Astrobiology (general): July 2007

Many NAI members will be attending next week's Bioastronomy meeting in San Juan Puerto Rico. As an experiment at this interdisciplinary conference, we have asked our meeting attendees to define jargon and vocabulary words that someone outside their discipline might not understand in an interdisciplinary event. We have had quite good response to this, but would like to fill out our list a bit more, and are asking you to help. Think back to your recent talks or upcoming talks and select a few words you use that could be entered into our glossary. Our hope is that this will be a continuing/ evolving resource for the whole institute.

The Science Steering Committee of the 2008 Astrobiology Science Conference (April 15-17, Santa Clara, California, USA) invites proposals for sessions related to the major scientific themes: "The Astronomical and Planetary Context for Life", "The Origin and Evolution of Life", and "The Search for Life in our Solar System and Beyond". To submit proposals, and for more details, please go to the conference website, http://abscicon.seti.org. The deadline for submission of session topic proposals is July 23, 2007. Questions can be addressed to: session.proposals@seti.org.

Members of the media are invited to attend Bioastronomy 2007, a meeting convened by an international organizing committee of representatives from the scientific community. Scientists from all over the world will gather at this meeting in San Juan to report on latest findings in the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.

THE LIMITS OF ORGANIC LIFE IN PLANETARY SYSTEMS, a new report from the National Research Council, examines the search for life elsewhere in the universe and whether the fundamental requirements for life as we generally know it are the only ways phenomena recognized as "life" could be supported beyond our planet.