A chemical reaction that gives food flavour could have helped evolution, one study suggests. According to New Scientist, the Maillard reaction is when the temperature between sugars and amino acids rises above approximately 140°C. It often occurs in food such as toasted bread, meats and roasted vegetables. Caroline Peacock at the University of Leeds wanted to explore whether it could happen at lower temperatures. To do this, scientists added iron or manganese minerals to a solution made up of sugar glucose and the amino acid glycine. When the substance was incubated at 10°C, the process was sped up by around 100 times. The temperature is said to be similar to the seabed at the edges of continents. Peacock and the team discovered that the Maillard reaction also occurs on the ocean floor, where iron and manganese minerals are often found. If this is the case, it could cause the carbon in sugars and amino acids to be stored in "large, complex polymers that microbes find harder to ingest," Peacock said, as per the publication. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter "If you can get your carbon through the 1-metre danger zone [at the top of the sea floor], where carbon generally is attacked and degraded and turned back into carbon dioxide by microbes, that will lock it away from the atmosphere," she explained. The team estimated that the minerals could lock away roughly 4 million tonnes of carbon every year. If this process didn't exist, the atmosphere could have warmed by a further 5°C over the past 400 million years, the study suggested. "This process has such a profound impact on atmospheric oxygen," she says. "Because complex life forms require higher levels of oxygen, as they’re more energetically demanding, we think it’s reasonable to surmise this process had a hand in creating conditions required for complex life." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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So far this year, we’ve mostly been seeing artificial intelligence pop up on our timelines as a tool for creating trivial things like odd news songs from classic bands or bizarrely sexualised images of classic artworks However, it looks like AI had a vital practical implementation recently after spotting a dangerous asteroid heading close to Earth that was originally missed by scientists. A 600-foot asteroid named 2022 GN1 was found thanks to a new algorithm, and it was revealed that our planet had a close shave with the object last year. As it’s now been revealed, 2022 GN1 flew a relatively close 4.5 million miles from Earth in September 2022. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It sounds like a huge distance, but it falls within the definition of a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA). At the time, it was completely missed due to it being obscured by starlight from objects in the Milky Way. The algorithm, named HelioLinc3D, spotted the object after observing data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) telescope. The team leader behind the algorithm, Mario Jurić, released a statement saying: “This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when [the algorithm] HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night. “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large, telescopes.” Meanwhile, scientists think they have come up with a new approach to mitigating global warming: put up a giant “umbrella” in space to protect the Earth from excess sunlight. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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