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| Life on Frosted Earths |
| Topic: Alien Life |
01/28/08 |
| The search for life beyond the Earth is closely linked with hunting for habitable worlds. Astronomers have always hoped to find planets in the so-called "Goldilocks zone" around their parent stars, where the temperature is just right. |
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| The Return of the Blob … As a Robot |
| Topic: Robotics & A.I. |
01/14/08 |
| Most robots have legs, wheels, or tank-like treads. But Virgina Tech roboticist Dennis Hong is building one that uses "whole-skin locomotion" to move like an amoeba, enabling it to squeeze more easily into the some of the tight other-worldly spaces where extraterrestrial life might be hiding. |
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| Leaving No Stone Unturned |
| Topic: Extreme Life |
12/03/07 |
| Kimberley Warren-Rhodes has spent countless hours in some of the world´s driest deserts, turning over rocks. Tens of thousands of rocks. What is she hoping to find? The pattern of life. |
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| Life on Mars - Viking Revisited |
| Topic: Mars |
11/26/07 |
| The Viking missions to Mars tried to find evidence for life on the planet's surface, but the results of those experiments were frustratingly ambiguous. Joop Houtkooper recently has taken another look at the data, and he suspects that Viking may have discovered Martian microbes after all. |
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| Swimming a Salty Sea |
| Topic: Europa |
11/19/07 |
| If there is life on Jupiter´s moon Europa, what would it be like? The answer partly depends on the type of ocean water that is under the moon's icy outer shell. |
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| Rethinking Jupiter |
| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
11/12/07 |
| The planet Jupiter is thought to act as a "cosmic vacuum cleaner," sucking up comets and asteroids that could potentially hit the Earth and endanger all life on our planet. But new research has more closely examined Jupiter's ability to protect the inner solar system, and there are some suprising findings. |
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| Predicting Planets |
| Topic: New Planets |
10/15/07 |
| Finding new planets around distant stars has become commonplace. But now a team of astronomers has succeeded in predicting the orbit of a planet that hadn´t yet been discovered. The last time that happened was more than 150 years ago. |
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| Phoenix Takes Flight |
| Topic: Mars |
09/03/07 |
| Phoenix, NASA´s latest mission to Mars, will land in the planet´s northern polar region. It will dig down into the permafrost, which lies just below the surface, and look for signs of past habitability. |
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| Our Earliest Animal Ancestors |
| Topic: Biosphere |
08/06/07 |
| How has life changed Earth? How has Earth changed life? And why did animal life appear on Earth some time around 600 million years ago – and not at another time? A new NASA Astrobiology Institute group will tackle big questions about the origin of advanced life. |
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| The Origin of Life: First Steps |
| Topic: Origin & Evolution of Life |
07/09/07 |
| One of the biggest puzzles in astrobiology is how did life emerge on Earth, and under what conditions might it arise on other planetary bodies? From Astrobiology Magazine, European Edition is a review of "From Suns to Life," which investigates the various pieces of this puzzle. |
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