March 24, 2025 (menalive.com)

By  Jed Diamond

                My friend and colleague Margaret Wheatley says,

“Warriors appear at certain historic moments, when something valuable is being threatened and needs protection. It could be clans, communities, kings, lands—something is being imperiled by outside forces. This situation of extreme threat demands exceptional protectors. This is when the Warriors arise.”

                In my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet, I said that we must separate the life of the warrior from the destruction of war and quoted meditation master Chögyam Trungpa.

“Warriorship here does not refer to making war on others,” says Trungpa. “Aggression is the source of our problems not the solution. Here the word ‘warrior’ is taken from the Tibetan pawo which literally means ‘one who is brave.’  Warriorship in this context is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness.” Trungpa concludes by saying, “Warriorship is not being afraid of who you are.”

                I experienced my first warrior calling on November 21, 1969. My wife was pregnant with our first child and I had spent the last nine hours coaching her through the Lamaze breathing techniques we had been taught in the child-birth classes with other expectant parents to be. When we began the classes, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of the birth process, even if I was allowed, afraid I might pass out at the sight of blood or become overly concerned with my wife’s pain and be more of a hindrance than a help.

                When the time had arrived for her to go to the delivery room, the nurse said,

“Well, your job is done here Mr. Diamond. You can go to the waiting room now.”

                I felt a mixture of sadness and relief. We had been given the rules of Kaiser hospital at the outset. Whichever doctor was there when the baby was ready to be born would decide if the father would be allowed in the delivery room. So I kissed my wife goodbye and wished her well. She was wheeled through the doors toward the delivery room and I walked down the long hallway toward the exit sign leading to the waiting room to sit with the other expectant fathers.

                Yet, in the eternity of those few moments it took to make the short walk, something shifted in me. I felt a call from my unborn child that could not be denied telling me I don’t want a waiting-room father. Your place is here with us.

                I turned around and walked back into the delivery room and took my place at the head of the table. There was no question of asking permission, no chance I would leave if directed. I was simply there. I felt a wonderful sense of calm come over me and quite soon, amid tears of joy, my son, Jemal, arrived in the world. He was handed to me and as I looked into his eyes, I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully involved with their children throughout their lives.

                When my wife and I were in college after we had met and fallen in love, we agreed we both wanted children. But we also felt that there were children already born who needed loving parents. We decided we would have a child then adopt a child. After Jemal was born, we began the adoption process for a little girl. Two years later we adopted a two-and-a-half-month old African-American little girl who we named Angela.

                As I write this our son Jemal, is 54 and has a child of his own. Angela is 52 and has four children. My wife, Carlin, and I now have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, three great grandchildren, and one on the way. Before I had children, I thought my purpose as a man was centered outside the home, with the work I did in the world. I still do work outside the home, but over the years I have come to see my most important role has been as a hands-on caregiver.

Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies

                Dr. Sarah Hrdy is an anthropologist and primatologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates. She has recently turned her attention to men.

“It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things,” says Hrdy. “When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors’ offspring.”

                In her recent book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be “normal.” She offers a sweeping account of male nurturing, explaining how and why men are biologically transformed when they care for babies.

                “Under the right circumstances,” she says, “males of our species are as well-equipped as women to tenderly nurture babies and develop caring priorities. Gestation, giving birth, and breast-feeding are not nature’s sole pathways to parental involvement and intense devotion.”

                This was certainly my experience when Jemal and Angela were babies. Once I brought my wife and new-born son home from the hospital, I took three weeks off from work to help with the immediate caregiving. I assumed that mothers were born with some genetically driven knowledge of how to care for babies but soon learned that was not the case. She had breasts for the baby, but breastfeeding was an art she and the baby had to learn together.

                I knew that changing diapers was not a sex-specific skill and I soon learned to get as good at it as was my wife. After three weeks I went back to work and my wife soon moved into the role of full-time caregiver, with me as the support team. That lasted a year until my wife announced one day that she needed a break and was doing to take a three-week trip with a girlfriend and that I would assume full-time care duties while she was away.

