* Astronomy

Volcanic rock discovery could reveal secrets of Earth's history Geologists in Scotland have discovered a completely new type of volcanic rock, which they believe will help to pinpoint the precise time in Earth's history at which life emerged from the oceans and began to colonise...

A scientist believes techniques used to find oil and gas in the North Sea could help establish whether life could survive on Mars. Professor John Parnell, from Aberdeen University, has been studying the Haughton meteor crater using methods for detecting oil and gas underground. He was part of...

The chances of finding life somewhere else in the Universe depends on how many planets are capable of supporting life. According to new calculations by astronomers at Open University, as many as half of all star systems cou...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found the ingredients for life all the way back to a time when the universe was a mere youngster. Using Spitzer, scientists have detected organic molecules in galaxies when our universe was one-fourth of its current age of about 14 billion years. These large mol...

A geologist from Washington University in St. Louis is developing new techniques to render a more coherent story of how primitive life arose and diverged on Earth — with implications for Mars. [img]http://epsc.wustl.edu/classwork/classwork_480/Homepages/Carrine%20Blank_files/ca...

Some hardy Earth microbes could survive long enough on Mars to complicate the search for alien life, according to a new study co-authored by University of Florida researchers. Though scientists looking for life on Mars worry about contamination from stowaway spores clinging to spacecraft, th...

The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January, 2005. Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Centre in Moffet Field, Cal...

Using cellphones on aeroplanes could drown out faint radio signals from space, astronomers are warning. They told a US agency considering lifting in-flight restrictions on cellphones that special devices should be installed on planes to limit damage to research if the regulations change. ...

The President of the Mineralogical Society of America, Douglas Rumble, III, of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, describes new techniques, used on minerals, to reveal the steps that led to evolution of the atmosphere on Earth. "Rocks, fossils, and other natural relics h...

Stanley Miller, a chemist who showed that, given the right conditions, simple organic compounds can form life, died this week at the age of 77 following a series of strokes. Read more

Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a mass extinction on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago could have been triggered by a [url=http://mysite.freeserve.com/blobrana/news/explosion.html]star exp...

Max Planck researchers uncover the survival strategy of microorganisms responsible for the world-wide emission of methane from rice paddies About 10 to 25 percent of the world's methane emissions come from flooded rice paddies. Methane is a greenhouse gas produced by various groups of micr...

Scientists studying hydrothermal vents, those underwater geysers that are home to bizarre geological structures and unique marine species, have discovered something all too familiar: pollution. A University of Florida geologist is among a team of geologists that is the first to observe “...

Half-a-billion years ago, as an explosion of life was starting to produce diverse new forms, the Antrim Plateau Volcanics of northern Australia began spewing massive amounts of lava. Before it was over, lava floods had buried almost a fifth of Australia's area today. The newly identified K...

Cave extremeophiles (microbes that live in very difficult environments) have been the object of Hazel Bartons research for a long time. Barton, a professor of microbiology at Northern Kentucky University has visited more than 1000 caves in the United States, Britain, Greenland, Mexico, Belize...

Tough Enough for Mars, but Deinococcus is from Earth Results of a recent study titled Deinococcus geothermalis: The Pool of Extreme Radiation Resistance Genes Shrinks, will be published in the Sept. 26 edition of PLoS ONE. Bacteria of the genus Deinococcus are extremely resistant to ionising ra...

Origins - How Life Began - Introduction Click to Play | View Details Origins - How Life Began - Part 1 Click to Play | View Details Origins - How Life Began - Part 2 Click to Play | View Details

Life on Venus could be blown to Earth by powerful winds, scientists claim. Previous research has considered the possibility of micro organisms existing in Venus's atmosphere despite extreme temperatures on its surface. But two scientists at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology say microbes fro...

A classic experiment proving amino acids are created when inorganic molecules are exposed to electricity isn't the whole story, it turns out. The 1953 Miller-Urey Synthesis had two sibling studies, neither of which was published. Vials containing the products from those experiments were recen...

