Mountain Views News          Saturday, March 7, 2015

THE WORLD AROUND US

B4

Mountain Views-News Saturday, March 7, 2015 


LIFE ‘NOT AS WE KNOW IT’ POSSIBLE ON SATURN’S MOON TITAN


A new type of methane-based, oxygen-free life form 
that could metabolize and reproduce similar to life 
on Earth has been modeled by a team of Cornell 
University researchers.

 Taking a simultaneously imaginative and rigidly 
scientific view, chemical engineers and astronomers 
offer a template for life that could thrive in a harsh, cold 
world—specifically Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. 
A planetary body awash with seas not of water, but of 
liquid methane, Titan could harbor methane-based, 
oxygen-free cells.

 Their theorized cell membrane, composed of 
small organic nitrogen compounds and capable of 
functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 
degrees below zero, is published in Science Advances, 
Feb. 27. The work is led by chemical molecular 
dynamics expert Paulette Clancy and first author James 
Stevenson, a graduate student in chemical engineering. 
The paper’s co-author is Jonathan Lunine, director for 
Cornell’s Center for Radiophysics and Space Research.

 Lunine is an expert on Saturn’s moons and an 
interdisciplinary scientist on the Cassini-Huygens 
mission that discovered methane-ethane seas on Titan. 
Intrigued by the possibilities of methane-based life on 
Titan, and armed with a grant from the Templeton 
Foundation to study non-aqueous life, Lunine sought 
assistance about a year ago from Cornell faculty with 
expertise in chemical modeling. Clancy offered to 
help.

 “We’re not biologists, and we’re not astronomers, but 
we had the right tools,” Clancy said. “Perhaps it helped, 
because we didn’t come in with any preconceptions 
about what should be in a membrane and what 
shouldn’t. We just worked with the compounds that we 
knew were there and asked, ‘If this was your palette, 
what can you make out of that?’”

 On Earth, life is based on the phospholipid bilayer 
membrane, the strong, permeable, water-based vesicle 
that houses the organic matter of every cell. A vesicle 
made from such a membrane is called a liposome. 
Thus, many astronomers seek extraterrestrial life in 
what’s called the circumstellar habitable zone, the 
narrow band around a star in which liquid water could 
exist. But what if cells weren’t based on water, but on 
methane, which has a much lower freezing point?

 The engineers named their theorized cell membrane 
an “azotosome,” “azote” being the French word 
for nitrogen. “Liposome” comes from the Greek 
“lipos” and “soma” to mean “lipid body”; by analogy, 
“azotosome” means “nitrogen body.”

The azotosome is made from nitrogen, carbon and 
hydrogen molecules known to exist in the cryogenic 
seas of Titan, but shows the same stability and flexibility 
that Earth’s analogous liposome does. This came as a 
surprise to chemists like Clancy and Stevenson, who 
had never thought about the mechanics of cell stability 
before—they usually study semiconductors, not cells.

 The engineers employed a molecular dynamics 
method that screened for candidate compounds 
from methane for self-assembly into membrane-
like structures. The most promising compound they 
found is an acrylonitrile azotosome, which showed 
good stability, a strong barrier to decomposition, and 
a flexibility similar to that of phospholipid membranes 
on Earth. 

 Clancy said the next step is to try and demonstrate 
how these cells would behave in the methane 
environment—what might be the analogue to 
reproduction and metabolism in oxygen-free, 
methane-based cells.

 Lunine looks forward to the long-term prospect 
of testing these ideas on Titan itself, as he put it, by 
“someday sending a probe to float on the seas of this 
amazing moon and directly sampling the organics.”

 Stevenson said he was in part inspired by science 
fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who wrote about the 
concept of non-water-based life in a 1962 essay, “Not as 
We Know It.”

 Said Stevenson: “Ours is the first concrete blueprint 
of life not as we know it.”

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.


OUT TO PASTOR 

A Weekly Religion Column by Rev. James Snyder

BORN WITH A SCREWDRIVER 

IN MY HAND

Some people understand compliments and take 
them as they come. Other people, like myself, 
wouldn’t know a compliment if it hit them in the 
face like a pie.

 For a long time I had been under the impression 
my wife was giving me compliments. It takes a 
husband a long time to understand his wife and 
by the time he understands her, she has morphed 
into the next level of womanhood. The man who 
thinks he knows his wife needs a psychiatrist, 
preferably a woman psychiatrist.

