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Physicists from Eötvös University in Budapest and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle have taken an innovative approach to determining when the first organic chemicals formed, and it turns out they could be a lot older than we imagined.

Complex organic chemistry once considered unique to life might not only be ubiquitous throughout the modern Universe - it may have formed a mere cosmic heartbeat after the Big Bang.

Barely a year goes by without the borders of organic chemistry being pushed to new limits. There's carbon chemistry on Mars, alcohol in the veins of baby solar systems, and molecules of aliphatic 'grease' just floating around in between stars.

We've certainly come a long way since chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted their famous 'primordial soup' experiment in 1952, showing how a rich variety of amino acids might feasibly form on a newborn planet Earth.

Now we can picture similar amino acids forming in an infant Universe, one that is barely a few million years old.

"The results suggest that the main ingredients of life, such as amino acids, nucleotides and other key molecules, came into existence very early," the group concludes in their report.

Unlike Miller and Urey, the team took a more mathematical approach to determining how elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen could combine into large, complex structures.

For the first 100 million years, the periodic table of the Universe was rather brief: hydrogen, helium, and not a lot else. Baking larger building blocks demanded the gravitational ovens of stars.

This raises an interesting question – once these first stars released their payload of chunky elements, what kinds of compounds did they form?

Theoretically the recipe book would be be close to endless, considering every possible combination of every element in variable numbers.

So the research team put some constraints on the problem, limiting their scope to molecules of a given mass rather than simply atomic configurations. That way molecules of the same mass could be placed in the same basket.

Next they compared this array with Earth's sizeable chemical diversity, using a database consisting of around 94 million molecules to get a sense of the range they should consider.

Their answer was roughly 290 daltons, or a mass equivalent to roughly 290 hydrogen atoms. There's a lot of molecules around that size, with numbers dwindling significantly below 100 daltons and past the 1,000 dalton limit.

However, that's just on Earth, which, given its richness in chemistry, is pretty much a special case.

A look at 5-billion-year-old meteorites found in the Australian outback showed a similar pattern, though, with a peak at around 240 daltons and a trailing off.

This suggests there's something governing this pattern. Given all of the possible combinations of atoms in the periodic table, it seems a couple hundred daltons is a sweet spot for atomic gatherings.

Atoms can come together and hold hands in a variety of ways. Like people, some relationships take work, while other matches require little more than a random encounter.

Random meetings can account for a huge variety of molecules under 240 daltons in size. To get bigger masses, some preferential contexts – the presence of an existing well-endowed molecule, for example – are increasingly required.

Armed with these details, the team reasoned it's possible to work out when these special arrangements might have first seen light.

By their estimates, those first elements from the Universe's inaugural nuclear furnaces could have shed their star dust, which through random encounters made simple molecules smaller than 240 daltons.

Only then could astronomical processes we still see today build up on those smaller clusters of atoms, creating a rich diversity of organics.

In terms of time, there's no reason to think amino acids and nuclides couldn't be among the first sizeable carbon molecules to appear roughly 165 million years after the first stars sparked up.

But we have to keep in mind that 'organic' doesn't necessarily imply life. These stepping stones from carbon to cows might have solid roots in the early Universe, but we still have a lot to learn about those preferential contexts for biochemistry to form.

The research hasn't been given the tick of approval by a peer review panel either, but is up for everybody to read on arXiv.com. Probably worth taking with a pinch of salt until it's published in a peer-reviewed journal, but definitely still worth checking out.

It's interesting to reflect that the hazy borders of life could well stretch back to the dawn of chemistry in an emerging cosmos.

Natural disasters as we all know are the consequences of events triggered by natural hazards that overwhelm local response capacity and seriously affect the social and economic development of a region. There is basically no human control over natural disaster. We cannot stop these natural disasters but what is in our hands is to be prepared for these. Also there are a lot of ways through which we can minimize the damage caused due to these natural disasters. Traditionally, natural disasters have been seen as situations that create challenges and problems mainly of a humanitarian nature.

There is no way to prevent or avert these natural disasters, though scientists do claim to have found the ways to predict these natural disasters but at most of the times they have failed to predict natural disasters causing some serious destruction. During the last few years, there has been an increase in the reports of natural disasters as well as destruction caused due to these disasters.

The tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes, which hit parts of Asia and the Americas in 2004/2005 are some examples of natural disasters in past few years and floods in the parts of Uttarakhand is a recent example of the destruction caused due to these natural calamities.

These calamities have led to displacement of a lot of people and heavy loss of life as well as property was also reported. Not just these few cases, natural disasters can be of many types which may include volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, foods, drought, landslides, or earthquakes etc. From past many years there has been a constant debate on the topic of natural disasters and the human role in the same.

A lot of human practices as well as rapidly growing developmental activities have been blame blamed for constant rise of these natural disasters like floods, hurricanes and tsunamis in past few years. One of the major causes of natural disasters has been attributed to the global warming, which has sparked debate analyzing what the effects may be. The reality at present is that we are experiencing an increasing number of natural disasters, and disaster preparedness is an area still to develop. Also along with the disaster preparedness there is a need to keep a check on developmental activities so that we could have a sustained environment.

What is Call for Code?

IBM has announced its Call For Code initiative, inviting startups and developers to solve problems related to natural disasters using cloud, AI, IoT, and blockchain platforms.

Call For Code was launched on May 24 by IBM chairman, president, and CEO Ginni Rometty during a keynote address at Viva Technology in Paris. The software giant has also committed to investing $30 Mn in the initiative in the next five years.

Developer teams can answer the call and register interest to compete in Call for Code, which begins officially on June 18 and closes on August 31.

How can people participate?

First and second runner-up will receive :  $25,000 USD cash prize Invitation to the Call for Code Global Prize Event & Long-term open source project support from The Linux Foundation.

Winners will be announced at the Call for Code Global Prize Event and Concert, which will benefit UN Human Rights and the American Red Cross, and be held on October 13th, the United Nations International Day for Disaster Reduction.

Developers can learn more about this initiative at the Call for Code site. In addition, IBM will hold hundreds of events over the next three months in 50 cities around the world—San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and more—to help global developers address the complex problems stemming from natural disasters.

In the quest for ever-colder temperatures, NASA is sending an apparatus to the International Space Station that will create a spot 10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space.

It's called the Cold Atom Laboratory, a payload about the size of an ice chest aboard Orbital ATK's Cygnus rocket, and it will help scientists observe the weird quantum properties of ultra-cold atoms.

A combination of lasers and magnets will be used to chill and slow a cloud of atoms to just a fraction above absolute zero, also known as zero Kelvin (-273.15 Celsius or -459.67 Fahrenheit).

Absolute zero is the coldest temperature in the Universe - and impossible to achieve, because at that point, atoms stop moving.

But the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) can cool clouds of atoms to just one-tenth of a billion of a degree above absolute zero, which causes them to move extremely slowly, exhibiting microscopic quantum phenomena.

These clouds are called Bose-Einstein condensates. They can be created on Earth, but there's a catch - gravity. It drags them downwards very quickly, so they can only be observed for a fraction of a second.

The microgravity environment aboard the ISS will overcome this significant problem, allowing scientists on Earth operating the equipment remotely to observe the atoms for up to 10 seconds.

This will be the longest we've ever been able to observe Bose-Einstein condensates, by a wide margin.

This has several scientific benefits. Because Bose-Einstein condensates are what is known as a superfluid - a type of fluid with zero viscosity - it will help us understand them better.

"If you had superfluid water and spun it around in a glass, it would spin forever," CAL project manager Anita Sengupta of JPL said last year.

"There's no viscosity to slow it down and dissipate the kinetic energy. If we can better understand the physics of superfluids, we can possibly learn to use those for more efficient transfer of energy."

It could also help advance superconductivity, and devices such as superconducting quantum interference devices, quantum computers, and laser-cooled atomic clocks. It could allow for the observation of never-before-seen quantum phenomena.

And it could even help detect and understand dark energy, the unknown force accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," said CAL project scientist Robert Thompson of JPL.

"The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy - some of the most pervasive forces in the universe."

The Cold Atom Laboratory isn't the only science payload departing for the ISS on Cygnus.

The rocket will also be carrying a handheld sextant to test for emergency star navigation (not to be confused with SEXTANT, the ground-breaking technology that uses pulsars as guide stars); and biomolecule sequencing technology, for sequencing microbes found aboard the ISS.

The launch is scheduled for Monday, May 21 at 08:39 UTC.