New Scientist: Could alien life exist in the form of DNA-shaped dust?

Could alien life exist in the form of DNA-shaped dust?:

Could alien life exist in the form of dancing specks of dust? According to a new simulation, electrically charged dust can organise itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave in many ways like living organisms, reproducing and passing on information to one another.

"This came as a bit of a surprise to us", says Gregor Morfill of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. He and colleagues have built a computer simulation to model what happens to dust immersed in an ionised gas, or plasma.

The dust grains pick up a negative charge by absorbing electrons from the plasma and then this charged 'nucleus' attracts positive ions, which form a shell around it.

It was already known that this system can produce regular arrays of dust called plasma crystals, and some experiments have also shown hints of spiral structures. Now, Morfill's simulation suggests that the dust should sometimes form double helixes.

Like DNA, the dust spirals can store information. They do so in the scaffolding of their bodies, as they have two stable states – one with a large diameter and the other with a small one – so a spiral could carry a series of wide and narrow sections.

The specific order of these sections can be copied from one dust spiral to another, like a genetic code. The researchers aren't sure how it happens, but they think each narrow section of spiral creates a permanent vortex of moving dust outside it. So if another spiral drifts alongside it, that vortex pinches the same length into its narrow state...