Small stretches of seemingly useless DNA harbour a big secret, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. There's one problem: We don't know what it is. Although individual laboratory animals appear to live happily when these genetic ciphers are deleted, these snippets have...

The Cyborg Astrobiologist: Scouting Red Beds for Uncommon Features with Geological Significance. Authors: Patrick C. McGuire, Enrique Diaz-Martinez, Jens Ormo, Javier Gomez-Elvira, Jose A. Rodriguez-Manfredi, Eduardo Sebastian-Martinez, Helge Ritter, Robert H...

Astrobiologists have often pondered "life as we do not know it" in the context of extraterrestrial life, says Paul Davies, an internationally acclaimed theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University. "But," he asks, "has there been a blind spot t...

Roughly a billion years from now, the ever-increasing radiation from the sun will have heated Earth into inhabitability; the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that serves as food for plant life will disappear, pulled out by the weathering of rocks; the oceans will evaporate; and all living things w...

Inventories of living and dead organisms could serve as a relatively fast, simple and inexpensive preliminary means of assessing human impact on ecosystems. The University of Chicagos Susan Kidwell explains how measuring the degree of live-dead mismatch could be used as an ecological tool in th...

A prehistoric giraffe discovered in eastern Macedonia earlier this summer is the first to be found in Europe, according to palaeontologists. The ancient animal was among several sets of fossil remains dating five to ten million years ago. Located outside the village of Stamer, near Delcovo, the f...

Lithopanspermia in Star Forming Clusters Authors: Fred C. Adams, David N. Spergel This paper considers the lithopanspermia hypothesis in star forming groups and clusters, where the chances of biological material spreading from one solar system to another is greatly enh...

The last universal ancestor (LUA), also called the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), or the cenancestor, is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend. Read more

Space is a hostile environment for living things, but small organisms on the Expose-E experiment unit outside Europes Columbus ISS laboratory module have resisted the solar UV radiation, cosmic rays, vacuum and varying temperatures for 18 months. A certain lichen, Xanthoria elegans, seems to b...

Half of Earth's life may lie below While astronomers scour the skies for signs of life in outer space, biologists are exploring an enormous living world buried below the surface of the Earth. Scientists estimate that nearly half the living material on our planet is hidden in or beneath the ocean or in...

Title: Detection of Endolithes Using Infrared Spectroscopy Authors: S. Dumas, Y. Dutil, G. Joncas On Earth, the Dry Valleys of Antarctica provide the closest martian-like environment for the study of extremophiles. Colonies of bacteries are protected from the freezing temperatures, the drou...

Isovaline is a rare amino acid that was found in the Murchison meteorite. It is an isomer of the biologically important amino acid L-valine. It may have analgesic properties. Read more

A simple and reliable method for converting one of the simplest chemical entities into one of the most difficult-to-make molecular building blocks of life, with complete control over its shape, is reported by scientists at the University of Bristol in this weeks Nature. It will have major implica...

J. Craig Venter Institute Seeks Monopoly Patents on the World's First-Ever Human-Made Life Form ETC Group Will Challenge Patents on "Synthia" - Original Syn Organism Created in Laboratory Ten years after Dolly the cloned sheep made her stunning debut, the J. Craig Venter Institute is...

Using high-tech robotic cameras, a team of scientists is getting a rare first glimpse of marine life in the North Atlantic that could shed light on the ocean's ecosystem and climate to as far back as 1,000 years. Images of tulip-shaped sponges, brightly coloured corals, delicate pink stars and feat...

Flinders Ranges rocks contain a rare frozen record of extreme climate change, leading researchers say. Dr Alan Collins from Adelaide University's school of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said the rocks provided a unique glimpse of weather patterns [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed...

VLT Rediscovers Life on Earth By observing the Moon using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have found evidence of life in the Universe - on Earth. Finding life on our home planet may sound like a trivial observation, but the novel approach of an international team may lead to future discoveri...

