It was once said if it sprouted on your door, a witch had cursed your family.

East Greenland has sprung a leak.

Water sure does some crazy stuff when it’s cold.

Half a century ago, we were advised jokingly to never shake hands with aliens, because they might be made of antimatter. In that case, touching them would lead to mutual annihilation. Today, thanks to advances in gamma-ray and cosmic-ray astronomy, we know that antimatter is a negligible constituent in the cosmic mass budget. These circumstances are well understood in the context of the dense early phase of the Universe, when all traces of antimatter annihilated with matter, leaving behind a tiny (six parts in ten billion) excess of matter that accounts for what we observe in the Universe today. But there is another important reason to avoid contact with extraterrestrial life: it could be a mirror image of terrestrial life. In 1848, the chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that some molecules essential for life exist in mirror image forms. The two forms are referred to as “left-handed” and “right-handed” where the handedness, or chirality, refers to the direction in which polarized light rotates as it propagates through a solution of the molecules. Biology on Earth broke the symmetry and chose homochirality, representing just one of these chiral forms. DNA, RNA, and their building blocks are all right-handed, whereas amino acids and proteins are all left-handed. The symmetry breaking could have occurred before or after life emerged. This uncertainty might be resolved once we discover life beyond Earth. Two chiral copies of a generic amino acid that are mirror images of each other (Image credit: Wikimedia) If extraterrestrial life is found to have equal probabilities for being left-handed or right-handed, then we would know that the symmetry was accidentally broken on Earth in a way that made one handedness dominate terrestrial ecology. It would also suggest that the transfer of life between planets, called panspermia, is insignificant, as it would have naturally led to a single dominant handedness in systems that share a common heritage. A new Policy Forum article co-authored by 38 leading experts in the journal Science alerts to the existential risk from mirror life, based on a 299-page technical report titled: “Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks”. In mirror bacteria, the DNA, RNA, amino acids and proteins are replaced by their mirror images. Future advances in synthetic biology could lead to the production of mirror bacteria. Their interactions with natural organisms would be different from the interactions of natural bacteria with natural organisms. Immune defenses rely on interactions between chiral molecules that could fail to detect or kill mirror bacteria. As a result, mirror bacteria might spread throughout the ecology of natural terrestrial life, unchecked by natural biological controls. The mirror bacteria would appear as dangerous pathogens for a wide range of natural life forms, including humans. The report details the resulting risks to the health of humans, other animals and plants, as well as potential ecological consequences. Based on that, the Science policy article concludes: “Unless compelling evidence emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers, we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even those with engineered biocontainment measures, should not be created. We therefore recommend that research with the goal of creating mirror bacteria not be permitted, and that funders make clear that they will not support such work.” But what if nature created mirror life on another planet? Should we be worried about this mirror life being delivered to our home planet inside a rock or a Mars Sample Return mission? This would constitute the interplanetary analog of Amazon delivery services, with a package that includes content we never ordered. What happens naturally on other planets is under no obligation to satisfy the recommendation of the 38 authors of the Science article. One thing is clear: if any rocks with traces of mirror life were ever delivered to Earth over the past 4.2 billion years since the appearance of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), terrestrial life managed to survive their potential harms. Otherwise, mirror cyanobacteria which feed on non-chiral nutrients and sunlight, could have dominated Earth’s ecosystem by producing mirror versions of common sugars. Mirror animals would have fed on mirror food, produced by mirror plants. It is possible that no package with mirror life arrived at Earth, because a universal mechanism favors the same homochirality for life everywhere. As of now, the new technical report and Science policy article imply that we should be careful when handling material which potentially carries traces of extraterrestrial life. This important caution should be kept in mind when handling Mars sample return, NASA’s and ESA’s ambitious, multi-mission campaign. The health risk should also be kept in mind when following Elon Musk’s inspiring vision to occupy Mars and make humans a multi-planet species. The possibility that the Martian soil might contain relics of mirror life, adds to the known health risks from energetic cosmic-rays and extreme temperature variations between day and night on the surface of Mars. Until we know that homochirality is universal, we should be careful in our first contact with extraterrestrial life. The post The Existential Risk from Extraterrestrial Mirror Life appeared first on Anomalien.com.