                The idea sounded reasonable. I could tell she was exhausted even with the help I supplied when I came home from work. But the truth was I was scared as hell. All my fears came to the surface. What will I do when I don’t know what to do? What if he starts crying and I can’t make him stop? We didn’t have any other family who lived close to us and most of our friends were either single or were overwhelmed with their own family challenges.

                My wife was reassuring and said I could call her if I needed advice. She kissed me goodbye and off she went. I’m a long way from those fearful days, but the truth was it was one of the greatest gifts of my life. Jemal and I worked things out together. Each hour of each day we were together, I gained confidence. My wife had left enough breast milk (using one of those handpumps popular at the time) and I learned how to heat and serve. We played together and I carried him around on my back.

                My wife got worried when I hadn’t called and when she phoned me she was relieved to learn that we were going well. My confidence as a man has grown through the years as I learned new skills in caring for our daughter.

                Dr. Hrdy discovered some of the reasons that men can become as good at nurturing infants as women.

“Early in my career, back in the 1970s while still focused on infanticide, the antithesis of nurturing,” says Hrdy, “I learned about a phenomenon called ‘sensitization.’ Even in species of animals whose males ordinarily ignore, attack, or cannibalize pups they encounter, males might, given the right circumstances, switch to gently tending them instead. What it took was repeated exposure. Time in intimate proximity somehow ‘flipped a switch’ in the deepest recesses of the male brain, whether a rodent’s or a monkey’s.”

                Dr. Hrdy went on to say,

“Time in intimate proximity to babies could have surprising effects on males including surges in oxytocin (known as a ‘bonding’ hormone).”  

                I didn’t know it at the time, but being in intimate contact with my children triggered the brain chemicals that are present in both males and females and can be stimulated if given enough time together. Dr. Hrdy concludes,

“For men, it turns out, have a different birthright from the one that I and many of my evolutionary colleagues have so long assigned them.”

                In standing up to a system that would deny fathers in the delivery room, I learned that it takes strength with heart, as my colleague Dr. Daniel Ellenberg describes it or being a compassionate warrior as another friend, Sean Harvey discusses in his book, Warrior Compassion: Unleashing the Healing Power of Men. It’s time for more men to stand up and embrace our birthright. We are needed now more than ever.

                I look forward to hearing from you. What are you own experiences nurturing young children? What support have your received? What resistance have you found from others or from your own early conditioning about what is “natural” for men?

                If you would like to read more articles like these, please visit me at www.MenAlive.com. You can subscribe to my free weekly newsletter here: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/.

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Best Wishes,

Jed Diamond

---

Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive

The Ten of Disks The Lord of Wealth is a card which talks about the manifestation of the fruits of our labours, in whatever area they have been directed. When we have aimed all our energies in a single stream of force toward one end, there comes a point, inevitably, where we shall attain our objective. And that is what the Ten of Disks indicates.Often, commentaries on this card warn that once sufficient wealth has been attained, you should make sure you distribute excess fairly and generously. This is because energy which remains unused eventually corrupts and dissipates.But there’s another aspect to the right use of energy which is not so often addressed. This is to do with the way the Will works. There’s a common misunderstanding about the use of Will among us – we tend to think that applying Will is something that we only do consciously. This is incorrect. The human Will works all the time. It runs around happily creating whatever seems most pressing in your mind.This has a rather unfortunate side effect. For many people, the most pressing emotions and responses in their minds are connected to fear, pain, unhappiness or deprivation. Once seized by feelings such as these, it can be very difficult indeed to keep your mind off them, and engage in positive thoughts, affirmations and actions.You know the feeling – something comes along and hurts you. Then you suffer. You keep circling the issue in your mind. You build up a nice collection of fears. You make a lot of (often wildly illogical) painful associations. And you do not find a relevant affirmation and repeat it with extraordinary fervour until you have your feelings back under control. You do not go and do something nice for yourself. You do not deliberately force your thoughts and feelings onto a more positive track.All the time that cycle is taking place, your Will is wildly scampering after all those negative feelings and channelling your energy out into life, attempting to create the things it thinks you want!DOH!!! Dissipation of power causing chaos!The Lord of Wealth teaches us the invaluable lesson… by bringing our thoughts and emotions to a conscious level, and by making positive choices about how we direct those energies, we create our world. So we need to decide what we what, and then think about that… not linger on the things that we don’t want. And we need to trust our own energy to fly out into the Universe and come back to us completed.Then we are endlessly wealthy. Affirmation: “I am endlessly wealthy.”

