Are the building blocks of life at the bottom of the sea?
Scientists recreated a deep-ocean environment where underwater volcanoes spew heat and chemicals to test whether or not biological molecules…
Tag: astrobiology
Believe it or not, we can (kind of) measure the air pressure of early Earth!
Blue-green algae's response to different nitrogen pressures may tell us what fossils to look for and what those fossils tell us about…
Hunting for fossilized microbes
We’ve all heard of hunting for fossils to learn about the Earth’s past, but what if you wanted to learn about the microbes that lived…
A crater on Mars may be a future landing site
Here on Earth, scientists study layers of sediment like dirt and sand to better understand how rocks form. The same contextual clues…
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…
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…
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…
What Could Have Created the Ancient Martian Rivers?
Water is essential for life. When searching for life in the universe, the first thing researchers do is “follow the water”. Mars is no…