Mininotebooks

=Mininotebooks=

Scientist keep a lab notebook. It is clear evidence of their work. They date their entries and number the pages. They use ink when writing in their notebook and cross out errors instead of erasing them.

We are going to use a mininotebook for every activity in our course. You make your own mininotebooks. You take three sheets of notebook paper, staple them along their left edges and number them. On page 1 you enter all identifying information: date, course number, your name, your partners’ names, and activity title.

Everything that you need to write down during the activity you must write in this mininotebook. No other paper can be used. Your writing does not have to be fastidiously neat. It should be clear and clearly labeled. Labels should be underlined so that they stand out. All numerical data and results should be followed by their units.

Mininotebooks are turned in at the end of every activity and are returned at the beginning of the following activity. You should store them in a three ring binder. At the end of the course, the binder should contain the totality of your work.

IMPORTANCE OF NOTEBOOKS Recreating life on Earth

Scientists have brought a 1950s science experiment back to life, and with it discovered a lot more about how life on Earth got stated in the first place.

Stanley Miller, 1999In the 1950s UCSD scientist Stanley Miller made history when he recreated the conditions of the early Earth by mixing some water, methane, hydrogen and ammonia in a glass bottle, boiling the result and zapping it with some synthetic lightning. In the residue remaining he identified 5 types of "amino acid", the building blocks used by life to create proteins. This, he said, strongly argued that "Darwin's warm little pond" from which life sprang 4 billion years ago, was spawned by the early Earth itself.

Miller died last year but his colleagues, in clearing up his things, discovered notebooks, the original apparatus and the resulting residues that he produced in his experiments fifty years ago.

Now, in a paper in this week's Science, they describe how they re-analysed Miller's material using ultra-sensitive modern chemical analytical techniques. Rather than just 5 of life's building blocks it would appear that Miller had actually made many more. The team, led by UCSD scientist Jeff Bada, document 22 amino acids and at least 5 other amine chemicals in the vestiges of the experiments. This shows, they say, that the conditions on the early Earth could well have produced a host of life-giving chemicals, rather than the handful suggested previously.