(Angelpaths.com)

Amanpour and Company • Mar 26, 2025 • Trump’s America has started to challenge and redefine academic freedom, and Yale Professor Jason Stanley is sounding the alarm. He is the author of “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.” Stanley joins the show to discuss how new teaching guidelines are stoking a culture of fear, and why he’s taking drastic measures as a result. Originally aired on March 26, 2025

However entitled you already thought these people were, they’re more so, according to Sarah Wynn-Williams in her memoir “Careless People.”

By Lily Janiak,Theater criticUpdated March 23, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg addresses a crowd at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park in 2014. The memoir “Careless People” claims Sandberg coerced employees into “sleepovers.”Alison Yin/Invision for Facebook/AP Images

The first thing a tell-all needs is juicy things to tell, and Sarah Wynn-Williams at least has those.

In her memoir “Careless People,” which gets its name from a line in “The Great Gatsby” describing how Tom and Daisy “let other people clean up the mess they had made,” the former director of global public policy at Facebook has a chapter called “Lean in and Lie Back.” Here, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg; a young assistant named Sadie whom Sandberg treats as a “little doll” or “lady-in-waiting,” complete with hair-petting and lap-sitting duties; Wynn-Williams and others are in a private jet flying back from Davos, Switzerland. A pouty Sandberg repeatedly tells Wynn-Williams to “come to bed” — the single large bed in the craft — for a sleepover. 

Wynn-Williams really doesn’t want to and tries to pawn the job off on Sadie, whose last name isn’t given. Then, in a move that combines “Mean Girls” and a toddler having a bedtime tantrum, Sandberg says, “Sadie’s slept over lots of times and I’m not asking Sadie. I’m asking you.” 

The best revelations in the book peek behind the smooth digital facades of Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg to the actual people warped by increasingly infinite power, money and isolation — and they’re jaw-dropping enough that on Wednesday, March 12, Facebook parent company Meta won a temporary legal injunction to halt promotion and distribution of the book. 

More Information

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
By Sarah Wynn-Williams
(Flatiron Books; 400 pages; $32.99)

Meta claimed Wynn-Williams violated a non-disparagement clause in her 2017 severance agreement, which resulted in the emergency ruling in the social media company’s favor effectively prohibiting Wynn-Williams’ ability to market the book. But her publisher, Flatiron Books, has moved forward with distribution, and the memoir has taken off. 

The content more than backs up the commotion surrounding its release. However entitled you already thought these overlords were, they’re more so, according to the author. 

Wynn-Williams, who worked at the company from 2011 to 2017, details decisions about unstable regimes or vulnerable youths that lead to preventable deaths, with responses that aren’t even blinks. There’s the meeting about an organ donation initiative when an oblivious Sandberg asks, “Do you mean to tell me that if my four-year-old was dying and the only thing that would save her was a new kidney, that I couldn’t fly to Mexico and get one and put it in my handbag?” 

Elsewhere, she praises Filipina nannies as “service-oriented” and expects her Facebook employees — the female ones, naturally — to do unpaid labor promoting her 2013 book “Lean In.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., in 2018. Facebook parent company Meta won a temporary legal injunction this week to halt promotion and distribution of the memoir “Careless People,” which alleges bad behavior by the company’s leaders. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

In Wynn-Williams’ telling, Zuckerberg is so used to his sycophants letting him win at board games that he just thinks he’s amazing at them, and when she challenges him for real, his short-circuited brain can only conclude she’s cheating. He’s the kind of person who believes “something more important might come up” than being present for the birth of his child, or who, when one of his employees gets jailed in a foreign country, doesn’t work to free that person but uses the situation to draft a self-aggrandizing Facebook post — one that could put the jailed employee at even more risk.

