Why there’s a huge collection of vintage cars stored in the middle of the desert
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Back at the turn of the 21st century, Qatar was a country with few cultural attractions to keep visitors and residents entertained. Yet the Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani Museum — known as the FBQ Museum — was a place that most people visited as an alternative to the then-still rather ramshackle National Museum of Qatar.

You had to make an appointment, and drive out into the desert, getting lost a few times along the way, but then you were welcomed to the lush Al Samriya Farm with a cup of tea and some cake. The highlight was being allowed into a space crammed full with shelves and vitrines holding all sorts of eclectic artifacts from swords to coins — with the odd car and carriage standing in the grounds.

It wasn’t necessarily the kind of museum you’d find elsewhere in the world, but it was definitely a sight that needed seeing.

Today, it has grown and now claims to be one of the world’s largest private museums. It holds over 30,000 items, including a fleet of traditional dhow sailboats, and countless carpets. There’s also an entire house that once stood in Damascus, Syria.

There are archaeological finds dating to the Jurassic age, ancient copies of the Quran, a section that details the importance of pearling within Qatar’s history, and jewelry dating to the 17th century.

There are also items from 2022’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar including replica trophies, balls used in the games, entry passes, football jerseys and even shelves full of slightly creepy dolls and children’s plush animals.

Some of the more disturbing exhibits include various items of Third Reich paraphernalia in the wartime room, and, strangely enough, several showcases of birds’ legs with marking rings on them. Basically, whatever you can think of, you have a very good chance of finding it here.

Rumor even has it that behind a locked door is a room filled with the late Princess Diana’s dresses and other memorabilia, accessible only to a select few visitors. Another door hides a room, no longer open to the public, filled with collectibles of the late Saddam Hussein.

‘White Lotus’ villain Jon Gries reveals the true crimes that inspired his twisty take on Greg/Gary
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When Season 3 of “The White Lotus” premiered last month, the shock was palpable when returning character Belinda recognized a familiar face at the resort in Thailand: Greg Hunt, the wily suitor of the late Tanya McQuoid.

As the season has unfolded, Greg (played by Jon Gries) has emerged as an antagonist, particularly after Belinda dove into the investigation surrounding Tanya’s death and learned that Greg, who now goes by Gary, evaded questioning by authorities.

On a show famous for reinventing itself, the same has been asked of the actor, who says that playing the ever-shifting character has been a welcome challenge and, like “White Lotus” itself, full of twists.

“In the beginning, I totally played him for a guy who was, you know, on his last legs,” Gries said in a recent interview with CNN, referencing Greg’s very apparent ill health in the first season of “White Lotus,” which premiered to rave reviews in summer 2021. He added: “When you play a character, you want to find his empathetic side, and you want to understand where they came from, and what got them to where they are.”

But when he was contacted by creator Mike White about appearing in Season 2, Gries realized he would have to adjust his framing of Greg, despite having previously imagined a “comprehensive history” for him on his own.

“(White) said, ‘I’m writing it right now, and I’m writing you, and I just need to know here and now: If you’re in, I’ll continue writing. If not, I’ll stop,’” Gries recalled.

Of course, he said yes to coming back to the series, which eventually required him to live in Italy for a few months for filming.
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During production, White revealed to Gries that Greg is “very sinister.” That became rather irrefutable by the season’s climax, which saw Tanya’s demise orchestrated by her now-husband.

Come Season 3, Gries had to rewrite Greg’s backstory again, this time drawing from some unlikely sources for inspiration, like HBO docuseries “The Jinx,” about late convicted killer Robert Durst, and the case involving the man who came to be known as the Tinder Swindler.

Gries said he was struck by Durst’s “kind of seemingly even keel personality,” which served as a model for where Greg was headed, someone “who doesn’t really show a great deal of emotion, doesn’t seem to get too angry, just gets a little bit irritated and is dangerous.”

“There’s a bridled rage underneath. And those kind of people I find – at least with respect to Gary, Greg, Gary – fascinating,” he said.

And yet, while searching for an empathetic way back to portraying his character, Gries kept wondering if there was anything still redeeming about Greg.
An important “wake up moment” came during a decisive conversation he had with White just before filming in Thailand, in which the show’s creator said of Greg, in no uncertain terms: “He’s a psychopath.”

“And that was it. It was like, ‘back to the drawing board.’ And it really did help me,” Gries said.

The penultimate episode of the series will air on Sunday, an evening that thanks to “Lotus” and other shows has again become a night of appointment viewing amid a general move away from binge watching. Gries said he appreciates the shift.

“We’re a society that in a weird way doesn’t understand the beauty of waiting. The beauty of the space between the notes,” he shared. “If I binged (‘White Lotus’ I’d feel like I just ate too many chocolates. It just wouldn’t be the same. You need to process this.”

“The White Lotus” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO, with the episode available to stream on Max. HBO and Max, like CNN, are owned by the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

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.
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“(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.
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.

Water and life
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Lightning is a dramatic display of electrical power, but it is also sporadic and unpredictable. Even on a volatile Earth billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life — a fact that has cast doubt on such theories in the past, Zare said.

Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, eventually leading to the evolution of life.

“Microdischarges between obviously charged water microdroplets make all the organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment,” Zare said. “We propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules that constitute the building blocks of life.”

However, even with the new findings about microlightning, questions remain about life’s origins, he added. While some scientists support the notion of electrically charged beginnings for life’s earliest building blocks, an alternative abiogenesis hypothesis proposes that Earth’s first amino acids were cooked up around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, produced by a combination of seawater, hydrogen-rich fluids and extreme pressure.

Researchers identified salt minerals in the Bennu samples that were deposited as a result of brine evaporation from the asteroid’s parent body. In particular, they found a number of sodium salts, such as the needles of hydrated sodium carbonate highlighted in purple in this false-colored image – salts that could easily have been compromised if the samples had been exposed to water in Earth’s atmosphere.

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Yet another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules didn’t originate on Earth at all. Rather, they formed in space and were carried here by comets or fragments of asteroids, a process known as panspermia.

“We still don’t know the answer to this question,” Zare said. “But I think we’re closer to understanding something more about what could have happened.”

Though the details of life’s origins on Earth may never be fully explained, “this study provides another avenue for the formation of molecules crucial to the origin of life,” Williams said. “Water is a ubiquitous aspect of our world, giving rise to the moniker ‘Blue Marble’ to describe the Earth from space. Perhaps the falling of water, the most crucial element that sustains us, also played a greater role in the origin of life on Earth than we previously recognized.”