	Forum	Replies	Views	Last Post
Life Ancient life ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 21 ) (Preview)	General news	201	20937	May 30 16:55 2017 by Blobrana
Volcanic rock discovery could reveal secrets of Earth's history Geologists in Scotland have discovered a completely new type of volcanic rock, which they believe will help to pinpoint the precise time in Earth's history at which life emerged from the oceans and began to colonise...
Mars Life Mars life ( 1 2 3 4 ) (Preview)	Astronomy News	30	10478	Sep 15 10:52 2016 by Blobrana
A scientist believes techniques used to find oil and gas in the North Sea could help establish whether life could survive on Mars. Professor John Parnell, from Aberdeen University, has been studying the Haughton meteor crater using methods for detecting oil and gas underground. He was part of...
Life Seti Alien life ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 18 ) (Preview)	Astronomy News	177	29419	Jun 8 11:29 2017 by Blobrana
The chances of finding life somewhere else in the Universe depends on how many planets are capable of supporting life. According to new calculations by astronomers at Open University, as many as half of all star systems cou...
Life Ingredients for life ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 13 ) (Preview)	Cosmology News	126	22772	Jun 8 11:49 2017 by Blobrana
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found the ingredients for life all the way back to a time when the universe was a mere youngster. Using Spitzer, scientists have detected organic molecules in galaxies when our universe was one-fourth of its current age of about 14 billion years. These large mol...
Life Plants Primitive life ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) (Preview)	Astronomy News	40	10352	May 2 13:52 2013 by Blobrana
A geologist from Washington University in St. Louis is developing new techniques to render a more coherent story of how primitive life arose and diverged on Earth — with implications for Mars. [img]http://epsc.wustl.edu/classwork/classwork_480/Homepages/Carrine%20Blank_files/ca...
Life Mars Martian Aliens ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) (Preview)	General news	49	8960	Jan 22 07:03 2013 by Blobrana
Some hardy Earth microbes could survive long enough on Mars to complicate the search for alien life, according to a new study co-authored by University of Florida researchers. Though scientists looking for life on Mars worry about contamination from stowaway spores clinging to spacecraft, th...
Titan Life Titan Life (Preview)	Astronomy News	7	2703	Jun 12 16:45 2010 by Blobrana
The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January, 2005. Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Centre in Moffet Field, Cal...
Life Seti SETI ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 13 ) (Preview)	General news	125	18391	Jul 10 10:00 2017 by Blobrana
Using cellphones on aeroplanes could drown out faint radio signals from space, astronomers are warning. They told a US agency considering lifting in-flight restrictions on cellphones that special devices should be installed on planes to limit damage to research if the regulations change. ...
Earth Climate Life Atmosphere Evolution of the atmosphere ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) (Preview)	Astronomy News	48	18056	Feb 7 18:17 2017 by Blobrana
The President of the Mineralogical Society of America, Douglas Rumble, III, of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, describes new techniques, used on minerals, to reveal the steps that led to evolution of the atmosphere on Earth. "Rocks, fossils, and other natural relics h...
Life Person Stanley L. Miller dies (Preview)	Off Topic	0	1617	May 25 08:22 2007 by Blobrana
Stanley Miller, a chemist who showed that, given the right conditions, simple organic compounds can form life, died this week at the age of 77 following a series of strokes. Read more
Life Extinction ( 1 2 3 4 5 … 10 ) (Preview)	Astronomy News	94	20320	Aug 11 10:18 2015 by Blobrana
Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a mass extinction on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago could have been triggered by a [url=http://mysite.freeserve.com/blobrana/news/explosion.html]star exp...
Life Methanogenic Archaea (Preview)	General news	5	2833	May 25 19:40 2017 by Blobrana
Max Planck researchers uncover the survival strategy of microorganisms responsible for the world-wide emission of methane from rice paddies About 10 to 25 percent of the world's methane emissions come from flooded rice paddies. Methane is a greenhouse gas produced by various groups of micr...