 For a number of years my wife said to me, which 
I thought was a compliment, “You must’ve been 
born with a screwdriver in your hand.”

 I never thought of myself as a handyman, but 
these kinds of compliments gave me a little bit of 
confidence in my incompetence. Nothing is more 
dangerous than confident incompetence.

 I try to do a little bit of work around the house, 
like fixing things and improve things. However, 
every time I start to fix something, something 
happens to make it worse.

 Last week, for instance, the front door latch 
came loose. Some screws had come loose and it 
was to the point that you could not shut the door. 
Well, being the bungling handyman that I am, I 
grabbed the nearest screwdriver I could find and 
tried to screw the screws back into the door and fix 
the problem. Usually, the first screwdriver I pick 
up does not fit the screw I am trying to screw in. I 
have come to discover that there is a screwdriver 
for every conceivable screw. Who knew?

 I memorized a phrase to help me along that 
line; Lefty Loosey, Righty Tighty. Every time I 
use that phrase I need to think it through a little 
bit to understand or at least try to understand 
what it means. If I turn the screwdriver left, I am 
loosening it and if I turn it right, I am tightening 
it. What that means I have no idea.

 I grabbed my screwdriver firmly in my right 
hand and used my left hand to guide it to the screw 
that needed to be tightened. However, the more I 
turned it to the right the looser it became. It is not 
supposed to work that way. Either, I do not know 
my right from my left or somebody has messed up 
this project. Thank goodness, there was no mirror 
handy.

 Just as I was about ready to rip the door from 
its hinges and throw it across the street the 
Gracious Mistress of the Parsonage appeared and 
said, “Another proof that you were born with a 
screwdriver in your hand.”

 At the time, I was not in any frame of mind 
whatsoever to receive a compliment.

 She simply said to me, “May I have the 
screwdriver and would you go in and see if there’s 
any coffee left in the coffee pot?”

 Since I had come to the end of my rope, I 
handed her the screwdriver and headed for the 
kitchen mumbling incoherently. By the time I got 
to the kitchen, I turned around and there she was 
following me.

 “What about the door?” I said in a rather 
grumpy tone.

 “Oh,” she said rather cheerfully, “it’s fixed.”

 Several other projects I started ended up the 
same way. My wife would cheerfully come to 
me and say, “You must’ve been born with a 
screwdriver in your hand.” Then she would laugh 
most heartily and I would smile not quite getting 
what she was saying.

 One Christmas the truth of this really hit home. 
I was opening a Christmas present from someone 
named “Guess Who” and discovered a brand-
new screwdriver with my name engraved on the 
handle. The note inside the card said, “Here’s a 
screwdriver to help you in all the things you screw 
up.”

 I must confess it took several days for me to 
process this Christmas gift. Then, just before New 
Year’s, the whole thing unfolded for me.

 Whenever my wife says, “You must’ve been 
born with a screwdriver in your hand,” she is not 
complimenting me as I originally thought, but 
rather in that secret code that all wives know was 
saying that I was a major screwup.

 At first, I was a little upset by this. To think that 
my wife thought I was a screwup was a very hard 
to swallow. She did not say I was a screwup, but 
she laid all the groundwork for me to come to that 
awesome conclusion.

 To know what you can do is important, but 
to know what you cannot do is more important. 
Every time I look at the screwdriver, I realize there 
are a whole lot of things that I cannot do. I need to 
focus on what I can do. That is the message of the 
screwdriver.

 We have now come to a basic understanding in 
our house that when there is ever a project that 
needs fixing I will always look at my wife and say, 
“Would you like to borrow my screwdriver?”

 I think the apostle Paul understood this when 
he wrote, “Wherefore let him that thinketh he 
standeth take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 
10:12).

 I think the biggest compliment I could ever 
receive or give, for that matter, is what Paul is 
implying here. Simply put; think before you fall.

 Rev. James L. Snyder is pastor of the Family 
of God Fellowship, PO Box 831313, Ocala, FL 
34483. He lives with his wife, Martha, in Silver 
Springs Shores. Call him at 1-866-552-2543 or 
e-mail jamessnyder2@att.net or website www.
jamessnyderministries.com.