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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Vials contain samples of prebiotic materials created by Stanley Miller in 1958, labeled by Miller himself. Miller added a potential prebiotic condensation agent, cyanamide, during the course of the experiment. Cyanamide has been suggested to induce polymerization of amino acids into simple peptides which is an important set in chemical evolution and possibly the origin of life. For unknown reasons, Miller had never analyzed the samples. In a paper published in 2014, researchers at Georgia Tech and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego analyzed the samples and established the potential importance of reagents - substances that cause chemical reactions such as cyanamide - in the origin of life on Earth. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.