volcano Life Hydrothermal Hydrothermal Vents ( 1 2 3 4 ) (Preview)	Off Topic	36	10875	Apr 29 18:26 2015 by Blobrana
Scientists studying hydrothermal vents, those underwater geysers that are home to bizarre geological structures and unique marine species, have discovered something all too familiar: pollution. A University of Florida geologist is among a team of geologists that is the first to observe “...
Life Ordovician Toyonian mass extinction event (Preview)	General news	8	3763	Apr 23 07:06 2012 by Blobrana
Half-a-billion years ago, as an explosion of life was starting to produce diverse new forms, the Antrim Plateau Volcanics of northern Australia began spewing massive amounts of lava. Before it was over, lava floods had buried almost a fifth of Australia's area today. The newly identified K...
Life Cave Cave extremeophiles (Preview)	General news	0	1203	Oct 1 09:56 2007 by Blobrana
Cave extremeophiles (microbes that live in very difficult environments) have been the object of Hazel Bartons research for a long time. Barton, a professor of microbiology at Northern Kentucky University has visited more than 1000 caves in the United States, Britain, Greenland, Mexico, Belize...
Life extreme lifeform ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) (Preview)	General news	45	10523	Feb 27 18:52 2015 by Blobrana
Tough Enough for Mars, but Deinococcus is from Earth Results of a recent study titled Deinococcus geothermalis: The Pool of Extreme Radiation Resistance Genes Shrinks, will be published in the Sept. 26 edition of PLoS ONE. Bacteria of the genus Deinococcus are extremely resistant to ionising ra...
Life Origins - How Life Began ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Videos	18	7746	May 19 14:16 2017 by Blobrana
Origins - How Life Began - Introduction Click to Play \| View Details Origins - How Life Began - Part 1 Click to Play \| View Details Origins - How Life Began - Part 2 Click to Play \| View Details
Life Venus Life (Preview)	Astronomy News	4	1768	May 16 22:29 2013 by Blobrana
Life on Venus could be blown to Earth by powerful winds, scientists claim. Previous research has considered the possibility of micro organisms existing in Venus's atmosphere despite extreme temperatures on its surface. But two scientists at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology say microbes fro...
Life Miller-Urey experiment (Preview)	Off Topic	2	2813	Mar 21 20:28 2011 by Blobrana
A classic experiment proving amino acids are created when inorganic molecules are exposed to electricity isn't the whole story, it turns out. The 1953 Miller-Urey Synthesis had two sibling studies, neither of which was published. Vials containing the products from those experiments were recen...
Life DNA (Preview)	Chemistry	9	2759	Jan 24 21:50 2017 by Blobrana
Small stretches of seemingly useless DNA harbour a big secret, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. There's one problem: We don't know what it is. Although individual laboratory animals appear to live happily when these genetic ciphers are deleted, these snippets have...
Mars Life Cyborg Astrobiologist ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	Astronomy News	14	6029	Nov 22 23:39 2011 by Blobrana
The Cyborg Astrobiologist: Scouting Red Beds for Uncommon Features with Geological Significance. Authors: Patrick C. McGuire, Enrique Diaz-Martinez, Jens Ormo, Javier Gomez-Elvira, Jose A. Rodriguez-Manfredi, Eduardo Sebastian-Martinez, Helge Ritter, Robert H...
Life Weird Life (Preview)	General news	3	1242	Apr 21 17:16 2009 by Blobrana
Astrobiologists have often pondered "life as we do not know it" in the context of extraterrestrial life, says Paul Davies, an internationally acclaimed theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University. "But," he asks, "has there been a blind spot t...
Life Biosphere (Preview)	General news	5	1493	Jun 1 07:57 2015 by Blobrana
Roughly a billion years from now, the ever-increasing radiation from the sun will have heated Earth into inhabitability; the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that serves as food for plant life will disappear, pulled out by the weathering of rocks; the oceans will evaporate; and all living things w...
Life Ecosystems (Preview)	General news	2	1249	Jan 25 12:41 2011 by Blobrana
Inventories of living and dead organisms could serve as a relatively fast, simple and inexpensive preliminary means of assessing human impact on ecosystems. The University of Chicagos Susan Kidwell explains how measuring the degree of live-dead mismatch could be used as an ecological tool in th...