Such leaders create a workplace culture, in Wynn-Williams’ telling, where moms get critical performance reviews when co-workers can hear babies during Zoom meetings or when they’re insufficiently responsive on email when in a coma on maternity leave. 

“The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is,” she writes. 

“Lean In” author and former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg speaks at the Fortune Global Forum conference in San Francisco in 2015. A new memoir by a former Facebook employee describes Sandberg and other company leadership as being warped by power, money and isolation.Liz Hafalia/S.F. Chronicle

It’s an office where women with “director” in their title are expected to get on their hands and knees to look for items their male superiors have dropped or get fired after they complain about their boss’ sexual harassment. 

It’s a place of moral turpitude — that enables human rights violations in Asia, that grants China surveillance power over all Facebook users, that targets ads to teens based on their emotional state and is proud of doing so. “We shout this from the rooftops,” an advertising exec tells the author.

“Careless People” author Sarah Wynn-Williams.Flatiron Books

But if Wynn-Williams has dishy “all” in her tell-all, her telling often muddies it. Her overreliance on sentence fragments makes for a choppy ride through a paragraph. It’s like getting continuously kicked off the back of a horse and having to remount. 

And not only does she tell instead of show — abstracting instead of supplying the detail that could empower you to draw conclusions yourself — she repeats points as if speaking to a remedial class. Does a single page need to inform us both that Sandberg and others “ruthlessly manage their own labor, extracting as much work out of each day as humanly possible” and that “her ferocious work ethic and endurance are astounding”?

A tell-all about a toxic workplace needs still another ingredient to succeed, and that’s a teller who strikes a tricky balance. We seek a narrator far enough outside of the cult to truly see and critique it, but not one so intent on settling scores that we can’t trust her. At the same time, she can’t oversell her virtues, and this is where Wynn-Williams, who worked in diplomacy before joining Facebook, falters. The subtext of chapter after chapter — whether the subject is China, Myanmar, U.S. elections or teen users’ mental health — is: “If only Facebook had listened to Sarah!” 

It’s also been speculated that fact-checking of these accounts, which are based on memories of the author’s experiences from years past, was sparse.

Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at the Facebook F8 developers conference in San Jose in 2018. A memoir by a former Facebook employee claims the company culture included women being fired if they complain about sexual harassment. Paul Chinn/S.F. Chronicle

You might object that maybe Wynn-Williams really was the lone person farsighted enough to predict how Facebook could become as powerful as nation-states, guided only by the caprices of some ill-informed, callous billionaires accountable to no one. Even so, it doesn’t always make for great reading. The book, instead, reads less as memoir than as cover letter for her next gig. 

The closest she gets to sounding sinful like the rest of us is when she admits, “When a woman I work with closely expresses surprise upon learning I have a child, she tells me, ‘Good job! ’ — openly admiring of the fact that she’d had no idea — and I feel a flush of pride.”

Yet perhaps this tightrope that exposé authors must walk is just like the impossible demands we place on female corporate managers: Be relatable but also respectable. Be a feminist, but only at the right times. Hype yourself, but don’t be pushy. 

About Opinion

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

Read more about our transparency and ethics policies

If the goal of all those unwritten rules is to get more women to become like Zuckerberg and Sandberg, “Careless People” paints the apex of digital power as a lonely, unhappy, dehumanizing place. With any luck, some readers will choose to lean away.

Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the date Meta won the temporary legal injunction to halt promotion and distribution of the book. It was Wednesday, March 12, the day after the memoir’s release.

Reach Lily Janiak: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com 

March 20, 2025|Updated March 23, 2025 5:58 p.m.

