If we are to talk about molecules of life, the ribosome, made of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and protein, is a key: it stands at the junction between information and action, i.e. between nucleic acids and proteins. It is an extraordinarily sophisticated machine that takes the information present in mRNA and uses it to build proteins, containing over 250K atoms, and measuring more than 200 in every dir...

The main factors of the developmental environment of marine source rocks in continental margin basins have their specificality. This realization, in return, has led to the recognition that the developmental environment and pattern of marine source rocks, especially for the source rocks in continental margin basins, are still controversial or poorly understood. Through the analysis of the trace ...

Once segmentation of 3D surface data of a rock pile has been performed, the next task is to determine the visibility of the surface rocks. A region boundary-following algorithm that accommodates irregularly spaced 3D coordinate data is presented for determining this visibility. We examine 3D surface segmentations of laboratory rock piles and determine which regions in the segmentation correspon...

The rocks of the Wadi Umm Gheig/El-Shush area in the central Eastern Desert of Egypt form part of the Nubian Shield, a component of the Neoproterozoic Pan-African Orogeny. The rocks have been divided into three units: (i) low-grade metamorphosed rocks, which consist of metavolcanic rocks interleaved with slices of ophiolitic melange; (ii) high-grade metamorphic rocks, which consist of syn-tecto...

The Moon, like the Earth, is made of rocks. To learn about the Moon and its history, one has to learn something about lunar rocks—what they are made of, how they are studied and classified, and how our experiences in interpreting rocks on the Earth have been applied to rocks on the Moon. The lunar samples have provided our only direct information about the Moon’s minerals, chemical composition,...

A broad spectrum of variably altered igneous rocks with a wide range of grain sizes are compressed and heated over a wide range of pressure-temperature paths in subduction zones. Although experimental kinetic data cannot be extrapolated to predict the rates of blueschist and eclogite formation in nature, textural data from rocks indicate that transformation below temperatures of 150øC is minima...