A promising spot for life on Mars
As NASA's Curiosity rover makes its way up the central peak of Gale Crater, it has been gathering evidence from ancient lake beds and long ago groundwater environments that are promising to life.
View ArticleCould dark streaks in Venus' clouds be microbial life?
The question of life on Venus, of all places, is intriguing enough that a team of U.S. and Russian scientists working on a proposal for a new mission to the second planet—named Venera-D—are considering...
View ArticleMicrobes could survive thin air of Mars
Microbes that rank among the simplest and most ancient organisms on Earth could survive the extremely thin air of Mars, a new study finds.
View ArticleDoes Pluto have the ingredients for life?
Pluto has long been viewed as a distant, cold and mostly dead world, but the first spacecraft to pass by it last year revealed many surprises about this distant dwarf planet.
View ArticleMicrobes set the stage for first animals
It is thought that animal life first arose during the Ediacaran Period, between 635 and 541 million years ago, but these organisms bore little resemblance to the animals we know today. That's led some...
View ArticleSun's UV light helped spark life
High energy, ultraviolet radiation from the Sun is a known to hazard to life, yet the energy provided by our star has played an important role as the essential driver of life on Earth.
View ArticleAll that life needs on Enceladus
If chemical energy is life's coin and water is life's marketplace, there may be a swift economy alive and well beneath the icy shell of Saturn's brightest moon. Such was the announcement during NASA's...
View ArticleLack of oxygen not a showstopper for life
The hot springs of Yellowstone National Park may be extreme environments, but they are host to a diversity of microbes that could shed light on the evolution of life on Earth and, perhaps, what lurks...
View ArticleNext breakthroughs in exoplanet discovery
It was a good week for astrobiology. Within days of NASA's announcement that the necessary ingredients for life exist in the plumes erupting from the southern pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus,...
View ArticleAfter 13 lucky years at Saturn, Cassini's mission comes to an end
In October 1997, the Cassini spacecraft blasted off to explore Saturn and drop a probe onto its eponymously named moon, Titan. Then, something unusual happened. What was meant to be a four-year mission...
View ArticleMethanol detected for first time around young star
Methanol, a key building block for the complex organic compounds that comprise life, has been detected for the first time in the protoplanetary disk of a young, distant star. This finding could help...
View ArticleHow hot were the oceans when life first evolved?
We know little about Earth's surface temperatures for the first 4 billion years or so of its history. This presents a limitation into research of life's origins on Earth and also how it might arise on...
View ArticleTides could be source of heat on icy moons
The icy moons in the outer solar system hold the potential for life, given that they may contain oceans of water. But life also needs a source of energy input to perform essential functions such as...
View ArticleKepler has taught us that rocky planets are common
Rocky planets are probably a whole lot more common in our galaxy than astronomers previously believed—according to the latest release of Kepler Space Telescope data last week—a scenario that enhances...
View ArticleA big repeating molecule may be what defines life
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...
View ArticleA simple bacteria reveals how stress drives evolution
A common bacteria is furthering evidence that evolution is not entirely a blind process, subject to random changes in the genes, but that environmental stressors can also play a role.
View ArticleLife evolves adaptions to microgravity
Life has found ways to overcome, and even thrive, in many extreme situations—from super saline pools to the high temperatures of hydrothermal vents. A new experiment has shown that the microgravity...
View ArticleSolar eclipse a chance to study life's resilience
On August 21, as North America experiences its first total eclipse of the Sun in 38 years, astrobiologists are taking advantage of this rare celestial event to conduct experiments on life's ability to...
View ArticleNew Horizons' next target just got a lot more interesting
Could the next flyby target for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft actually be two targets?
View ArticleThis enzyme enabled life to conquer a hostile earth
Computers are simulating the ancestral versions of the most common protein on Earth, giving scientists an unparalleled look at early life's development of harnessing energy from the Sun and production...
View ArticleAs oceans alkalized, life developed bones and shells
A critical feature of many multicellular lifeforms on Earth are hard, biological structures, such as animal bones and snail shells that are made from minerals.
View ArticleWater can be corrosive to life, so what about alternative solvents?
Life on early Earth seems to have begun with a paradox: while life needs water as a solvent, the essential chemical backbones of early life-forming molecules fall apart in water. Our universal solvent,...
View ArticleAre plate tectonics key to life? Maybe not, say scientists
Earlier this year, researchers announced they had found fossils of microbial life in the rocks of northern Quebec, Canada dating to at least 3.77 billion years old, making them the oldest known life...
View ArticleWhat the energy cycles of other planets can tell us about climate change on...
Scientists sometimes think of a planet's atmosphere as an engine. Potential energy, supplied by heat from a parent star, is converted into kinetic energy, producing winds that swirl around the planet...
View ArticleMeteorite's origins point to possible undiscovered asteroid
A new analysis of a meteorite called Bunburra Rockhole has revealed that the rock originated from a previously unknown parent asteroid, allowing scientists to understand the geology of the parent body.
View ArticleHydrothermal vent experiments bring Enceladus to Earth
Laboratory experiments on Earth can now simulate the conditions under which life might emerge on Saturn's moon Enceladus, as well as other icy alien worlds, according to new research published in the...
View ArticleMars and Earth may not have been early neighbors
A study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters posits that Mars formed in what today is the Asteroid Belt, roughly one and a half times as far from the sun as its current...
View ArticlePond scum explains evolution of first animals
Microbial mats that existed on sea floors prior to the Cambrian explosion provided the foundation for early animal life to arise, new research looking at trace fossils of that early life has found.
View ArticleMeteorites brought water to Earth during the first two million years
A new study of a rare basaltic meteorites called angrites suggests that volatiles, which are elements with relatively low boiling points such as water, could have been brought to our planet by...
View ArticleDoes Titan's hydrocarbon soup hold a recipe for life?
NASA researchers have confirmed the existence in Titan's atmosphere of vinyl cyanide, which is an organic compound that could potentially provide the cellular membranes for microbial life to form in...
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