Extraterrestrial life is life beyond that which belongs to the Earth. The question of whether life exists outside the earth has puzzled many scientists for years.
What is required for life? On Earth it is CHNOPS (Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus and Sulphur). These are the most common and important elements to make biological molecules on this planet. Phosphorus is also used to make cell membranes and sulphur is used to make amino acids. In the baking process, Nitrogen, Hydrogen and Oxygen make carbohydrates and sugars, DNA, RNA and cellulose for plants, methane, proteins and phosphates for genetic material and energy transfer. There's one ingredient missing though, and that's water. It acts as a solvent to chemically bond the ingredients together and provide oxygen to the organism.
Earth is rich in H20 (water) naturally, and back in the day (like really back in the day) meteorites brought CHNOPS in through the atmosphere.
I say meteorites because we must be specific. Asteroids have, of course, never hit earth. Let me explain why:
An asteroid is a small body of rock, carbon and metal orbiting the sun
A comet is a small body of dirt and ice that lets off a trail when getting close to the sun.
A meteroid is part of an asteroid or comet
A meteor is one that hits the earth's atmosphere and disintegrates on entry.
A meteorite is one that makes it all the way through and hits the surface of the Earth.
The reason why water+CHNOPS should make life elsewhere is because the Earth and many other planets are made of space gas, "stardust" (from supernovae stars) and "space dust" (bits of planets and non-supernovae stars) all twirled together through nebulae like a giant cosmic Nigella Lawson. So if we start with the same basic ingredients in our recipe, shouldn't we end up with the same product?
There could also be silicon life. But silicon is not as good a base as carbon. Silicon is similar to carbon but bigger and creates more monotonous shapes than the flexible and malleable carbon. It's also less reactive in forming bonds with other elements.
If there is silicon life though, if it breathed in oxygen it would breathe out sand due to the chemical processes of silicon based life. The hope for silicon-based life remains, however as if it was in an atmosphere rich in sulphuric acid, then the chains of molecules would actually be more stable than carbon-and-water chains on Earth.
Also, if this silicon life-form lived in temperatures around 1,000ºC (or 1,800ºF) the silicon sand it breathed out would be a liquid secretion. Sci-Fi writers take note: I want royalties for a liquid-sand-squirting super-hot, sulphuric-acid monster.
Where are we going to find this silicon-based life, though? Well, here on Earth. One of the earliest lifeforms were living clay minerals, they were based on silicon. Also diatoms - a type of algae - have a silicon-based skeletal structure.
So if silicon is more boring than carbon, what about in the other direction? A planet rich in Boron could produce life with even a great complexity of life. However, at least in these parts of the universe, boron is quite rare.
Metal oxides of titanium, aluminium, magnesium and iron could potentially make life forms at extremely high temperatures, and would create an awesome race of creatures I'd like to term, "rust life."
There could also be plasma life. A plasma is where gas is super-heated and dissolves its bonds due to electrons floating around. It then becomes very reactive in magnetic fields. A simple example of a plasma is neon light.
Plasma, as generated on earth in laboratories or in the middle of electrical storms and grow, multiply by itself and even communicate on a basic level with other plasma balls - several phenomena we deem to be part of life as we know it.
This would be good news for the soul of G Buren. He was a scientist who lost a bet when everyone told him nothing could live on the sun. He was even taken to court for the money and his widow was pursued after his death to pay up on this wager .
The believe in extraterrestrial life dates back to antiquity. In Hinduism there's six planes of existence - Deva, Asura, Manussa, Tiryagyoni (these last two are the only ones on Earth), Preta and Naraka.
In Norse Mythology there's nine: Manheimr (land of the humans), Vanir and Asaheimr (land of the Gods), Jotunheimr (land of the giants), Alfheimr (land of the elves), Hel (land of the dead), Suartalfaheimr (land of the dark elves), Niflheimr (land of ice) and Muspeltheimr (land of fire).
