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Hot Topic
Origins
Extreme Life
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Apollo 12 Remembered
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
11/21/04 |
| This last week marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the precision landing for Apollo 12. The mission sought to retrieve a camera casing from the robotic Surveyor 3 which had survived three years on the surface. But did biology sneak into their equation? The debate is examined with fresh historical perspective. |
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Studying Slime
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
11/01/04 |
| Penny Boston, a member of the SLIME team - Subsurface Life in Mineral Environments - spends much of her life underground. She explores caves, studying the bizarre microbial life forms that inhabit them. These unique environments, very different from the surface world that we live in, hold important clues to finding life on other planets. |
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Life in a Lava Tube
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
10/25/04 |
| Most people think of underground caves as beautiful and benign environments. Their colorful stalactites and stalagmites draw throngs of tourists each year. But some of the caves that Penny Boston explores are so poisonous to humans that she has to wear a full biosuit to enter them. To her, caves are laboratories for studying unusual forms of life on Earth, and hold important clues to finding life on other planets. |
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Erasing Life's Letters
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
10/21/04 |
| Given a stable genome like the well-studied mouse, how does one systematically go about testing or modifying it? The large amount of junk DNA indicates that very aggressive edits still do not change a mouse into a non-mouse by fractional modifications. |
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New Signs of Polar Life
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
09/23/04 |
| Finding moss and lichen colonies in Antarctica depends on weathering not only the cold, but also extremes of dryness. On ninety-nine percent of the Poles, no vegetation can grow. But scientists with the British Antarctic Survey have found a remarkably robust colony of plants photosynthesizing from a rocky haven. |
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Ring of Life
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
09/12/04 |
| Molecular biologists have uprooted a traditional perspective on life's ancient ancestry, if their supplanted tree-of-life metaphor is modified to look more like a ring-of-life. |
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Unsung Species Co-Endangered
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
09/12/04 |
| Extinction of a species is not just a permanent loss of biological diversity, but may have ripple effects as co-dependent species suffer from the absence of what may be linked predator-prey relatsionships. |
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Deception Point
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
09/06/04 |
| Bestselling author, Dan Brown, has concocted a tale for astrobiologists called "Deception Point". But how can one separate facts from fiction? Consider the scientific possibilities of dissecting a meteorite full of insect-like fossils. |
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Whale of a Species
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
08/06/04 |
| One finds alien looking species in deep sea niches, but few could have imagined a whale-eating worm with neither mouth nor eyes. When a whale dies, this species comes to life. Even more remarkable is the female gestates her own reproductive partners-- by engulfing a dozen or so immature males alive. |
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The Spillproof Earth
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
07/27/04 |
| Texas A&M University and NASA are teaming up to bring new levels of planetary protection against forward contamination of other worlds from our space probes. The team hopes to sterilize future hardware using a well-known technique called electron beam irradiation. |
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