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The Ancient Splice of Life
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
02/25/05 |
| Summary: One of the key motivations for revisiting the probability of life elsewhere in the universe is the surprising proclivity of life in hostile places on Earth. New findings suggest that modern organisms may have useless DNA fragments today that once saved their ancestors lives in extreme environments. |
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Aliens of the Deep
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
01/28/05 |
| Summary: Film director and exploration enthusiast James Cameron (Titanic, Aliens) gave Stanford graduate student Kevin Hand a chance to search for "alien" life close to home-- a mere 2 miles below the ocean surface-- as part of Cameron's IMAX documentary, Aliens of the Deep, which opens today. |
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The Incredible Edible Universe
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
01/27/05 |
Summary: There are many examples of bacteria living in
extreme environments -- including the human body -- using hydrogen as fuel. A new sampling technique has uncovered a hydrogen economy going on now in the hot springs of Yellowstone. |
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Diving for Life under Antarctic Ice
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
12/15/04 |
| Summary: Life manages to hang on pretty much anywhere on Earth where there's liquid water. Ice-covered lakes in Antarctica are no exception. But to study the microbes that hang out down under the ice, researchers have to do some risky diving. Dale Andersen is a pioneer of the technique. |
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Life Slogging Through Bogs
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
12/14/04 |
| Summary: The limits to life have consistently listed carbon-based organisms as central. While methane-consuming microbes are still carbon-based, they do offer novel ways to extract energy even without light or oxygen. Their role in our solar system is a subject of fruitful speculation. |
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Living Above the Tree Line, Inside a Rock
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
12/14/04 |
| Summary: Are there places on Earth devoid of life? One of the most barren spots on the planet is above the tree line, where glaciers strip the land of nutrients and life. But enough dissolved organics may flow in melting streams to point to microbial life where no life was previously imagined. |
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Apollo 12 Remembered
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| Topic: Extreme Life |
11/21/04 |
| Summary: 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 |
| Summary: 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 |
| Summary: 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 |
| Summary: 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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