, you sure have your capitalist hat on!
Raally, sometimes people are driven just to know, not for profit....especially colleges.

"Our metal bits squirm, give more grant moneyz! lolz!"


A few years ago, a scientist discovered that if you take one of those ball chains (like you find holding a pen to the desk at the bank), tie it in any sort of knot, and place it on a vibrating plate, it will come untied on its own. Applications? Possibly explaining the untangling of chromosomes prior to cell reproduction. See, that wasn't so hard! I don't see how wiggling a bunch of metal bits around can contribute to finding how life began.

I'm open to further explanation, but the explanation in the article just sounds way too open-ended, like a cop-out reason for just wanting to play around with cool stuff. Example: Locally we have the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (really awesome stuff going on there), they levitated a frog once. Totally useless, they just felt like doing it for the coolness factor, but they didn't come up with some cockamamie (spell check ftw) reason why.

Better yet, It was seen that if you place a bunch of pennies in your hand, and shake them, they will line up. Just like DNA does when it compacts itself.

Actually the definition of work is to establish order. The two examples here are the natural state of the chain and pennies when work is applied.