The New York Times huddled with the leftist “youth climate movement” as they girded for battle against Trump II, in a so-called news story that appeared in Thursday’s paper: “As Teens, They Fought Trump on Climate. Now What?” by Austyn Gaffney, who has previously written freelance for Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Grist, three left-wing publications. Activists in groups like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour and Fridays for Future have pushed for the Biden administration to step up climate action before its exit next month: They want land protected as national monuments, permits denied for liquid natural gas projects, funds allocated from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down for good. After the inauguration, they’ll retrench. They might ease off the mass marches and school strikes that built their platform, while refining new strategies like focusing on state politics, reducing the use of fossil fuels at a local level, and re-energizing the country to elect climate-conscious leaders. The activists and the reporter were quite cozy -- almost like a huddle, as if Gaffney is plotting strategy and tactics against Trump alongside the kid radicals on climate (and Gaza, and capitalism, and whatever else.) The article even featured flattering posed photos and pull quotes from four youth activists. The 2018 child activists who were in middle and high school are now in their 20s, moving through college and into their careers. They’re facing the conflict so many generations before them have grappled with: how to balance the scales between hope and despair. She dredged up Greta Thunberg, whose placement on the autism spectrum didn’t stop the left from using her as an environmental mascot. Currently Thunberg is serving as a vulgar mascot supporting the anti-Israel terrorists of Hamas. (Gaffney’s story came with a noteworthy correction – she’d first described Thunberg as some expert mariner who’d made a solo journey across the Atlantic Ocean while protesting climate change.) There was no journalistic concern displayed over the extremist tactics used by Just Stop Oil, with “throwing cans of soup on famous paintings….” relegated to a single sentence. Zero Hour sent Jamie Minden, the group’s senior director of global organizing, who at 13 was lying in her bed staring at the ceiling when she decided to devote her young life to fighting the climate crisis. But almost a decade later, Ms. Minden, now 21, knew to brace herself. COP29 was a disappointment, she said, if not a death sentence for poor nations. The intellectual incoherence of this “climate” movement was only implied by Gaffney noting the splintering of various factions over non-climate causes. ….. Zero Hour did not endorse a candidate because of the group’s opposition to the war in Gaza. Some of the nine youth climate activists who spoke to The Times said they voted for Jill Stein, the third-party candidate, in protest. The Times better hurry, all these woke terms are surely past their expiration date: Leah Thomas, 29, made a social media post in 2020 that popularized the term “intersectional environmentalist.” Her platform was based on links between racial and environmental justice, looking at “the ways in which injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected.”…. The reporter's call to arms near the end unwittingly underlined that incoherence, while trying to pat the young radicals on the back. Whatever the next round of youth climate activism looks like, youth activists overwhelmingly agree that it will be about more than just climate.

