Without plants on land, humans could not live on Earth. From mosses to ferns to grasses to trees, plants are our food, fodder and timber. All this diversity emerged from […]
It’s a long way to Mars, and explorers headed there will either have to take enough food and supplies to last the whole trip or use in-situ resources to make […]
This study investigates the resilience of the unicellular green microalga Chlorella vulgaris to extreme atmospheric conditions simulating those of Mars, Jupiter, and Titan.
In the next 10–20 years, several observatories will aim to detect the signatures of oxygenic photosynthesis on exoplanets, though targets must be carefully selected. Most known potentially habitable exo-planets orbit […]
Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada is known for its towering tufa formations, abundant brine shrimp and black clouds of alkali flies uniquely adapted to the salty, arsenic- and […]
Plant life first emerged on land about 550 million years ago, and an international research team co-led by University of Nebraska–Lincoln computational biologist Yanbin Yin has cracked the genomic code […]
The ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica are dominated by nutrient-poor mineral soil and rocky outcrops. The principal habitat for microorganisms is within rocks (endolithic).
In a study published in Science Advances on Jan. 24, researchers led by Prof. ZHU Maoyan from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences […]
Editor’s note: We observe new worlds from afar first with telescopes, then spacecraft flybys, then robotic orbital missions, followed perhaps by human missions. How we eventually study the surface of […]
A scientist from the University of Leicester has discovered a new type of fossil that reveals life in the oceans half a billion years ago.
