When the word "virus" first came into use, it was as a "poison" and “a very small disease-causing agent.” While the presence of viruses was theorized earlier, they were not fully identified until the 1890s. So from their earliest discovery, viruses were synonymous with disease and generally of the ghastly epidemic type of disease …
Continue reading "Viruses, the Virosphere and Astrovirology"
The surface of the sun, with each "kernel" or "cell" roughly the size of Texas. The movie is made up of images produced by the Daniel Inouye SolarTelescope in Hawaii. Novel and even revolutionary data and images are also expected from the Parker Solar Probe (which will travel into the sun's atmosphere, or corona) and …
Continue reading "Exploring Our Sun Will Help Us Understand Habitability"
It has been almost 60 years now that scientists -- a first a few intrepid souls and now many more -- have been searching the skies for radio signals that just might be coming from other advanced, technological civilizations. There have been some intriguing anomalies that created great interest, but nothing has to date survived …
https://videopress.com/v/lEFuz7Sl?posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fmanyworlds.space%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F01%2FScreenshot-2020-01-27-at-22.42.43.png&preloadContent=metadata Explainer video for Earth-Like. (Vimeo edition with subtitles here) Are we alone? The question hangs over each discovery of an Earth-sized planet as we speculate on its habitability. But how different and varied could these worlds really be? Perhaps the best way to get a flavor of this potential diversity is to build a …
Continue reading "Exactly How Like Our Earth is an Earth-like Planet?"
When especially interesting new planets are discovered in the cosmos, scientists around the world begin the process of identifying their characteristics -- their orbit, their mass and density, their composition, their thermal properties and much more. It's all part of a drive that seems to be innate in humans to learn about the workings of …
Anthony Del Genio started out his career expecting to become first an engineer and then a geophysicist. He was in graduate school at UCLA and had been prepared by previous mentors to enter the geophysics field. But a 1973 department-wide test focused on seismology, rather than fields that he understood better, and his days as …
Continue reading "Using Climate Science on Earth to Understand Planets Beyond Earth"
There is no doubt that early Mars had long period of warmer and much wetter climates before its atmosphere thinned too much to retain that liquid H20 on the surface. As we know from the Curiosity mission to Gale Crater and other orbital findings, regions of that warmer and wetter Mars had flowing water …
Just about everything that scientists see as essential for extraterrestrial life -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and sources of energy -- is now known to be pretty common in our solar system and beyond. It's basically there for the taking by untold potential forms of life. But what is not at all common …
Given the complex history of the discovery and announcement in 1995 of the first exoplanet that orbits a sun-like star, it is perhaps no surprise that errors might sneak into the retelling. Two main groups were racing to be first, and for a variety of reasons the discovery ended up being confirmed before it was …
The search for life, or signs of past life beyond Earth is now a central issue in space science, is central to the mission of NASA, and is actually a potentially breakthrough discovery in the making for humanity. The scientific stakes could hardly be higher. But identifying evidence of ancient microbial life – and …
Continue reading "PIXL: A New NASA Instrument For Ferreting Out Clues of Ancient Life on Mars"
Many Worlds 
