More than a half century ago, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey famously put water and gases believed to make up the atmosphere of early Earth into a flask with water, sparked the mix with an electric charge, and produced amino acids and other chemical building blocks of life. The experiment was hailed as a ground-breaking …
Continue reading "Messy Chemistry: A New Way to Approach the Origins of Life"
This article of mine, slightly tweaked for Many Worlds, first appeared today (July 6) in Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net As NASA inches closer to launching new missions to the Solar System’s outer moons in search of life, scientists are renewing their focus on developing a set of universal characteristics of life that can be measured. …
Sometimes tectonic shifts in scientific disciplines occur because of discoveries and advances in the field. But sometimes they occur for reasons entirely outside the field itself. Such appears to be case with origins-of-life studies. Nobel laureate Jack Szostak was recently in Tokyo to participate in a workshop at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the …
In the late stages of the formation of Earth, the planet was a brutally hot, rough place. But perhaps not precisely in the way you might imagine. Most renderings of that time show red-hot lava flowing around craggy rocks, with meteorites falling and volcanoes erupting. But according to those who study the time, the reality …
For years, noted chemist and synthetic life researcher Steven Benner has talked about the necessary role of the element boron in the origin of life. Without boron, he has found, many of the building blocks needed to form the earliest self-replicating ribonucleic acid (RNA) fall apart when they come into contact with water, which is …
When it comes to the study of exoplanets, it's common knowledge that the host stars don't get much respect. Yes, everyone knows that there wouldn't be exoplanets without stars, and that they serve as the essential background for exoplanet transit observations and as the wobbling object that allows for radial velocity measurements that lead …
We all know that life has not been found so far on any planet beyond Earth -- at least not yet. This lack of discovery of extraterrestrial life has long been used as a knock on the field of astrobiology and has sometimes been put forward as a measure of Earth's uniqueness. But the more …
Europa is a moon no bigger than our own and is covered by deep layers of ice, but it brings with it a world of promise. Science fiction master and sometimes space visionary Arthur C. Clarke, after all, named it as the most likely spot in our solar system to harbor life, and wrote a …
The study of the formation and logic of the universe (cosmology) and the study of exoplanets and their conduciveness to life do not seem to intersect much. Scientists in one field focus on the deep physics of the cosmos while the others search for the billions upon billions of planets out there and seek to …
It is hardly surprising that in this burgeoning exoplanet era of ours, those hitherto unknown planets get most of the attention when it comes to exo-solar systems. What are the planet masses? Their orbits? The chemical makeup of their atmospheres? Their potential capacity to hold liquid surface water and thereby become "habitable." Less frequently …
Continue reading "Forget the "Habitable Zone," Think the "Biogenic Zone""
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