Lily Janiak

THEATER CRITIC

Lily Janiak joined the San Francisco Chronicle as theater critic in May 2016. Previously, her writing appeared in Theatre Bay Area, American Theatre, SF Weekly, the Village Voice and HowlRound. A Michigan native whose childhood also took her to Tennessee and Texas, she holds a BA in theater studies from Yale and an MA in drama from San Francisco State. She served on the jury for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

New Thinking • Mar 29, 2025 Gary Lachman is the author of twenty-one books on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to literary suicides, popular culture and the history of the occult. He has written a rock and roll memoir of the 1970s, biographies of Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, C. G. Jung, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, P. D. Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson, histories of Hermeticism and the Western Inner Tradition, studies in existentialism and the philosophy of consciousness, and about the influence of esotericism on politics and society. Here he points out that the Corpus Hermeticum originated in Alexandria, Egypt, during a period of fusion among Greek and Egyptian traditions. Hermes Trismegistus represents an amalgamation of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek god Hermes. The original literature is of unknown authorship and focuses on the attainment of higher stats of consciousness. Hermeticism serves as the backbone of the western esoteric tradition that also includes astrology, tarot, alchemy, and ceremonial magick. Hermeticism was particularly influential during the Renaissance. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on March 20, 2019)

(Stephanie Winn (Som)

AI Overview

Learn more

Autogynephilia is a term used in psychology to describe a sexual interest in oneself as a woman. It is a paraphilia, which means an unusual or atypical sexual interest. 

Individuals with autogynephilia may experience: 

• Sexual arousal when imagining or dressing as a woman
• A desire to have a female body
• Gender dysphoria, or a feeling of discomfort or distress with their assigned gender 

It is important to note that autogynephilia is not a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, but rather a possible contributing factor. Not all individuals with gender dysphoria experience autogynephilia. 

Generative AI is experimental.

(findagrave.com)

“This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it son the contrary aa entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive.”

–Richard Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness

(Amazon.com)

“Bucke believed that in the future humanity will develop cosmic consciousness. But some human beings might develop different faculties, such as the power to heal, true psychic awareness, or the ability to communicate with the dead. He believed that these would become senses as natural as sight.”

–Ronnie Pontiac in The American Metaphysical Religion

New Thinking • Mar 27, 2025 Robert Davis, PhD, is a retired professor of neuroscience at the State University of New York. He is author of The UFO Phenomenon: Should I Believe?, Life After Death: An Analysis of the Evidence, Unseen Forces: The Integration of Science, Reality, and You, and most recently The Consciousness Connection: Extraordinary Human Experiences and the Nature of Reality. His website is https://bobdavisspeaks.com/ You can view Bob Davis’ film The Consciousness Connection for free on Gaia.com during their 7-day free trial. https://consciousness.media Here he reviews a wide range of phenomena, explaining carefully what science has learned about such matters, what it has yet to learn, and what science may never come to terms with. Topics include UFO encounters, kundalini experience, and after-death communication. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:24 Kundalini awakening 00:21:24 UFO related encounters 00:32:00 Traumatic and healing experiences 00:42:10 What is consciousness? 00:51:10 A new approach in science 00:54:36 Words, symbols, and imagination 01:03:18 Studies of mediumship 01:09:59 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on March 6, 2025)

By Ashley Strickland, CNN

Published 7:00 AM EDT, Sat March 29, 2025 (CNN.com)

(NASA’s Curiosity rover drilled into this rock target, called Cumberland, in May 2013 and collected a powdered sample of material from the rock’s interior. NASA

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.CNN — 

The NASA Curiosity rover has detected the largest organic molecules found to date on Mars, opening a window into the red planet’s past. The newly detected compounds suggest complex organic chemistry may have occurred in the planet’s past — the kind necessary for the origin of life, according to new research.

The organic compounds, which include decane, undecane and dodecane, came to light after the rover analyzed a pulverized 3.7 billion-year-old rock sample using its onboard mini lab called SAM, short for Sample Analysis at Mars.

Scientists believe the long chains of molecules could be fragments of fatty acids, which are organic molecules that are chemical building blocks of life on Earth and help form cell membranes. But such compounds can also be formed without the presence of life, created when water interacts with minerals in hydrothermal vents.

