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IMAGE: An illustration of early Earth, as it would have looked around 4 billion years ago view more
Credit: Lucy Entwisle
Lightning strikes were just as important as meteorites in creating the perfect conditions for life to emerge on Earth, geologists say.
Minerals delivered to Earth in meteorites more than 4 billion years ago have long been advocated as key ingredients for the development of life on our planet.
Scientists believed minimal amounts of these minerals were also brought to early Earth through billions of lightning strikes.
But now researchers from the University of Leeds have established that lightning strikes were just as significant as meteorites in performing this essential function and allowing life to manifest.
Mar. 15, 2021 , 1:10 PM
Early in her career, Anne-Marie Coriat was frustrated at times as she tried to forge her path within the academic research system. She didn’t know it then, but these frustrations would eventually lead her to her ultimate professional path: a decadeslong career at U.K. funding bodies, running scientific programs, managing funding calls, and providing strategic leadership.
“What inspired me to take [this] career path was … ruling out what I didn’t want to do, as well as developing a passion along the way for caring about how the system actually operated, because I found it quite difficult to navigate,” Coriat says. That included a stint in the United States, where she discovered that doing a Ph.D. there was totally different from what she was familiar with in the United Kingdom; she ended up working as a technician so she could focus on lab research. Later, after completing her Ph.D. in developmental biology in the United Kingdom, she struggled to id
Despite being discovered almost 300 ago, photosynthesis still holds many unanswered questions for science, particularly the way that proteins organise themselves to convert sunlight into chemical energy and at the same time, protect plants from too much sunlight.
Now a collaboration between researchers at the University of Leeds and Kobe University in Japan is developing a novel approach to the investigation of photosynthesis.
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A rare disease first identified in 2020 is much more common than first thought, say researchers at the University of Leeds investigating its origins.
VEXAS syndrome is a serious inflammatory condition which develops in men over 50, causing them to become very sick and fatigued, and can be fatal. It was originally thought to be rare, but a new study has identified genetic mutations which indicate that the disease is actually much more common.
The researchers developed a genetic test to identify patients who may have the disease, and now want to screen more people showing symptoms to understand exactly how common it is.
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