During a 24-hour livestream featuring Offset and Kai Cenat, the Twitch streamer expressed interest in speaking with Cardi B's sister Hennessy

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The Valorant Champions Tour 2024 is hosting Masters events in Madrid and Shanghai, introducing VCT China, and implementing major changes to Valorant Challengers.

Minnesota Vikings wideout Justin Jefferson is the latest NFL player to join the Madden 99 club. His reaction is priceless.Justin Jefferson is the best wide receiver in the NFL. At least, that's how the team behind EA Sports' Madden 24 ranked him. The Minnesota Vikings wideout will be r...

Bitcoin reached an almost two-month low as risk aversion weighs on the cryptocurrency market with global government bond

TL;DR: As of August 6, you can get a two-pack of MagStack Foldable 3-in-1 Wireless

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UFC 5 includes seven game modes, including Career Mode, Fight Week, Ranked Championships, and more for players to explore on Oct. 27.

The meaning of life is the ultimate mystery – why do we exist? And is there a point to… well… anything? These are questions to which we may never find answers, but at least we can define what “life” means in scientific terms. And yet, our understanding of what life is is changing all the time, thanks to space exploration. As scientists continue to hunt for life beyond our own world, biologists are having to rethink the meaning of the word “life” itself. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Generally, biologists explain “life” as connoting a self-sustaining chemical system which is capable of performing functions such as eating, metabolising, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and responding to external stimuli. This definition works pretty well here on Earth (although there are some important exceptions, such as viruses), but experts have pointed out that if life exists elsewhere in the universe, it may not display the same properties that we’re used to. Indeed, it might be unrecognisable as life as we know it (forget those little green men). In which case, how will we spot it if it ever crosses our path? Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and chemist Lee Cronin think they’ve come up with a solution. The pair are now arguing that highly complex molecules found in all living creatures can’t exist thanks purely to chance. Therefore, they say, the universe must have a way of creating and reproducing complex information and retaining a “memory” of all of this.. In an interview with New Scientist, Walker, of Arizona State University, explained their radical idea on how objects come into existence. The concept, known as Assembly Theory, explains why certain complex objects have become more abundant than others by considering their histories. If the theory proves correct, it will redefine what we mean by “living” things and show that we’ve been going about the search for extraterrestrial life all wrong. In the process, we could even end up creating alien life in a laboratory, she stressed. In her discussion with New Scientist, Walker pointed out: "An electron can be made anywhere in the universe and has no history. You are also a fundamental object, but with a lot of historical dependency. You might want to cite your age counting back to when you were born, but parts of you are billions of years older. "From this perspective, we should think of ourselves as lineages of propagating information that temporarily finds itself aggregated in an individual." Assembly theory predicts that molecules produced by biological processes must be more complex than those produced by non-biological processes, as Science Alert notes. To test this, Walker and her team analysed a range of organic and inorganic compounds from around the world and outer space, including E. coli bacteria, urine, meteorites and even home-brewed beer. They then smashed up the compounds into smaller pieces and used mass spectrometry to pinpoint their molecular building blocks. They calculated that the smallest number of steps required to reassemble each compound from these building blocks was 15. And whilst some compounds from living systems needed fewer than 15 assembly steps, no inorganic compounds made it above this threshold. "Our system … allows us to search the universe agnostically for evidence of what life does rather than attempting to define what life is," Walker, Cronin, and others wrote in a 2021 Nature Communications article. The handy thing about this building block system – which they’ve dubbed the “'molecular assembly index” – is that it doesn’t rely on carbon-based organic materials to be identified. In other words, an alien could be made of entirely different stuff entirely and we’d still be able to spot it as life using the index. It also works regardless of what stage of “life” an extraterrestrial being is in – whether it is still in its infancy or has moved into a technological stage beyond our understanding. That’s because all of these states produce complex molecules which couldn’t exist in the absence of a living system. If all of this is hurting your head, let’s just get back to the basics: if there is a secret to life, it might all be down to what we do, not what we are. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Security flaws in two surveillance camera brands used around the world have been identified by Panorama.

Astronomers have just found out what planet in the universe is most dazzling and it is probably one you have never heard of. Looking at how much planet's clouds reflect sunlight back into space, astronomers have found a planet called exoplanet LTT9779b which reflects 80 per cent of the starlight it receives, making it the shiniest known planet in the universe. LTT9779b is slightly heavier and slightly larger than Neptune, and it is reflective because of the metallic glassy clouds that make up its atmosphere. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “Imagine a burning world, close to its star, with heavy clouds of metals floating aloft, raining down titanium droplets,” co-author James Jenkins, an astronomer at Diego Portales University and CATA (Santiago, Chile), said in a statement. Vivien Parmentier, a researcher at the Observatory of Côte d’Azur (France) and co-author of the study added: "LTT9779 b can form metallic clouds despite being so hot because the atmosphere is oversaturated with silicate and metal vapours.” So there you have it. Shame it doesn't have a very catchy name. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.