Part of the reason that there is a crisis of confidence in the media is because of the sense of absolute moral certitude with which they look down upon anyone who strays from the preordained consensus, even as they themselves spit out active disinformation. As CNN’s Abby Phillip demonstrates, sometimes these efforts fail hilariously. Watch as Abby Phillip accuses Covid skeptics of pushing…horse tranquilizer? CNN NEWSNIGHT WITH ABBY PHILLIP 12/16/24 10:15 PM SCOTT JENNINGS: I also think it's important for us to remember why are we here at all in this moment where people are questioning the public health regime, and it is all out of Covid.  ABBY PHILLIP: Yeah. I agree. JENNINGS: Everything comes from Covid, things we were told that weren't true, things about the vaccine that we were told that weren't true. This has caused people- in the past, folks might have just accepted this sight unseen. Now, I think it's legitimate for Americans to say, are we being told the absolute truth by the supposed experts? I don’t have a problem with those questions. PHILLIP: Look. I also- I'm old enough to remember hydroxychloroquine and the horse tranquilizer and all that stuff. I mean, those things weren't true either, okay? So let's be honest about the fact that there- there was misinformation happening pretty far and wide in the Covid era. And it's not just that we were telling people the vaccine is the best thing we've got so far to help you in this moment. It's also because some people were actually trying to mislead people for profit. There are people right now still selling Covid cures that are invented. So that’s- that’s-we have to be honest about the fact that it’s- it’s happening on a lot of different sides. Either Phillip is suggesting here (without evidence) that people took xylazine (street name: tranq) to treat Covid, OR she is repeating the debunked smear of the powerful antiviral ivermectin as horse medicine- a common smear aired on CNN at the height of the pandemic. In fact, when Joe Rogan talks about how his eyes were opened to the media’s tendency to destroy those who dissent from the official narrative, he often cites his run-in with CNN over their prime time hosts’ insistence on saying that Rogan took “horse paste”, which resulted in Rogan calling CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta out on his eponymous podcast.  Fast forward to 2024, and Abby Phillip couldn’t even be bothered to get the equine pejorative right while trying to contain Scott Jennings’s correct explanation of the deceptions that underlie skepticism of the current public health regime. Discussing the things that led to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. being the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services on CNN gets you a performance of that institutional arrogance in real time. Abby Phillip tried to mock public health skeptics and shut down a reasonable discussion of the ongoing crisis, failing badly on both counts.  

Judge Juan Merchan rejected President-elect Donald Trump's request to dismiss the conviction in his New York criminal case on the basis of presidential immunity.On Monday, Merchan presented a 41-page ruling denying Trump's bid and upholding the 34-count conviction for falsifying business records.'This lawless case should have never been brought.'Earlier this year, Trump's lawyers filed a motion to overturn the jury's guilty verdict, arguing that some of the prosecution's evidence was from his time in office and should have been excluded based on the United States Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling.Merchan wrote in his rejection that all of the evidence was related "entirely to unofficial conduct and thus, receive no immunity protections.""The People's use of these acts as evidence of the decidedly personal acts of falsifying business records poses no danger of intrusion on the authority and function of the Executive Branch," Merchan stated.Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, told Fox News Digital, "Today's decision by deeply conflicted, acting Justice Merchan in the Manhattan DA Witch Hunt is a direct violation of the Supreme Court's decision on immunity, and other longstanding jurisprudence.""This lawless case should have never been brought, and the Constitution demands that it be immediately dismissed, as President Trump must be allowed to continue the Presidential Transition process, and execute the vital duties of the presidency, unobstructed by the remains of this, or any other, Witch Hunt," Cheung added.While Merchan has rejected this request, he has not yet ruled on Trump's formal bid to dismiss the case.Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office has argued against Trump's request to dismiss the convictions and instead asked for the case to be put on ice until the end of his presidency.Bragg's office contended that issuing a stay and waiting to sentence Trump in 2029 would exempt him "from any immediate obligations in this case during his time in office, while at the same time respecting the public interest in upholding the rule of law and preserving the meaningful aspects of the criminal process that have already taken place."Trump's lawyers argued that Bragg's "ridiculous suggestion that they could simply resume proceedings after President Trump leaves Office, more than a decade after they commenced their investigation in 2018, is not an option."Trump is no longer facing any federal indictments. The Georgia case, which never reached trial, is currently tied up in appeals.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A Texas father accused of setting a house on fire with his three children inside has been charged with attempted murder.Fulshear Police said a Nov. 6 house fire in the 31000 block of Eldorado Lane in the Polo Ranch Community led to the arrest of Pedro Luis Parra Pulgar, 46, who was charged with intentionally setting the fire while his three children were inside. Fulshear is about 40 minutes west of Houston.'How evil do you have to be? He should never breathe free air again.'Police said the suspect's extensive injuries sustained in the fire resulted in an extended stay in a hospital; he was released Thursday and taken to the Fort Bend County Jail, where he faces three counts of Attempted Murder.Judge Argie Brame of the 434th Associate District Court set bond at $750,000 for each Attempted Murder charge, totaling $2.25 million, police added.In the fire, two children managed to escape with minor injuries — but a 3-year-old was trapped inside, police said.Officers heard faint sounds in the home, quickly entered through a bedroom window, and rescued the child, who was suffering from severe smoke inhalation, police said.The child was airlifted to a hospital, received treatment, and has since been released, police said.You can view a video report here about the incident.How are people reacting?The police department's Facebook post about the arrest has attracted over 300 comments, with many of them praising police for rescuing the trapped child. Others expressed anger at the suspect:"He deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail," one commenter said."How evil do you have to be? He should never breathe free air again. I really hope these kids are with someone who loves them and cares for them so they can heal," another user stated."How does this happen[?] How does someone become so twisted as to believe this is an acceptable behavior? How worthless does someone need to be?" another commenter wondered."Hope he rots in prison," another user wrote.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Penn State head coach James Franklin called for the NCAA to establish a leader of college football after expressing his frustration over the transfer window landing during the college football playoff.Penn will host St. Mary's University December 21 in the first round of the inaugural college playoff 12-team bracket but was crippled by an announcement that their backup quarterback Beau Pribula will enter the transfer portal at the same time.Pribula has taken the lead role and performed wonderfully when filling in for usual starting QB Drew Allar. On Monday, however, Pribula had to take his chance with the transfer portal in order to land a No. 1 quarterback position at another school since Allar has declared he will return to Penn in 2025.Coach Franklin sounded off during a recent press conference, asking, "Who is really running college football and making the best decisions for the student-athletes and for our sport as a whole?"Franklin continued, "To have a transfer portal slash free agency going on right in the middle of the playoffs, it's just there's just a lot of things that don't really make sense."Franklin said that it's now "pretty obvious" that the NCAA needs a college football commissione and one who isn't affected by conference finances."We need somebody running college football. We need somebody that is not biased based on a conference and that is out of the financial impacts of it as well. So you know, I'm concerned for college football right now in general, to be honest with you." Beau Pribula before the Big Ten Championship on December 7, 2024.Photo by James Black/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images'I don't think it's in the best interest of the student-athlete.'Pribula shared his own concerns about the crossover of the playoffs and transfer portal, saying it "creates a challenge" for student-athletes."The overlapping CFB playoff and transfer portal timeline has forced me into an impossible decision," he said, per CBS Sports.Coach Franklin openly claimed that Pribula "did not want to leave" the Penn State program but was put in a "no-win" situation."I agree with him," Franklin revealed. "I don't think it's in the best interest of the student-athlete. Beau should not be put in this position."The Penn coach signed a 10-year deal worth a guaranteed $85 million in 2021, Sports Illustrated reported. He then received more incentives once the college football playoff was established.The transfer window opened on Dec. 9 and will close on Dec. 28.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

