Recently in the Habitable Zones & Global Climate Category

Earth's volatile elements (H, C, and N) are essential to maintaining habitable conditions for metazoans and simpler life forms.

The habitable zone (HZ) around a star is typically defined as the region where a rocky planet can maintain liquid water on its surface.

We present the results of simulations on the detectability of O2 in the atmosphere of Earth twins around nearby low mass stars using high resolution transmission spectroscopy.

In the redshift range 100<(1+z)<110, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) had a temperature of 273-300K (0-30 degrees Celsius), allowing early rocky planets (if any existed) to have liquid water chemistry on their surface and be habitable, irrespective of their distance from a star.

Using the powerful eye of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, two teams of scientists have found faint signatures of water in the atmospheres of five distant planets.

The future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular microorganisms.

The biosignatures of life on Earth do not remain static, but change considerably over the planet's habitable lifetime.

Rain as acidic as undiluted lemon juice may have played a part in killing off plants and organisms around the world during the most severe mass extinction in Earth's history.

An international team of researchers led by Ralf Tappert, University of Innsbruck, reconstructed the composition of the Earth's atmosphere of the last 220 million years by analyzing modern and fossil plant resins.

What kind of environment may exist on terrestrial planets around other stars? In spite of the lack of direct observations, it may not be premature to speculate on exoplanetary climates, for instance to optimize future telescopic observations, or to assess the probability of habitable worlds.