{"id":1423,"date":"2007-08-19T11:48:09","date_gmt":"2007-08-19T09:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/?p=1423"},"modified":"2007-08-19T11:48:09","modified_gmt":"2007-08-19T09:48:09","slug":"its-a-dusty-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/?p=1423","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s a dusty life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a link to a new article with the title: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iop.org\/EJ\/article\/1367-2630\/9\/8\/263\/njp7_8_263.pdf\">From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter<\/a> by V N Tsytovich, G E Morfill, V E Fortov, N G Gusein-Zade, B A Klumov and S V Vladimirov, which appeared in the open access journal &#8220;New Journal of Physics&#8221;. Among others the authors looked at molecular dynamics simulations of dust grains (&#8220;a dust cloud&#8221;)  in plasma <strong> (details: Coulomb interaction with overscreening potential + &#8220;Grain motions are damped by friction (to model viscosity of plasma neutral component) and stochastically accelerated by Langevin force&#8221;).<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>In particular the dust grains (which are charged within the plasma) can e.g. assume the shape of a double helix. The authors investigated in how far these shapes and their behaviour can be compared to organic DNA-like behaviour. From the abstract:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization.<br \/>\n&#8230;.<br \/>\nIt is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a link to a new article with the title: From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter by V N Tsytovich, G E Morfill, V E Fortov, N G Gusein-Zade, B A Klumov and S V Vladimirov, which appeared in the open access journal &#8220;New Journal of Physics&#8221;. Among others the authors [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,24,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}