Using Gas Bubbles in Lava to Predict Ancient Air Pressure
What was the weather like in New York last week? You can look it up on weather.com. What was it like on March 7, 1953, in the pre-internet…
Category: Astrobiology & Space Science
Lasers and Fool’s Gold Give a Glimpse Into Our Ocean’s Past
The amount of trace elements in ocean pyrite correspond to ocean oxygen concentrations at different points in geologic time.
Managing Mars: Who Has a Right To It’s Resources?
Humans have long been fascinated by the huge Cosmos above us. Perhaps this fascination has been best put to words by Carl Sagan in his…
Can you teach an old gene new tricks?
Evolution explains how living things change over successive generations, giving rise to diversity. Across the evolutionary history of Earth,…
What Protects Exoplanets from Damaging Solar Flares?
Thanks to NASA’s Kepler Mission, over one-thousand potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered to-date, orbiting around their…
Life May Be Even Older Than We Thought!
How long has life been around on Earth? Is life an inevitable part of planet formation? The second question is tough to answer, but if life…
Chasing Alien Worlds with a Flying Telescope
The airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a flying observatory aboard a modified Boeing 747 that takes…
Writing the Alphabet of Life
When studying the origin of life on Earth, scientists must rely on past data, physical laws, and models instead of direct observations.…
The Genetic Origins of the Water Bear, Earth’s Most Resilient Organism
No living organism can survive in the dead of space, right? The unlikely exception: water bears. Also known by their scientific name,…
What Makes a Universe Habitable?
If there are multiple universes, which of them are capable of harboring life and why? A physicist comes up with a number, and that number is…