The Jewish Talmud says that at the time it was written there were 18,000 other worlds than this one.
In Islam, in the Qur'an, it states God is the Lord of All Worlds (plural), it also makes reference to a Jinn (or genie) who lives in the heavens above Earth.
Christianity denies aliens officially and got really annoyed when in the 16th Century Giordano Bruno came up with the idea that the universe was infinite, the sun just one star and all stars had their own planets and life systems. He was burned at the stake.
In the 1850s, they saw Mars for the first time and the idea of Martian life hasn't left us to this day. In 1911 there was even a book published called Mars and its Canals: A Guide to Travelling the Canals of Mars - A Scientific Study.
It was, of course, later discovered that these canals weren't filled with water and were just an optical illusion of the sun's light.
Even back in 10th Century Japan they had a folk tale of the Bamboo Cutter who finds a baby the size of his thumb in a stalk of glowing bamboo. The baby's hair shined like the moon. She is beautiful as she grows up into a normal-sized human and rebuffs all attempts at marriage, and cries longing to return to the moon.
Eventually the moon people come, wipe her memory and she goes back home. Leaving the parents that brought her up completely distraught at their loss of a child.
The search for the moon people continues in the modern day: we're looking for single-celled life. We've found gas emissions on Mars, some imprints that could be fossils of nanobacteria on meteorites and methane signatures in Mars' atmosphere - all signs that there could be life on Mars afterall. However, as yet, nothing conclusive.
SETI: The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence has radio telescopes pointed at the sky. The closest they've come is 06EQUJ50 - a signal where each symbol represents the amplitude of the wave received. 0 is very low, up to 9, then A through to Z (the highest). The U halfway through the signal is the highest recording ever made from space, 30 times louder than the background radiation of space. The whole transmission lasted 72 seconds from the direction of Sagittarius and has never been repeated.
Scientists being the type of people they are, named it after the first words spoken when receiving this signal: it's now forever known as "The WOW Signal."
The best place to look for ET is Gliese 581g. A red-dwarf-orbiting planet in the habitable zone of orbit. It's about 2x the size of the Earth.
Area 51 is a big alleged conspiracy that everyone thinks is a government cover-up for finding aliens. Area 51 started out in WW2 as a bombing practice range. In '55 it was used to test the U2 spy planes.
It is part of a large military complex called Groom Lake, also used for atomic bomb tests. Area 51 shares a border with Areas 15, 10, 9, 7, 3, 11 and 5.
Groom Air Base appears to be used for the testing of new and experimental Air Craft. This includes the U2 as previous mentioned and operation OXCART - using the A-12 Mach 3 recon aircraft which became the USAF SR-71 Blackbird.
The US Federal Government only says that it has an operating location near Groom Lake but will say nothing more.
If you go there you'll be followed by private security guards working for the company Wachenhut which became G45 last year.
Lethal force is authorised but so far has never been used. They just radio for the sheriff. $600.00 fines are the norm if they get you and some visitors have even been detained on public land for pointing cameras at the base.
The base isn't on any US maps, satellite pictures or similar. Many UFOlogists have taken their own amateur pictures from surrounding mountains.
The US government declares a taxable value of $2million for the private holdings on the base. No tax assessors are allowed on site to make an assessment, however.
People think that Area 51 has been involved in alien spaceship landings or crashes, development of energy weapons, weather control machines, time travel, teleportation or even as a meeting ground for the Majestic 12 (a secret organisation set up by Harry Truman to investigate UFOs).
Maybe we'll never know.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Cadbury's Creme Eggs
Cadbury's Creme Eggs are a brand of confectionary made to look like a chocolate brown egg filled with white albumen and the yellow embryo utellus (or yolk).
They are based on the chicken's egg which has been a popular choice of food for thousands of years. Usually they are unfertilised as the hens are kept without roosters. However, just in case you're worried, if your egg happens to be fertilised it'll make little nutritional difference. Furthermore the refrigeration process that most eggs go through prevent the embryo from developing.
However, in the Phillippines, China, Laos and Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, you can buy and eat what are called, "wrapped eggs," "feathered eggs," or, "flush eggs."
These are eggs where the embryo inside has been incubated and allowed to develop for nine days and then held to the light to check their development. If they've developed well they're given a further 8 days to develop and then sold to be eaten.
If they haven't developed well they are sold as, "pennoy" which look, smell and taste like a regular hard-boiled egg.
When eaten at the 17 day mark the embryo hasn't developed well enough to develop a beak, feathers or claws. But there are some real connoisseurs who like them at 21 days, where they are more recognisable as a baby chick, and the bones are firm but tender.
The production of these eggs is all done by hand, and the people that do it take it very seriously, it's considered an artform with each vendor carefully caring for his eggs by hand.
They are sold both as snacks in a street market or in restaurants as haute quisine.
Some people take it even further by wrapping an egg in alkaline clay, ash, salt, lime (the mineral not the fruit) and crushed rice husks before burying it for several months. This causes the egg white to become a dark green like jade and the yoke to become a transparent brown. You now eat it with salt.
However, our eggs are chocolate ones. And are often given as gifts.
The giving of eggs as gifts started 2,000 years ago with the Zoroastrian New Year as a symbol of new life. The reason for the connection between the Easter Bunnies and giving out eggs is because hare forms (where they raise their young, like rabbit burrows or badger sets) are very similar to plover nests. Plovers are small birds similar to lapwings who bury their eggs. In Australia they use bilbies instead of bunnies. Those are small marsupials related to bandicoots. They look like long-nose rats.
The eggs became coloured following the Christian legend that Mary Magdalene was carrying some boiled eggs to share with her friends outside Jesus' tomb when Jesus arose. He turned her eggs red (and that's not a euphemism). Then Mary goes to the Emperor of Rome to tell him Jesus has risen. He doesn't believe her. Until the power of God turns his eggs red.
In the modern day these became chocolate eggs and so the Creme Egg is born. They're made by Cadbury's.
Cadbury's is the 2nd largest confectionary company in the world after Mars-Wrigley. Or it was until it was acquired by Kraft in 2010. It used to be Cadbury-Schweppes since 1969, but that demerged in 2007.
In 1824 John Cadbury sold hot drinks in Birmingham. He was a quaker and sold his delicious hot drinks to tempt people away from alcohol.
In 1854 Cadbury acquired a Royal Warrent.
1874 - Their hot chocolate proved so popular they dropped tea and coffee and just made the chocolatey stuff.
1879 - They assembled the Bournville factory in Birmingham, it was a village built for the workers and run strictly under the owners' Christian beliefs.
1905 - They produced the first chocolate bar, seeing off the competition by putting more milk into their chocolate than any of their competitors.
In 1928 they souped up their chocolate bar by adding fruit and nuts - which is still around today.
2010 They are acquired by Kraft for £11.5billion ($18.9billion) and controversially move much of the product production to Poland, keeping R&D in Birmingham.
The first thing you'll notice about Cadbury's Creme Eggs is that they're not Cadbury's Cream Eggs. This is because in many juristictions around the world cream must contain predominantly milk fats. Except of course for ice cream and salad cream - those are curious exceptions.
The creme egg is a choclate shell filled with a white and orange-coloured fondant. They make it by creating the orange bit first as a hard ball then injecting it with an enzyme. Then they make the white halves around it and inject those in enzymes, seal it up with chocolate and let the enzymes go to work to soften the fondant.
Previously they used invertase to make the fondant which enables the hydrolysis (breakdown) of sucrose (sugar) into fructose and glucose (different sugars) to form what is known in the industry as inverted sugar syrup. However this proved quite expensive and now they use Xylose isomerase to perform the same process.
