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Deep Shifts In Evolutionary Rate Trajectories Of Ancient Bacterial Genes
[biorxiv.org] Reconstruction of ancestral gene repertoires from extant genomes captures only the genes that survived; those lost from the record are invisible. Among the genes that did persist, selective pressures change not only across lineages but across time. Here, we resolve evolutionary rate trajectories across 528 genes in the Last Bacterial Common Ancestor (LBCA). We…
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Spectral Evolution Of Ceres’ Surface and Implications For Space Weathering
[astro-ph.EP] The surface of Ceres exposed to the space environment will be gradually altered, but…
Chemists Uncover How Unthinkable Reactions Occur In Unimaginable Conditions
[Florida International University] Before there was Earth, there was chemistry. In the unimaginable cold, dark…
The Enceladian Crater Production Function
[Icarus] Interpreting Enceladus’s past and present surface history and interior state remains challenging, owing to…
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
WINERED Detects a Strong Atmospheric Outflow on the Sub-Neptune GJ 3090b
[astro-ph.EP] Sub-Neptunes are the most common short-period (P<100 d) planets known. A major goal for the field is to build a comprehensive understanding of their compositions and evolutionary histories, and an important tool for achieving this goal is metastable helium (He∗) transmission spectroscopy, which traces atmospheric escape. In this paper, we report the detection of…
Read moreExploration Gear & Tech
SkyFall Astrogeology/Astrobiology Droids Will Survey Mars
[NASA]. Equipped with four instruments each, the three SkyFall Mars helicopters helicopters will follow in the footsteps of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, a technology…
Alta-X Drone Tests Future Astrobiology / Astrogeology Droid Technology
[NASA]. An Alta-X drone flies an advanced guidance and navigation system known as the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) experiment. The…
Rethinking The Origin Of Life At Seafloor Hydrothermal Vents
[PNAS] Alkaline vents have dominated a class of hypotheses for the origins of life since their discovery a quarter of century ago, but advances in…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
How A Deep-sea Protein Adapts To An Extreme Environment
[Kyushu University] Life in the deep sea is under immense pressure—literally. Such extreme conditions can disrupt the delicate structures of proteins essential to life. Yet…
Radial Velocity Detection Of The TRAPPIST-1 Planetary System With SPIRou And NIRPS
[astro-ph.EP]. The TRAPPIST-1 system is well-known for its seven transiting Earth-sized exoplanets. It has been extensively studied and characterized, notably with transit timing variations (TTVs)…
POSTELLAR: Posterior Stellar Spectrum Sampling – An Alternative to Approximate Stellar Spectra for Exoplanetary Analysis
[astro-ph.EP] We present a novel approach to perform posterior sampling of the underlying stellar spectrum in high-resolution spectroscopic observations. Our method, postellar, coherently combines information…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Atmospheric Microbial Transport to Antarctica and Its Ecological Implications: A Systematic Review
[Environmental Microbiology] Atmospheric transport is hypothesized to be the primary vector connecting isolated Antarctic terrestrial habitats to global microbial pools, yet the mechanisms governing this…
The Epistemic Risk of the 31st Spore: If Planets Aren’t Fine Tuned, We’re Doing Life Detection Wrong
[physics.pop-ph] Exploration of planetary bodies within our solar system will be essential for understanding the origin of life on Earth and the distribution of life…
A Genomic Catalog Of Earth’s Bacterial And Archaeal Symbionts
[Nature Biotechnology] Microbial symbiosis drives the functional and phylogenomic diversification of life on Earth yet remains underexplored because of culturing challenges. This study used machine…