That Inorganic Dust Life

[knowingthomas]

I mentioned this awhile ago and I thought it was finally worth it's own thread, as it seemed interesting.
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/08/lifelike-dust-d.html

An international team led by V.N. Tsytovich of the General Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Science, in Moscow, working with colleagues there and at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany and the University of Sydney, Australia, has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

Loosely related, another article on non-carbon life:
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/06/noncarbon_lifef.html

[humphreyclarke]

They are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve; but they are still just a special form of plasma crystal. They can only develop at a pace at least a hundred thousand times slower than Earth's biological organisms and they are inherently fragile which makes them unsuitable for the development of complex organisms. However, this discovery was interesting because it provides another example of how self organisation is inherent in the universe, but also because an inorganic form of 'life' could have acted as a template for organic molecules.