Dissolved ions present in an aqueous environment may significantly improve biomolecule attachment at mineral surfaces through the formation of cooperative surface complexes. To test whether this phenomenon results in the selective adsorption of an organic species, we conducted batch adsorption experiments with an equimolar mixture of the amino acids aspartate, glycine, lysine, leucine, and phenylalanine onto powdered brucite [Mg(OH)(2)] at pH 10.2. We performed the batch experiments in triplicate both without and with 4.1 mM CaCl2. In experiments without CaCl2, we observed that up to 0.7 mu mol m(-2) of aspartate and about 0.4 mu mol m(-2) each of the remaining four amino acids adsorbed onto brucite. When we added CaCl2, we found that up to 1.6 mu mol m(-2) of aspartate selectively adsorbed onto the brucite surface relative to between 0.2 and 0.3 mu mol m(-2) of the other amino acids. We measured the brucite particle surface charge to be slightly positive without added CaCl2, but the surface charge becomes significantly more positive in the presence of CaCl2. Our results suggest that negatively charged molecules selectively and cooperatively adsorb onto brucite when CaCl2 is added to the system. This study emphasizes the importance of the dissolved ionic profile of a geochemical environment when evaluating the role of mineral surfaces in the evolution of prebiotic chemistry. The presence of dissolved ions at a mineral-water interface can selectively enhance the adsorption and concentration of specific molecules, which may serve as a key process in molecular self-organization and the assembly of proteins that are composed of metal-ligand complexes.

The unit-cell dimensions and crystal structure of kyanite at various pressures up to 4.56 GPa were refined from single-crystal X-ray diffraction data. The bulk modulus is 193(1) GPa, assuming K' = 4.0. Calculated unit-strain tensors show that kyanite exhibits more isotropic compressibility than andalusite or sillimanite. The most and least compressible directions in the kyanite structure correspond approximately to the most and the least thermally expandable directions. The analysis of the distortion of the closest packing in kyanite indicates that the most compressible direction of the structure (along [012]) corresponds to the direction along which the closest-packed O monolayers are stacked. The bulk moduli for the A11, A12, A13, and A14 octahedra are 274(43), 207(14), 224(26), and 281(24) GPa, respectively, and those for the Si1 and Si2 tetrahedra are 322(80) and 400(95) GPa, respectively. Four AlO6 octahedra that all become less distorted at higher pressures do not display clearly dominant compression directions. The average unshared O-O distance for each octahedron is considerably more compressible than the shared O-O distance. The high-pressure behaviors of the All and A14 octahedra are very similar but different from those of the A12 and A13 octahedra. Bulk moduli for the three Al2SiO5 polymorphs (kyanite, sillimanite, and andalusite), as well as those for the AlO6 octahedra in their structures, appear to decrease linearly as their volumes increase. The significantly larger bulk modulus and more isotropic compressibility for kyanite than for andalusite or sillimanite are a consequence of the nearly cubic close-packed arrangement of O atoms and the complex edge-sharing among four distinct AlO6 octahedra in the kyanite structure.

Rocks of Ediacaran age (similar to 635-541 Ma) contain the oldest fossils of large, complex organisms and their behaviors. These fossils document developmental and ecological innovations, and suggest that extinctions helped to shape the trajectory of early animal evolution. Conventional methods divide Ediacaran macrofossil localities into taxonomically distinct clusters, which may represent evolutionary, environmental, or preservational variation. Here, we investigate these possibilities with network analysis of body and trace fossil occurrences. By partitioning multipartite networks of taxa, paleoenvironments, and geologic formations into community units, we distinguish between biostratigraphic zones and paleoenvironmentally restricted biotopes, and provide empirically robust and statistically significant evidence for a global, cosmopolitan assemblage unique to terminal Ediacaran strata. The assemblage is taxonomically depauperate but includes fossils of recognizable eumetazoans, which lived between two episodes of biotic turnover. These turnover events were the first major extinctions of complex life and paved the way for the Cambrian radiation of animals.

