Sarah Hörst's Titan

In its January/February 2011 issue (The Year in Science), Discover magazine named PTYS/LPL graduate student Sarah Hörst's research on simulations of Titan's haze as one of the top 100 stories of 2010: #69 to be exact. The article explains that to "mimic Titan's environment, [Hörst's] team combined cold nitrogen, methane, and traces of carbon monoxide and exposed the mix to microwaves...and oxygen....The resulting concoction contained amino acides, the fundamental units of proteins, as well as the five chemical bases that constitute DNA and RNA." Discover had previously reported on Sarah's work in October.