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Mystery Surrounding The Formation Of Asteroid Bennu Solved
[ETH Zurich] The asteroid Bennu orbits the Sun once every 1.2 years and approaches Earth every six years, passing within around 300,000 kilometres. NASA took advantage of this to collect material from the celestial body. In a spectacular operation in 2023, the US space agency collected samples from the surface of the asteroid Bennu by…
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Scientists Uncover Gravity’s Impact On The Human Genome
[New York University] Human cells with fluorescently labeled chromatin (green) and microtubules (magenta) appear elongated…
Discovery Of Radio Emission From The Exoplanet β Pictoris b
[astro-ph.EP] Planetary magnetic fields shape atmospheric escape, mediate interactions with stellar winds, and encode information…
Could Earth’s Magnetic Field Influence How Earth Life Ages?
[University of Nottingham] The Earth’s magnetic field may influence how cells produce energy, physical performance…
Earth As A Potential Source Of Llife For Europa’s Subsurface Ocean
The paper discusses the possibility of dust particles containing living bacteria ejected from Earth reaching Europa and landing on its surface. It is shown that, taking certain factors into account, over a period of 30 − 80 Myr (the estimated age of Europa’s ocean), Jupiter’s moon would have been impacted…
Keep readingDust To Dust: Prospects For Passive Technosignatures As Relics Of ETI
Technological societies are separated in time, not just space — that is the lesson of the Drake equation. Might the best way to seek them be to find technosignatures that persist long after their creators? I present work I and my collaborators have done on the idea of passive technosignatures,…
Keep readingExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Habitable Zones
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Prebiotic Peptide Formation Triggered By Urea-rich Warm Little Ponds On Early Earth
[Bioorganic Chemistry]. In the study of the origin of life, the polymerization of amino acids into peptides in water faces significant thermodynamic barriers, often referred to as the “water problem.” It has been demonstrated that the reaction between urea and amino acids can efficiently yield carbamoyl amino acids (CAAs); however, whether urea and amino acids…
Read moreExploration Gear & Tech
Tricorder Tech: What A Spacefaring Arctic Microbe Reveals About Life in Alien Oceans
[ISS National Laboratory] It lives in places where life should not exist. In the brine channels that thread through Arctic sea ice, it survives temperatures…
Tricorder Tech: New Handheld Device Maps Chemical Composition Using Infrared Light
[Optica] Researchers have developed a compact, handheld mid-infrared imaging spectrometer that can produce high-resolution chemical maps of a sample without using any stains or labels.…
Water Planet Recon: How Accurately Can We Measure Earth Ocean’s Deepest Point?
[Research Organization of Information and Systems]. How deep is the deepest ocean—and how precisely can we actually measure it? Bathymetric maps obtained by each sounding…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
Rotational Spectroscopy And Astronomical Search Of Propane-1-thiol (CH3CH2CH2SH) And Propane-2-thiol ((CH3)2CHSH)
[astro-ph.GA] This study focuses on propanethiol (or propyl mercaptan, C3H7SH), a sulfur analogue of propanol and a key target for investigating interstellar sulfur chemistry. We…
Elemental Abundances of Cool Stars: A Spectroscopic Framework Applied to Five Planet-Host Stars
[astro-ph.SR] Stellar elemental abundances provide important constraints on the chemical environments from which planets form. M and late-K dwarfs are prime targets for the characterization…
JWST Reveals Refractory-Rich Water Ice in Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS: Evidence for a Continuum of Grain Properties across Protoplanetary Disks
[astro-ph.EP] We present JWST/NIRSpec PRISM observations of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS obtained on 2025 August 6 (Epoch 1), 2025 December 22 (Epoch 2), and 2026…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Is A Nearby Advanced Alien Civilization Out There Waiting To Pounce On Earth? Unlikely, Says New Study
[Northern Arizona University] Science fiction suggests that life on other planets, if it exists, is likely far more advanced than life on Earth. A recent…
Tracing 700 Million Years Of Cell Evolution
[KAUST] Publishing in Nature Communications, a KAUST-led team has developed the AI tool Unify to help scientists compare similar cell types across distant species[1]. This…
In situ Characterization Of Volatile And Refractory Hydrocarbons Produced By UV Photolysis Of Interstellar C2H2 Ice
[astro-ph.GA] Acetylene (C2H2) is commonly observed in star-forming regions, young stellar objects, and the Solar System. Laboratory and theoretical studies have linked this simplest alkyne…