The molecules cannot currently be confirmed as evidence of past life on the red planet, but they add to the growing list of compounds that robotic explorers have discovered on Mars in recent years. A study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

RELATED ARTICLEToxic dust on Mars would present serious hazard for astronauts

The detection of the fragile molecules also encourages astrobiologists that if any biosignatures, or past signs of life, ever existed on Mars, they are likely still detectable despite the harsh solar radiation that has bombarded the planet for tens of millions of years.

“Ancient life, if it happened on Mars, it would have released some complex and fragile molecules,” said lead study author Dr. Caroline Freissinet, research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Observations, and Space in Guyancourt, France. “And because now we know that Mars can preserve these complex and fragile molecules, it means that we could detect ancient life on Mars.”

The finding also adds fuel to the fire to return samples from Mars so scientists can study them on Earth with more sophisticated tools, and perhaps, once and for all, determine whether life ever existed anywhere beyond our planet.

This graphic shows the long-chain organic molecules decane, undecane, and dodecane that Curiosity detected in the Cumberland sample. Dan Gallagher/NASA

A long time in the making

Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. More than 12 years later, the rover has driven over 21 miles (34 kilometers) to ascend Mount Sharp, which is within the crater. The feature’s many layers preserve millions of years of geological history on Mars, showing how it shifted from a wet to a dry environment.

Perhaps one of the most valuable samples Curiosity has gathered on its mission to understand whether Mars was ever habitable was collected in May 2013.

The rover drilled the Cumberland sample from an area within a crater called Yellowknife Bay, which resembled an ancient lake bed. The rocks from Yellowknife Bay so intrigued Curiosity’s science team that it had the rover drive in the opposite direction to collect samples from the area before heading to Mount Sharp.

This patch of bedrock, called Cumberland, was selected as the second-ever target for drilling by Curiosity. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Since collecting the Cumberland sample, Curiosity has used SAM to study it in a variety of ways, revealing that Yellowknife Bay was once the site of an ancient lake where clay minerals formed in water. The mudstone created an environment that could concentrate and preserve organic molecules and trapped them inside the fine grains of the sedimentary rock.

Freissinet helped lead a research team in 2015 that was able to identify organic molecules within the Cumberland sample.

The instrument detected an abundance of sulfur, which can be used to preserve organic molecules; nitrates, which are essential for plant and animal health on Earth; and methane composed of a type of carbon associated with biological processes on Earth.

“There is evidence that liquid water existed in Gale Crater for millions of years and probably much longer, which means there was enough time for life-forming chemistry to happen in these crater-lake environments on Mars,” said study coauthor Daniel Glavin, senior scientist for sample return at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.

This mosaic of images from Curiosity’s Mast Camera shows the Yellowknife Bay formation, the site of an ancient lake bed. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Curiosity has maintained pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample in a “doggy bag” so that the team could have the rover revisit it later, even miles away from the site where it was collected. The team developed and tested innovative methods in its lab on Earth before sending messages to the rover to try experiments on the sample.

In a quest to see whether amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, existed in the sample, the team instructed the rover to heat up the sample twice within SAM’s oven. When it measured the mass of the molecules released during heating, there weren’t any amino acids, but they found something entirely unexpected.

An intriguing detection

The team was surprised to detect small amounts of decane, undecane and dodecane, so it had to conduct a reverse experiment on Earth to determine whether these organic compounds were the remnants of the fatty acids undecanoic acid, dodecanoic acid and tridecanoic acid, respectively.

The scientists mixed undecanoic acid into a clay similar to what exists on Mars and heated it up in a way that mimicked conditions within SAM’s oven. The undecanoic acid released decane, just like what Curiosity detected.

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/loops/stellar/prod/mars-rover-loop-3.mp4?c=originalEach fatty acid remnant detected by Curiosity was made with a long chain of 11 to 13 carbon atoms. Previous molecules detected on Mars were smaller, meaning their atomic weight was less than the molecules found in the new study, and simpler.

Curiosity heated the sample within SAM’s oven, releasing molecules. NASA

“It’s notable that non-biological processes typically make shorter fatty acids, with less than 12 carbons,” said study coauthor Dr. Amy Williams, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and assistant director of the Astraeus Space Institute, in an email. “Larger and more complex molecules are likely what are required for an origin of life, if it ever occurred on Mars.”