The filling is a fondant which is super-saturated water. That is water that is saturated with sugar more than water normally can or should be. You heat water and vigorously stir in sugar as it cools to make a smooth texture. Improper stirring with lead to the sugar forming crunchy crystals.
It is this process that etymologically links "fondant" to the word "foundry."
Creme Egg season is the 1st Jan (New Year) to 24th April (don't know the significance of this latter date, it was however the birthday of William of Orange, the death of Daniel Defore and the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, the first war crime to be designated a "genocide" in history.)
Over 200 million are sold a year, requiring 1.5 million to be made each day.
The New Zealand Creme Egg is smaller than the British one.
There have been many types of different creme eggs in the past. These include:
Mini creme eggs,
Caramel
Chocolate fondant
Orange
Berry
Dairy Milk Bars with Creme Egg filling
Dream Eggs (with white chocolate on the outside)
Twisted (another type of Creme Egg-filling chocolate bar)
Creme Egg McFlurries from McDonalds
Peppermint
Jaffa
Swirled Chocolate Marble
and Screme Eggs - with green fondant for Halloween.
There have also been many high-profile advertising campaigns for Cadbury's Creme Eggs.
1970 - A small child orders 6,000 Creme Eggs from a shopkeeper
1985 - The highly successful How Do You Eat Yours campaign
1990 - The How Do You Eat Yours campaign hits TV
1994 - The Spitting Image puppets are roped in to help advertise the product
1997 - Matt Lucas declaims, "I've seen the future and it's egg-shaped"
2008 - Here Today Goo Tomorrow
2011 - Goo Dares Wins to tie in with the Olympics.
According to website Pimp That Snack, you can make a giant Cadbury's Creme Egg. Have a look first at PimpMySnack for some interesting letters on how they had to register their trademark.
http://www.pimpmysnack.com/
The Creme de la Creme Egg:
http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/project/302/
They are based on the chicken's egg which has been a popular choice of food for thousands of years. Usually they are unfertilised as the hens are kept without roosters. However, just in case you're worried, if your egg happens to be fertilised it'll make little nutritional difference. Furthermore the refrigeration process that most eggs go through prevent the embryo from developing.
However, in the Phillippines, China, Laos and Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, you can buy and eat what are called, "wrapped eggs," "feathered eggs," or, "flush eggs."
These are eggs where the embryo inside has been incubated and allowed to develop for nine days and then held to the light to check their development. If they've developed well they're given a further 8 days to develop and then sold to be eaten.
If they haven't developed well they are sold as, "pennoy" which look, smell and taste like a regular hard-boiled egg.
When eaten at the 17 day mark the embryo hasn't developed well enough to develop a beak, feathers or claws. But there are some real connoisseurs who like them at 21 days, where they are more recognisable as a baby chick, and the bones are firm but tender.
The production of these eggs is all done by hand, and the people that do it take it very seriously, it's considered an artform with each vendor carefully caring for his eggs by hand.
They are sold both as snacks in a street market or in restaurants as haute quisine.
Some people take it even further by wrapping an egg in alkaline clay, ash, salt, lime (the mineral not the fruit) and crushed rice husks before burying it for several months. This causes the egg white to become a dark green like jade and the yoke to become a transparent brown. You now eat it with salt.
However, our eggs are chocolate ones. And are often given as gifts.
The giving of eggs as gifts started 2,000 years ago with the Zoroastrian New Year as a symbol of new life. The reason for the connection between the Easter Bunnies and giving out eggs is because hare forms (where they raise their young, like rabbit burrows or badger sets) are very similar to plover nests. Plovers are small birds similar to lapwings who bury their eggs. In Australia they use bilbies instead of bunnies. Those are small marsupials related to bandicoots. They look like long-nose rats.
The eggs became coloured following the Christian legend that Mary Magdalene was carrying some boiled eggs to share with her friends outside Jesus' tomb when Jesus arose. He turned her eggs red (and that's not a euphemism). Then Mary goes to the Emperor of Rome to tell him Jesus has risen. He doesn't believe her. Until the power of God turns his eggs red.
