We could use amino acids, we could use nucleic acids, carboxylic acids, fatty acids.

So that we actually, to test this idea, first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids.

It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates.

And it is detectable not just in amino acids.

And somehow these amino acids are combined, and life begins.

And these are predominantly what are called the Omega 3 fatty acids.

Bacteria is in there, eating the same sugars, turning them into acids.

They're very repetitive, and they're very rich in the amino acids glycine and alanine.

And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids.

Dogs can distinguish two very similar fatty acids, extremely diluted caprylic acid and caproic acid.

While they're not amino acids, we're now finding things like propane and benzene, hydrogen cyanide, and formaldehyde.

It has the chemical sequences of amino acids, which says, This is how to build the structure.

And you flip it over, and it's the amino acids with the PH at which they have different charges.

And the bad fats are things like trans fatty acids and processed food and saturated fats, which we find in meat.

That is also very robust what you find in systems like Earth where there are amino acids, but there is no life.

Because if we can, maybe we have a chance of actually discovering life somewhere else without being biased by things like amino acids.

And they had a look at what was in the soup, and they found amino acids, but nothing came out, there was no cell.

So, in soap, fatty acids made from boiling pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent, but also for giving it a pearl like effect.

And they really help molecules, like nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, stay inside, develop, change, divide and do some of the processes that we call life.

They came up with an unleavened whole wheat bread called carta musica made out of durum wheat, a type of cheese made from grass fed animals so the cheese is high in Omega 3 fatty acids instead of Omega 6 fatty acids from corn fed animals, and a type of wine that has three times the level of polyphenols than any known wine in the world.

Our hunter ancestors ate fat, which was transported to the liver and broken down by the lipolytic pathway to deliver fatty acids to the mitochondria (the subcellular structures that burn food to create energy). On the occasion of a big kill, any excess dietary fatty acids were packaged into low density lipoproteins and transported out of the liver to be stored in peripheral fat tissue.

These micro machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids.

Of course, there is still glycine and alanine, but in fact, there are these heavy elements, these heavy amino acids, that are being produced because these are valuable to the organism.

So I'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to, but in fact on processes only.

e Each of the devices contained about 100 kilograms of conventional explosives surrounding several layers of chemicals, including potassium cyanide, sodium cyanide, hydrogen peroxide, potassium ferricyanide, nitric acid, mixed acids, as well as various insecticides and pesticides.

So what you're seeing here is the one letter abbreviation for amino acids, and I've colored in the glycines with green, and the alanines in red, and so you can see it's just a lot of G's and A's.

Haldane guesses that a dog would probably be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes.

I can tell you indeed it is, because this type of spectrum, just like what you've seen in books, and just like what you've seen in amino acids, it doesn't really matter how you change the environment, it's very robust it's going to reflect the environment.

Sensitive detection of pathogens, such as HIV, typically relies on the presence of nucleic acids (DNA or RNA), which are absent in prions. Recently, however, effective methods for amplifying prions have been developed, which could enable detection of the pathogen before it can damage its host.

When Juan Enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth, of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab, that's what Barricelli imagined that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code it already is coding from nucleic acids.

Here is, in fact, what you get if you, for example, look at the distribution of amino acids on a comet or in interstellar space or, in fact, in a laboratory, where you made very sure that in your primordial soup that there is not living stuff in there.

But the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein chains in these orthologs can vary significantly. Sometimes the extent of sequence identity between two orthologs can be as low as 25 30 , and yet their folds remain strikingly similar, attesting to the robustness of function to evolutionary change.

Because it really only has to do with these concepts of information, of storing information within physical substrates anything bits, nucleic acids, anything that's an alphabet and make sure that there's some process so that this information can be stored for much longer than you would expect the time scales for the deterioration of information.

But the emergence of molecular comparisons in the 1960 s, and DNA technologies in the 1980 s, presented a new way of comparing species. The comparison of linear polymers proteins made up of chains of amino acids, or DNA made up of chains of nucleotides held out the promise of a simple tabular approach to evolution.

One of them is, if we are able to think about life in abstract terms and we're not talking about things like plants, and we're not talking about amino acids, and we're not talking about bacteria, but we think in terms of processes then we could start to think about life, not as something that is so special to Earth, but that, in fact, could exist anywhere.