Mass extinctions documented by the fossil record provide critical benchmarks for assessing changes through time in biodiversity and ecology. Efforts to compare biotic crises of the past and present, however, encounter difficulty because taxonomic and ecological changes are decoupled, and although various metrics exist for describing taxonomic turnover, no methods have yet been proposed to quantify the ecological impacts of extinction events. To address this issue, we apply a network-based approach to exploring the evolution of marine animal communities over the Phanerozoic Eon. Network analysis of fossil co-occurrence data enables us to identify nonrandom associations of interrelated paleocommunities. These associations, or evolutionary paleocommunities, dominated total diversity during successive intervals of relative community stasis. Community turnover occurred largely during mass extinctions and radiations, when ecological reorganization resulted in the decline of one association and the rise of another. Altogether, we identify five evolutionary paleocommunities at the generic and familial levels in addition to three ordinal associations that correspond to Sepkoski's Cambrian, Paleozoic, and Modern evolutionary faunas. In this context, we quantify magnitudes of ecological change by measuring shifts in the representation of evolutionary paleocommunities over geologic time. Our work shows that the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event had the largest effect on ecology, followed in descending order by the Permian-Triassic, Cretaceous-Paleogene, Devonian, and Triassic-Jurassic mass extinctions. Despite its taxonomic severity, the Ordovician extinction did not strongly affect co-occurrences of taxa, affirming its limited ecological impact. Network paleoecology offers promising approaches to exploring ecological consequences of extinctions and radiations.

The Earth in Five Reactions Workshop posed two significant challenges: (1) the formulation of a conceptual definition of "reaction" and (2) the identification and ranking of the "most important reactions" in the context of planetary evolution. Attempted answers to those challenges, collated in this collection of articles, reflect both the opportunities and hurdles when scientists deal with questions of meaning and value.

Minerals reveal the nature of the co-evolving geosphere and biosphere through billions of years of Earth history. Mineral classification systems have the potential to elucidate this rich evolutionary story; however, the present mineral taxonomy, based as it is on idealized major element chemistry and crystal structure, lacks a temporal aspect, and thus cannot reflect planetary evolution. A complementary evolutionary system of mineralogy based on the quantitative recognition of "natural kind clustering" for a wide range of condensed planetary materials with different paragenetic origins has the potential to amplify, though not supersede, the present classification system.

Redox states of the Archean Eon have been constrained by various lines of evidence, including atmospheric, photochemical, and ecological models, mass-independent fractionations of sulfur isotopes, Fe-depletion of paleosols, and preservation of diagnostic detrital minerals. Although these lines of evidence present seemingly consistent upper limits on pO(2,g), they are conceptually contradictory about the redox state of Archean surficial environments. Atmospheric, photochemical, and ecological modeling studies suggest weakly reducing environments under redox states represented by moderate H-2,H-g levels. However, current interpretations of Fedepletion in paleosols and the preservation of detrital minerals are based on low O-2,O-g levels at which the reducing detrital minerals are thermodynamically unstable and survive because of slow kinetics of oxidative weathering.

Microbial life permeates Earth's critical zone and has likely inhabited nearly all our planet's surface and near subsurface since before the beginning of the sedimentary rock record. Given the vast time that Earth has been teeming with life, do astrobiologists truly understand what geological features untouched by biological processes would look like? In the search for extraterrestrial life in the Universe, it is critical to determine what constitutes a biosignature across multiple scales, and how this compares with "abiosignatures" formed by nonliving processes. Developing standards for abiotic and biotic characteristics would provide quantitative metrics for comparison across different data types and observational time frames. The evidence for life detection falls into three categories of biosignatures: (1) substances, such as elemental abundances, isotopes, molecules, allotropes, enantiomers, minerals, and their associated properties; (2) objects that are physical features such as mats, fossils including trace-fossils and microbialites (stromatolites), and concretions; and (3) patterns, such as physical three-dimensional or conceptual n-dimensional relationships of physical or chemical phenomena, including patterns of intermolecular abundances of organic homologues, and patterns of stable isotopic abundances between and within compounds. Five key challenges that warrant future exploration by the astrobiology community include the following: (1) examining phenomena at the "right" spatial scales because biosignatures may elude us if not examined with the appropriate instrumentation or modeling approach at that specific scale; (2) identifying the precise context across multiple spatial and temporal scales to understand how tangible biosignatures may or may not be preserved; (3) increasing capability to mine big data sets to reveal relationships, for example, how Earth's mineral diversity may have evolved in conjunction with life; (4) leveraging cyberinfrastructure for data management of biosignature types, characteristics, and classifications; and (5) using three-dimensional to n-D representations of biotic and abiotic models overlain on multiple overlapping spatial and temporal relationships to provide new insights.