By Andrew Hayley BEIJING U.S. incentives to boost consumption of more environmentally friendly fuel has created a new

A stargazer who thought he’d made the discovery of a lifetime was brought down to Earth with a bump when a crater apparently left by a meteorite was revealed to be nothing more than a hole dug by beach-goers. Astrophysics enthusiast Dave Kennedy was over the moon when the hole, several feet wide and deep, appeared in north Dublin. He felt sure that a small, black, heavy rock found at the bottom of the hole was an asteroid from outer space, and contacted various astronomy experts in an effort to confirm his theory. He said a scorch mark on one side of the rock showed the angle at which it had fallen. “Only a month ago, I was watching a documentary from Nasa on exactly what we’re looking at so when I looked at it and saw how uniform it is, and the vast crater, I knew immediately I was looking at an impact site,” he said. Visitors to the Portmarnock beach gathered to inspect the crater. One said: “We’re down here quite a lot and never seen anything like this before, so it’s pretty spectacular.” However, Mr Kennedy’s optimism was short-lived. Within a day of his appearance on Virgin Media News, a “context note” on X (formerly Twitter) compiled from user information read: “It is in fact not a cosmic event - instead it was dug out the day before by 2 lads with a beach spade.” Footage on social media posted by friends of the young men showed them sitting in the hole, digging it out with children’s spades, and was captioned: “The hole we dug on Saturday”. Although the astronomy enthusiast was widely mocked, he said he would still have the rock analysed in the hope it wasn’t a “completely fruitless discovery”, Virgin Media News reported. Research on the chances of asteroids hitting Earth has focused on much larger rocks. Astronomers say Earth probably will not be struck by an object 1km wide (0.6 miles) for at least 1,000 years – but they have not ruled out smaller meteorites landing before then. Read More 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite sheds light on early solar system – study Best beach stays in the UK and Ireland for a peaceful break in 2023 Ukraine war: Kyiv ‘is pushing Russia back’, UK’s most senior military officer says War-blinded Ukrainian soldier cries with joy at new love at his wedding Ukraine ‘holds initiative’ in counteroffensive against Russia, says UK military chief

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Environmentalists have filed a lawsuit to prevent the construction of a new potash mine they say would devastate a lake ecosystem in the drought-stricken western Utah desert

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces have been pushed back amid Ukraine’s counteroffensive, as deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar reported new “successes” in the south and east. “There have been some successes, in particular in the direction of Novodanylivka-Novoprokopivka,” Ms Maliar said on the Telegram messaging app, referring to two southeastern villages in the Zaporizhzhia region. Novoprokopivka lies further south of the strategic settlement of Robotyne, which Ukraine said on Monday it had liberated. Ms Maliar also said Kyiv’s forces were pressing on with their offensive operations south of the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut, which was captured by Russian troops in May. The battlefield update comes on the same day the UK’s Ministry of Defence said Putin faced the largest attack on Russia since the start of the war, after it was hit by five separate drone strikes overnight on 29 and 30 August. The MoD said explosions were recorded in Moscow, Bryansk, and Ryazan, as well as at Pskov airbase close to the Estonian border. The government added that since many of these drones reached their targets, it “likely means Russian air defence is having difficulty detecting and destroying them”. Read More Putin’s forces pushed back in southern Ukraine – as Zelensky claims new long-range weapon The ‘Vampire’ rocket system helping Ukraine shoot down Russia’s kamikaze drones Ukraine pilot films moment drone flies into Russian truck

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.

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