While the Cumberland sample may contain longer chains of fatty acids, SAM is not designed to detect them. But SAM’s ability to spot these larger molecules suggests it could detect similar chemical signatures of past life on Mars if they’re present, Williams said.

“Curiosity is not a life detection mission,” Freissinet said. “Curiosity is a habitability detection mission to know if all the conditions were right … for life to evolve. Having these results, it’s really at the edge of the capabilities of Curiosity, and it’s even maybe better than what we had expected from this mission.”

Before sending missions to Mars, scientists didn’t think organic molecules would be found on the red planet because of the intensity of radiation Mars has long endured, Glavin said.

RELATED ARTICLEScientists redid an experiment that showed how life on Earth could have started. They found a new possibility

Curiosity won’t return to Yellowknife Bay during its mission, but there are still pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample aboard. Next, the team wants to design a new experiment to see what it can detect. If the team can identify similar long-chain molecules, it would mark another step forward that might help researchers determine their origins, Freissinet said.

“That’s the most precious sample we have on board … waiting for us to run the perfect experiment on it,” she said. “It holds secrets, and we need to decipher the secrets.”

Briony Horgan, coinvestigator on the Perseverance rover mission and professor of planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, called the detection “a big win for the whole team.” Horgan was not involved the study.

The Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, instrument, can analyze samples of Martian rock and soil to seek out organic compounds. NASA/GSFC

“This detection really confirms our hopes that sediments laid down in ancient watery environments on Mars could preserve a treasure trove of organic molecules that can tell us about everything from prebiotic processes and pathways for the origin of life, to potential biosignatures from ancient organisms,” Horgan said.

Dr. Ben K.D. Pearce, assistant professor in Purdue’s department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and leader of the Laboratory for Origins and Astrobiology Research, called the findings “arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars.” Pearce did not participate in the research.

Some scientists believe that fatty acids such as decanoic acid and dodecanoic acid formed the membranes of the first simple cell-like structures on Earth, Pearce said.

“(This is) the closest we’ve come to detecting a major biomolecule-related signal — something potentially tied to membrane structure, which is a key feature of life,” Pearce said via email. “Organics on their own are intriguing, but not evidence of life. In contrast, biomolecules like membranes, amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars are central components of biology as we know it, and finding any of them would be groundbreaking (we haven’t yet).”

Returning samples from Mars

The European Space Agency plans to launch its ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover to the red planet in 2028, and the robotic explorer will carry a complementary instrument to SAM. The rover LS6 will have the capability to drill up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) beneath the Martian surface — and perhaps find larger and better-preserved organic molecules.

While Curiosity’s samples can’t be studied on Earth, the Perseverance rover has actively been collecting samples from Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake and river delta, all with the intention of returning them to Earth in the 2030s via a complicated symphony of missions called Mars Sample Return.

The Curiosity rover has been using its robotic arm to drill into rocks and study samples for more than 12 years. NASA

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Both rovers have detected a variety of organic carbon molecules in different regions on Mars, suggesting that organic carbon is common on the red planet, Williams said.

While Curiosity and Perseverance have proven they can detect organic matter, their instruments can’t definitively determine all the answers about their origins, said Dr. Ashley Murphy, postdoctoral research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. Murphy, who along with Williams previously studied organics identified by Perseverance, was not involved in the new research.

“To appropriately probe the biosignature question, these samples require high-resolution and high-sensitivity analyses in terrestrial labs, which can be facilitated by the return of these samples to Earth,” Murphy said.

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If the molecules within the Cumberland sample are the byproduct of microbial life that existed 3.7 billion years ago, such a finding would align with the same time frame as when scientists think life was starting on Earth, Glavin said. Curiosity’s finding feels “so close” to helping make that determination, but the answers are more likely to come from studying samples on Earth, he said.

“I’m more optimistic that we’re going to finally be able to settle this life on Mars debate, which feels like it’s been going on forever,” Glavin said.

(Contributed by JP Massar)

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