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Sea Ice As An Origin Of Life Location For Hycean And Ocean Worlds
[astro-ph.EP] Water worlds with potential deep oceans are at the forefront of currently observable exoplanetary habitability. The standard requirements for habitability are the presence of an energy source, a source of nutrients, and a solvent, all of which can be met in exoplanets with deep liquid water oceans. Such planets may be numerous, ranging from…
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Viruses, Proviruses and Satellites from Asgard Archaea Enrichments Reveal Complex Microbial Interactions
[biorxiv.org] Asgard archaea are the closest known relatives of eukaryotes and are central to models…
Mars Rover Curiosity’s Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) Calibration
[NASA]. NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI),…
Carbon and Sulfur Isotopes of Microfossils and Pyrites from Neoarchean Cherts: Microbial Diversity in an Ancient Deep-Marine Environment
[Astrobiology (Journal) via PubMed] The 2.52 Ga Gamohaan Formation in South Africa offers critical insights…
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
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Auroral Belts As Magnetically Localized Reactors For Prebiotic Chemistry On Early Earth
[Biosystems] Most models of prebiotic chemistry emphasize globally distributed or widely acting energy sources, including ultraviolet radiation, lightning, impacts, and energetic particles. However, spatially localized environments capable of repeatedly concentrating reactive chemistry may also have contributed to sustaining nonequilibrium chemical evolution on the early Earth. Here, we propose that Earth’s auroral belts may have acted…
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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…
Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of Planetary Materials Using Laser Deposited Plasmonic Gold Nanoparticles
[x-mol.net] This work demonstrates a surface-enhanced raman spectroscopy (SERS) approach based on laser deposition of Au plasmonic nanoparticles onto several relevant mineral surfaces. A pulsed…
NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) Cooperative Agreement Notice (NNH26ZDA016C) Final Text And Due Dates
[NASA] The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate (HSMD) have released the final text of the…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
NASA Administrator Visits Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS)
[NASA]. Dragonfly will explore sites of interest around Titan’s equatorial regions and collect samples of surface material for analysis inside DraMS, the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer.…
A Cross-Laboratory Comparison Study of Titan Haze Analogs: Surface Energy II
[astro-ph.EP] The organic haze particles on Titan play important roles in atmospheric cloud formation and aerosol-lake interactions. These processes are strongly influenced by the surface…
Analytical Platform (Microsampling, Catapulting, Trapping, and LIBS) for the Characterization of Discrete Domains in Samples of Astrochemical Interest
[Analytical Chemistry] The chemical characterization of scarce or heterogeneous solid samples remains a significant analytical challenge due to the high material quantities required by conventional…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
The Emergence Of Life In The Light Of Evolution
[q-bio.PE] The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life s defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry…
ReactionAtlas: Ab Origine Exploration Of Chemical Reaction Networks With Machine Learning
[cs.LG] Mapping a chemical reaction network, the graph of minima and transition states (TS) and the elementary reactions connecting them, is the natural language of…
ExMODE: A Comprehensive Resource For Extremophile Genomic And Functional Exploration
[iMetaOmics] ExMODE (https://db.genomics.cn/exmode/) integrates 3518 samples to build a unified extremophile resource, which hosts 1.35 billion habitat-specific non-redundant genes, 5.25 million representative protein structures, 67,026…