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A Vermont man has died in custody while awaiting trial on charges of killing his mother at sea, federal authorities said on Thursday. Nathan Carman, 29, was accused of the first-degree murder of his mother Linda Carman during a 2016 boating trip in what prosecutors alleged was a plot to inherit millions of dollars. Carman pleaded not guilty last year to fraud and first-degree murder and had been due to go on trial in October. The cause of his death was not immediately known. In September 2016, Carman arranged a fishing trip from a Rhode Island marina with his mother, during which his boat reportedly sank and his mother disappeared. Carman was found floating in an inflatable raft eight days later, while his mother has never been found. Prosecutors allege that Carman made alterations to the boat to make it more likely to sink. He was also accused of killing his grandfather, John Chakalos, who was shot dead in his home in Windsor, Connecticut, in 2013. Chakalos’s killing was part of a scheme by Carman to obtain millions of dollars from his grandfather’s estate, according to an eight-count indictment. He had not been charged in that case. Chakalos had made a fortune of tens of millions of dollars by building and renting nursing homes. Last May, Carman was arrested and charged with his mother’s murder. Prosecutors urged him to be held in custody pending trial as he was a flight risk. Carman was being held by US Marshalls at the time of his death. His attorney Martin Minnella told the Associated Press that he had been in good spirits when they spoke on Wednesday, and they had been due to meet again on Thursday. “We were meeting with some experts today over Zoom at 12 o’clock. We were prepared to start picking a jury on October 10 and we were confident we were going to win,” he said. “It’s just a tragedy, a tragedy.” According to prosecutors, Carman’s inheritance scheme began nearly a decade ago when he purchased a rifle in New Hampshire and used it to shoot Chakalos while he was asleep in his Connecticut home on 20 December 2013. Carman then discarded his own computer hard drive and the GPS unit that had been in his truck, according to the indictment. After his grandfather’s death, Carman received $550,000. He moved from Bloomfield, Connecticut, to Vernon, Vermont, in 2014, was unemployed, and by 2016 had squandered most of his inheritance, they alleged. He then organised the fatal boating trip with his mother Linda, of Middletown, Connecticut. In 2019, Chakalos’ three surviving daughters filed a lawsuit in New Hampshire seeking to block Carman from receiving any more of his grandfather’s inheritance. The case was dismissed after a judge ruled that Chakalos was not a New Hampshire resident. It was later refiled in Connecticut and was still pending. The three sisters issued a statement to the AP saying they were “deeply saddened” by Carman’s death. “While we process this shocking news and its impact on the tragic events surrounding the last several years we ask for your understanding and respect relative to our privacy,” they said through a lawyer. Read More Man charged with murdering mother on fishing boat to inherit grandfather’s riches Man found on raft after mother's mystery death at sea was suspect in grandfather's killing Treat Williams death: Everwood and Hair star dies aged 71 following motorcycle accident

The meaning of life is the ultimate mystery – why do we exist? And is there a point to… well… anything? These are questions to which we may never find answers, but at least we can define what “life” means in scientific terms. And yet, our understanding of what life is is changing all the time, thanks to space exploration. As scientists continue to hunt for life beyond our own world, biologists are having to rethink the meaning of the word “life” itself. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Generally, biologists explain “life” as connoting a self-sustaining chemical system which is capable of performing functions such as eating, metabolising, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and responding to external stimuli. This definition works pretty well here on Earth (although there are some important exceptions, such as viruses), but experts have pointed out that if life exists elsewhere in the universe, it may not display the same properties that we’re used to. Indeed, it might be unrecognisable as life as we know it (forget those little green men). In which case, how will we spot it if it ever crosses our path? Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker and chemist Lee Cronin think they’ve come up with a solution. The pair are now arguing that highly complex molecules found in all living creatures can’t exist thanks purely to chance. Therefore, they say, the universe must have a way of creating and reproducing complex information and retaining a “memory” of all of this.. In an interview with New Scientist, Walker, of Arizona State University, explained their radical idea on how objects come into existence. The concept, known as Assembly Theory, explains why certain complex objects have become more abundant than others by considering their histories. If the theory proves correct, it will redefine what we mean by “living” things and show that we’ve been going about the search for extraterrestrial life all wrong. In the process, we could even end up creating alien life in a laboratory, she stressed. In her discussion with New Scientist, Walker pointed out: "An electron can be made anywhere in the universe and has no history. You are also a fundamental object, but with a lot of historical dependency. You might want to cite your age counting back to when you were born, but parts of you are billions of years older. "From this perspective, we should think of ourselves as lineages of propagating information that temporarily finds itself aggregated in an individual." Assembly theory predicts that molecules produced by biological processes must be more complex than those produced by non-biological processes, as Science Alert notes. To test this, Walker and her team analysed a range of organic and inorganic compounds from around the world and outer space, including E. coli bacteria, urine, meteorites and even home-brewed beer. They then smashed up the compounds into smaller pieces and used mass spectrometry to pinpoint their molecular building blocks. They calculated that the smallest number of steps required to reassemble each compound from these building blocks was 15. And whilst some compounds from living systems needed fewer than 15 assembly steps, no inorganic compounds made it above this threshold. "Our system … allows us to search the universe agnostically for evidence of what life does rather than attempting to define what life is," Walker, Cronin, and others wrote in a 2021 Nature Communications article. The handy thing about this building block system – which they’ve dubbed the “'molecular assembly index” – is that it doesn’t rely on carbon-based organic materials to be identified. In other words, an alien could be made of entirely different stuff entirely and we’d still be able to spot it as life using the index. It also works regardless of what stage of “life” an extraterrestrial being is in – whether it is still in its infancy or has moved into a technological stage beyond our understanding. That’s because all of these states produce complex molecules which couldn’t exist in the absence of a living system. If all of this is hurting your head, let’s just get back to the basics: if there is a secret to life, it might all be down to what we do, not what we are. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

After the Patriots' preseason opener against the Texans, here are three potential players New England could cut.The New England Patriots suffered a 20-9 loss to the Houston Texans in their first preseason game of the year.Gillette Stadium was brimming with fans waiting to see which rook...

By Ateeq Shariff Stock markets in the Gulf ended lower on Sunday in response to Friday's fall in