In the modern day these became chocolate eggs and so the Creme Egg is born. They're made by Cadbury's.
Cadbury's is the 2nd largest confectionary company in the world after Mars-Wrigley. Or it was until it was acquired by Kraft in 2010. It used to be Cadbury-Schweppes since 1969, but that demerged in 2007.
In 1824 John Cadbury sold hot drinks in Birmingham. He was a quaker and sold his delicious hot drinks to tempt people away from alcohol.
In 1854 Cadbury acquired a Royal Warrent.
1874 - Their hot chocolate proved so popular they dropped tea and coffee and just made the chocolatey stuff.
1879 - They assembled the Bournville factory in Birmingham, it was a village built for the workers and run strictly under the owners' Christian beliefs.
1905 - They produced the first chocolate bar, seeing off the competition by putting more milk into their chocolate than any of their competitors.
In 1928 they souped up their chocolate bar by adding fruit and nuts - which is still around today.
2010 They are acquired by Kraft for £11.5billion ($18.9billion) and controversially move much of the product production to Poland, keeping R&D in Birmingham.
The first thing you'll notice about Cadbury's Creme Eggs is that they're not Cadbury's Cream Eggs. This is because in many juristictions around the world cream must contain predominantly milk fats. Except of course for ice cream and salad cream - those are curious exceptions.
The creme egg is a choclate shell filled with a white and orange-coloured fondant. They make it by creating the orange bit first as a hard ball then injecting it with an enzyme. Then they make the white halves around it and inject those in enzymes, seal it up with chocolate and let the enzymes go to work to soften the fondant.
Previously they used invertase to make the fondant which enables the hydrolysis (breakdown) of sucrose (sugar) into fructose and glucose (different sugars) to form what is known in the industry as inverted sugar syrup. However this proved quite expensive and now they use Xylose isomerase to perform the same process.
The filling is a fondant which is super-saturated water. That is water that is saturated with sugar more than water normally can or should be. You heat water and vigorously stir in sugar as it cools to make a smooth texture. Improper stirring with lead to the sugar forming crunchy crystals.
It is this process that etymologically links "fondant" to the word "foundry."
Creme Egg season is the 1st Jan (New Year) to 24th April (don't know the significance of this latter date, it was however the birthday of William of Orange, the death of Daniel Defore and the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, the first war crime to be designated a "genocide" in history.)
Over 200 million are sold a year, requiring 1.5 million to be made each day.
The New Zealand Creme Egg is smaller than the British one.
There have been many types of different creme eggs in the past. These include:
Mini creme eggs,
Caramel
Chocolate fondant
Orange
Berry
Dairy Milk Bars with Creme Egg filling
Dream Eggs (with white chocolate on the outside)
Twisted (another type of Creme Egg-filling chocolate bar)
Creme Egg McFlurries from McDonalds
Peppermint
Jaffa
Swirled Chocolate Marble
and Screme Eggs - with green fondant for Halloween.
There have also been many high-profile advertising campaigns for Cadbury's Creme Eggs.
1970 - A small child orders 6,000 Creme Eggs from a shopkeeper
1985 - The highly successful How Do You Eat Yours campaign
1990 - The How Do You Eat Yours campaign hits TV
1994 - The Spitting Image puppets are roped in to help advertise the product
1997 - Matt Lucas declaims, "I've seen the future and it's egg-shaped"
2008 - Here Today Goo Tomorrow
2011 - Goo Dares Wins to tie in with the Olympics.
According to website Pimp That Snack, you can make a giant Cadbury's Creme Egg. Have a look first at PimpMySnack for some interesting letters on how they had to register their trademark.
http://www.pimpmysnack.com/
The Creme de la Creme Egg:
http://www.pimpthatsnack.com/project/302/
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