Editor’s note: If you are on a long term mission or on an away team on another world, you might want your tricorder to be able to do some quick […]
Nanotechnology
Some Thoughts on the Future of Technosignature Searches: Constraining the Fermi Paradox
This paper examines how future technosignature searches may constrain competing resolutions of the Fermi Paradox, with particular attention to the possibility that technologically capable entities (TCEs) are either intrinsically rare […]
Scientists Reveal Disease Genes From Reconstruction Of Ancestor To All Complex Life
A University of Texas at Austin-led team has reconstructed the most detailed map to date of the molecular machines that carried out the functions of life in an ancient ancestor […]
Artificial Intelligence Aided Design Of Peptides With Custom Secondary Structure Motifs And Reduced Amino Acid Alphabets
Proteins are highly diverse functional polymers where the specific sequence of amino acids, selected from a standard genetically-encoded alphabet of twenty (C20), determines the structure and ultimately the function of […]
Weaving Life Into Regolith: Engineered Autotrophic-Heterotrophic Consortia For Autonomous Biofabrication From Granular Feedstocks
Long-duration human missions to Mars will require autonomous systems capable of converting in situ resources into structural materials, tools, and functional components. More broadly, such systems represent a class of […]
A New Artificial Intelligence Tool That Can Generate Millions Of New Molecules
Editor’s note: As we expand outward from Earth to other worlds we are almost certainly going to encounter things we did not expect to find – things that are unlikely […]
Anabaena Learns A New Trick – Cyanobacteria Surprise Scientists With Evolutionary Shift
Photosynthetic bacteria helped shape Planet Earth. Among them are cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen in our atmosphere and made complex life possible, captivating scientists for decades. Now, researchers at the […]
Computational Chemistry And Supercomputers To Help Understand The Mechanisms Of Life
A new study from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in collaboration with Uppsala University (Sweden) and AstraZeneca, shows how computational chemistry and supercomputers can help scientists better understand the […]
Designing Lightweight Optics To Detect Signs Of Life Beyond Our Solar System
UC Santa Barbara doctoral candidate in physics, Skyler Palatnick, PhD ’26, has been named to Heising-Simons Foundation’s Science program’s new class of 51 Pegasi b Fellows, which he will perform […]
Optical Vortex Phase Masks for the Detection of Habitable Worlds
A team of NASA researchers is developing new types of optical masks that could help enable the many orders of magnitude of starlight suppression needed for future space observatories to […]
