Ethiopia's Dallol volcano and hot springs have created an environment about as hostile to life as can be imagined. Temperatures in the supersaturated water reach more than 200 degrees F (94 C) and are reported to approach pure acidity, with an extraordinarily low pH of 0.25. The environment is also highly salty, with salt chimneys …
Continue reading "The Message of Really, Really Extreme Life"
A look inside the planet simulator in the Origins of Life laboratory at McMaster University. Within this chamber, the origins of life can be explored on different worlds (McMaster University). Have you ever wondered if you could kick-start life on another planet? In the Origins of Life laboratory at McMaster University in Canada, there is …
The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS,” began four years ago as a NASA initiative to bring together a wide range of scientists involved generally in the search for life on planets outside our solar system. With teams from seventeen academic and NASA centers, NExSS was founded on the conviction that this search …
I regret that I haven't been able to file Many Worlds posts for a while, but here is why: The broken part of my wife's ankle is the traingle of bone floating near the tibia, to which it should be attached. She's had surgery and isn't supposed to be walking on it for a …
The Hubble Space Telescope, arguably the jewel in the crown of NASA's science missions, was launched 29 years ago. It has been providing scientists and the public with a steady stream of previously unimagined insights about the cosmos -- plus those jaw-dropping, very high-resolution images like the one above -- pretty much ever since. It …
With so many exoplanets already detected, with the pace of discovery continuing to be so fast, and with efforts to find more distant worlds so constant and global, it's easy to become somewhat blase´ about new discoveries. After so many "firsts," and so many different kinds of planets found in very different ways, it certainly …
When Buzz Aldrin became the second man to ever walk on the moon, his lunar escapades, along with those of Neil Armstrong, were a cause of national and pretty much global joy, wonder and pride. That the mission was hazardous was self-evident -- from launch to the ad-lib and hair-raising landing on the moon, …
The question of whether simple life can survive in space is hardly new, but it has lately taken on a new urgency. It is not only a pressing scientific question -- might life from Mars or another body have seeded life on Earth? Might organisms similar to extreme Earth life survive Mars-like conditions? -- but …
Rather like a swollen river overflowing its banks, the story of water on Mars keeps on rising and spreading in quite unpredictable ways. While the planet is now inarguable parched -- though with lots of polar and subsurface ice and, perhaps, some seasonal surface trickles -- data from the Curiosity rover, the Mars Reconnaissance …
Continue reading "Ancient Mars Water. Ever More of It, and Flowing Ever Longer on the Surface"
Virtually every definition of the word "life" includes the capability to undergo Darwinian evolution as a necessary characteristic. This is true of life on Earth and of thinking about what would constitute life beyond Earth. If it can't change, the thinking goes, then it cannot be truly alive. In addition, evolutionary selection and change occurs …
Continue reading "A New and Revelatory Window Into Evolution on Earth"
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