For those of you living under a rock, “Kill Tony” is the world’s biggest live podcast filmed at Joe Rogan’s Comedy Mothership in Austin, Texas. Each episode has well over two million views, making it one of the most viewed shows on YouTube. Each week the eponymous Tony Hinchcliffe, Brian Redban, and two comedian guests judge one-minute open mic slots of amateur and professional comedians picked randomly out of a hat. Monday’s episode featured BlazeTV’s very own Dave Landau. The "Normal World" host sat next to comedian Sketch and judged the night’s festivities. The best part of the show, as always, comes after the 60-second sets when Hinchcliffe, Redban, Sketch, and Landau ask questions of the contestants and roast them to a crisp. Here’s the episode: This week’s episode featured "Kill Tony" regulars William Montgomery, Ari Matti, and Kam Patterson. Oh, and if you’re wondering where you may have heard of Hinchcliffe, he was the one who horrified Democrats with his Puerto Rico joke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally back in October. He also absolutely killed it at "The Roast of Tom Brady."If you loved Landau on "Kill Tony," make sure to watch him every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night on BlazeTV’s "Normal World" along with 1/4 Black Garrett. And for even more fun, subscribe to BlazeTV+ and get $20 off your first year with promo code NORMAL.Want more 'Normal World'?To enjoy more whimsical satire, topical sketches, and comedic discussions from comedians Dave Landau and 1/4 Black Garrett, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.