A new study argues we should search for microbial life rather than human-like aliens.
Category: alien life – Page 85
Aliens are a mirror to humanity
Posted in alien life, futurism
Aliens symbolize the best and worst of humanity. When we dream of aliens, we are pondering our future selves.
Islands of Habitability or finding the best places to search for life on Mars.
Zeroing in on the best environmental niches to explore during the next mission to Mars.
Dr. Kate Adamala describes what synthetic cells are and how they can teach us the fundamental principles of life.
Life on Earth evolved once — this means that all biological systems on our planet are rooted in the same fundamental framework. This framework is extremely complex and we have yet to fully understand the processes inside each living cell. One way of understanding complex systems is to break them down into simpler parts. This is the principle of engineering the synthetic cell: to use our current knowledge of biology for building a living cell with the least amount of parts and complexity. Synthetic cells can be used to teach us about the basic principles of life and evolution, and they hold promise for a range of applications including biomaterials and drug development. Dr. Kate Adamala narrates an introduction to this exciting field.
0:00 Introduction.
Some thoughts about the genetic code aliens would use in the 2nd part of the series: The Science of Aliens:
Alien life would likely have different biochemistry, which may change the way it reproduces.
A rare glimpse of a star before it exploded in a fiery supernova looks nothing like astronomers expected, a new study suggests.
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that a relatively cool, puffy star ended its life in a hydrogen-free supernova. Until now, supernovas without hydrogen were thought to originate only from extremely hot, compact stars.
The discovery “is a very important test case for stellar evolution,” says Sung-Chul Yoon, an astrophysicist at Seoul National University in South Korea, who was not involved in the work. Theorists have some ideas about how massive stars behave right before they blow up, but such hefty stars are scant in the local universe and many are nowhere near ready to go supernova, Yoon says. Retroactively identifying the star responsible for a supernova provides an opportunity to test scenarios of how stars evolve right before exploding.
Scientists believe these photos show mushrooms on mars—and proof of life.
Could there be mushrooms on Mars? In a new paper, an international team of scientists from countries including the U.S., France, and China have gathered and compared photographic evidence they claim shows fungus-like objects growing on the Red Planet.
Debris from an out-of-control Chinese rocket likely plunged into the Indian Ocean, just west of the Maldives, on Saturday night ET, China’s space agency said.
Most of the huge Long March 5B rocket, however, burned up on reentering the atmosphere, the China Manned Space Engineering Office said in a post on WeChat.
It was unclear if any debris had landed on the atoll nation.
The team went so far as to say that “black fungi-bacteria-like specimens also appeared atop the rovers.”
They didn’t stop there: the team also examined photos taken by NASA’s HiRISE, and found evidence for “amorphous specimens within a crevice” that “changed shape and location then disappeared.”
“It is well established that a variety of terrestrial organisms survive Mars-like conditions,” the team concludes. “Given the likelihood Earth has been seeding Mars with life and life has been repeatedly transferred between worlds, it would be surprising if there was no life on Mars.”
An international collaboration of astronomers led by a researcher from the Astrobiology Center and Queen’s University Belfast, and including researchers from Trinity, has detected a new chemical signature in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet (a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun).