Hello Everyone!

I saw this at livescience, and thought that it might be interesting to share here. Life on Earth uses left-handed amino acids, and a team of scientists now have a reasonable answer of why this is. Enjoy!http://www.livescience.com/history/080408

Well, it would seem that bacteria hold the keys to worlds, for better or for worse. That is, they have the power to change planets for the sake of our colonisation, or to the detriment of ecosystems, as recent research has shown that they may have played a role in the Permian extinction.

At the Lunar and Planetary Science conference, which took ( Read more... )

Are models arbitrary? A lot of people think they are, especially when it comes to climate science. I've sometimes heard it said that models are built to give answers, arbitrarily pre-determined in advance.


A computer model is simply a model formulated (or executed) by a computer. In theory, you could write the entire model on paper -- although it ( Read more... )

"Did ancient oceans on Venus last long enough for potential life to have emerged? The answer could be locked inside a hardy mineral called tremolite, which future robotic missions to our neighbouring planet could find and study."

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It'd be interesting to find out just what caused Venus to become the hothouse it is today. It'd likely have been ( Read more... )

Engage the Antimatter Drive

"GLIESE 581c has got to be the ultimate tourist destination. Discovered in April this year, it is the first rocky planet beyond our solar system with anything like a pleasant climate. How mind-blowing would it be just to stroll along its beaches - surely it must have beaches - or watch the planet's red-dwarf sun setting ( Read more... )

The chances of humanity ever discovering and and colonizing another world like ours are rather slim. Obviously, I can't put a figure on it (although I'm betting it'd be higher than some would expect). Still, it is a possibility, and barring the certain fact that humans would have evolved since then (and possibly evolved a new way of thinking about ( Read more... )

Biology and the Planetary Engineering of Mars

"From the perspective of biology, planetary engineering is the ability to alter the environment of a planet so that terrestrial organisms can survive and grow (McKay, 1982). The feasibility of altering planetary environments is clearly demonstrated by mankind's activities on the Earth (Levine, 1991; ( Read more... )

"I fear that Mike Martinez's idea of diverting comets to Mars in order to speed up the process of terraforming is a complete non-starter as a means of colonisation (15 October, p 23). A great deal more than water will be needed to achieve even the first stage of terraforming, which is ecopoeisis - the creation of a self-sustaining biosphere.

At ( Read more... )

Chandra Wickramasinghe from Cardiff University, UK, has long argued the case for cometary panspermia, the idea that comets are infected with primitive life forms and delivered life to the early Earth. That would explain why life on Earth arose so quickly after our planet formed around 4.5 billion years ...

Wickramasinghe says the case has been ( Read more... )