Life Prehistoric Animals ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	General news	17	4582	Jan 13 09:47 2016 by Blobrana
A prehistoric giraffe discovered in eastern Macedonia earlier this summer is the first to be found in Europe, according to palaeontologists. The ancient animal was among several sets of fossil remains dating five to ten million years ago. Located outside the village of Stamer, near Delcovo, the f...
Life Lithopanspermia (Preview)	Stars/galaxy News	1	1140	Jan 30 18:10 2013 by Blobrana
Lithopanspermia in Star Forming Clusters Authors: Fred C. Adams, David N. Spergel This paper considers the lithopanspermia hypothesis in star forming groups and clusters, where the chances of biological material spreading from one solar system to another is greatly enh...
Life LUCA (Preview)	General news	0	914	Jan 22 02:46 2010 by Blobrana
The last universal ancestor (LUA), also called the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), or the cenancestor, is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend. Read more
ISS Life Expose-E experiment unit (Preview)	Mission News	2	1486	Jun 22 19:56 2012 by Blobrana
Space is a hostile environment for living things, but small organisms on the Expose-E experiment unit outside Europes Columbus ISS laboratory module have resisted the solar UV radiation, cosmic rays, vacuum and varying temperatures for 18 months. A certain lichen, Xanthoria elegans, seems to b...
Life Deep Life ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	General news	13	3544	Apr 11 14:01 2017 by Blobrana
Half of Earth's life may lie below While astronomers scour the skies for signs of life in outer space, biologists are exploring an enormous living world buried below the surface of the Earth. Scientists estimate that nearly half the living material on our planet is hidden in or beneath the ocean or in...
Life Extremophile (Preview)	General news	2	1520	Aug 6 16:32 2010 by Blobrana
Title: Detection of Endolithes Using Infrared Spectroscopy Authors: S. Dumas, Y. Dutil, G. Joncas On Earth, the Dry Valleys of Antarctica provide the closest martian-like environment for the study of extremophiles. Colonies of bacteries are protected from the freezing temperatures, the drou...
Life Isovaline (Preview)	Meteorite News	2	1228	May 19 11:59 2010 by Blobrana
Isovaline is a rare amino acid that was found in the Murchison meteorite. It is an isomer of the biologically important amino acid L-valine. It may have analgesic properties. Read more
Life Chirality (Preview)	Physics News	8	2519	May 8 19:35 2012 by Blobrana
A simple and reliable method for converting one of the simplest chemical entities into one of the most difficult-to-make molecular building blocks of life, with complete control over its shape, is reported by scientists at the University of Bristol in this weeks Nature. It will have major implica...
Life Synthia (Preview)	Off Topic	7	2099	Jun 14 00:38 2010 by Blobrana
J. Craig Venter Institute Seeks Monopoly Patents on the World's First-Ever Human-Made Life Form ETC Group Will Challenge Patents on "Synthia" - Original Syn Organism Created in Laboratory Ten years after Dolly the cloned sheep made her stunning debut, the J. Craig Venter Institute is...
Life Marine life (Preview)	Off Topic	0	933	Jul 22 15:21 2010 by Blobrana
Using high-tech robotic cameras, a team of scientists is getting a rare first glimpse of marine life in the North Atlantic that could shed light on the ocean's ecosystem and climate to as far back as 1,000 years. Images of tulip-shaped sponges, brightly coloured corals, delicate pink stars and feat...
Life Ediacaran Period ( 1 2 ) (Preview)	General news	18	10735	May 29 15:39 2017 by Blobrana
Flinders Ranges rocks contain a rare frozen record of extreme climate change, leading researchers say. Dr Alan Collins from Adelaide University's school of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said the rocks provided a unique glimpse of weather patterns [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed...
Life Earth biosignature (Preview)	Earth	1	881	Mar 2 11:29 2012 by Blobrana
VLT Rediscovers Life on Earth By observing the Moon using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have found evidence of life in the Universe - on Earth. Finding life on our home planet may sound like a trivial observation, but the novel approach of an international team may lead to future discoveri...