It’s a pretty sure bet that anyone who survived high school biology has heard about the Miller-Urey experiment that supported the hypothesis that the chemistry of life could arise from Earth’s primordial atmosphere. It was literally “lightning in a bottle,” with a mix of gases like methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water in a closed-loop glass apparatus and a pair of electrodes to provide a spark to simulate lightning lancing across the early prebiotic sky. [Miller] and [Urey] showed that amino acids, the building blocks of protein, could be cooked up under conditions that existed before life began.

Fast forward 70 years, and Miller-Urey is still relevant, perhaps more so as we’ve extended our reach into space and found places with conditions similar to those on early Earth. This modified version of Miller-Urey is a citizen science effort to update the classic experiment to keep up with those observations, plus perhaps just enjoy the fact that it’s possible to whip up the chemistry of life from practically nothing, right in your own garage.

[Markus Bindhammer]’s setup is similar to [Miller] and [Urey]’s in a lot of ways, but differs mainly by using plasma as the energy input, rather than a simple electrical discharge. [Markus] doesn’t expand on his reasoning for using plasma other than the practical consideration of it being hot enough to oxidize nitrogen inside the apparatus, providing the anoxic environment needed. The plasma discharge is controlled by a microcontroller and MOSFETs, to keep the electrodes from melting. Also, rather than methane and ammonia, the raw ingredient here is a formic acid solution, because the spectroscopic signature of formic acid has been detected in space, and because it has interesting chemistry that can potentially lead to the production of amino acids.

Unfortunately, while the apparatus and experimental procedure are fairly simple, quantifying the results requires some specialized equipment. [Markus] will be sending his samples off for analysis, so we don’t yet know what the experiment will show. But we love the setup here, which just goes to show that even the greatest experiments are worth repeating, because you never know what you’re going to find.

[Dearmash] put together this RGB LED display using triangles for each pixel. It’s an interesting deviation from the traditional grid layout. There are two video demos after the break. The first is a plasma-style pattern generated in Processing. The second is a spinning color wheel which would be perfect if synchronized with your Photoshop color spinner.

So the physical build is done, and now [Dearmash] is looking for a purpose for the device (isn’t that always the way it happens?). He mentions that the triangular layout looks cool, but makes text display almost impossible. Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work? Right off the bat we could see side-scrolling a font similar to the Metallica logo’s M and A. Bu there must be some way to group these pixels together into readable characters. If you always use an upward and downward pointed triangle on the same row as a pixel it makes a parallelogram which would be used to display italicization characters.