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Imagine a form of life so unusual that we cannot figure out how it dies. That’s exactly what researchers are finding beneath the floor of the sea off Peru. The microbes being studied there — single-celled organisms called Archaea — live in time frames that can perhaps best be described as geological. Consider: A bacteria like Escherichia Coli divides and reproduces every twenty minutes or so. But the microbes in the so-called Peruvian Margin take hundreds or thousands of years to divide. “In essence, these microbes are almost, practically dead by our normal standards,” says Christopher H. House (Penn State)....

Astrobiology sounds like the stuff of lava lamps and Jetsons reruns. Yet seven years after NASA launched a formal astrobiology research program, scientists of every stripe — geologists, biologists, chemists, paleontologists, oceanographers and astronomers — have rallied to the quest. They've spent as much as $65 million a year trying to solve a mystery that has underpinned religion and inspired thinkers from Seneca to Carl Sagan: How did life on the lonely Earth begin? And is Earth really the only source of life in the universe? With the help of modern tools such as the genome, high-powered computer modeling and...

Washington, D.C., is full of conspiracy theories and political intrigue at the best of times. When it comes to talk about aliens in the U.S. capital, it's often about calls for the CIA to reveal what it did with a UFO that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1950s, or buzz about frozen alien bodies in the basement of the Pentagon. But next week in Washington, talk about aliens will be taken with furrowed-brow seriousness. It's not speculation about pregnant women and Martian abductions, but the painstaking search for possible Martian microbes. Not alien invaders, but talk about...

Red rain could prove that aliens have landed Amelia Gentleman and Robin McKie Sunday March 5, 2006 The Observer There is a small bottle containing a red fluid on a shelf in Sheffield University's microbiology laboratory. The liquid looks cloudy and uninteresting. Yet, if one group of scientists is correct, the phial contains the first samples of extraterrestrial life isolated by researchers. Inside the bottle are samples left over from one of the strangest incidents in recent meteorological history. On 25 July, 2001, blood-red rain fell over the Kerala district of western India. And these rain bursts continued for the...

Latching Onto Lichen Rhizocarpon geographicum, species of lichen. by Leslie Mullenfor Astrobiology MagazineMoffett Field CA (SPX) Dec 06, 2005 Bacteria can often survive the harsh conditions of space, and their toughness and adaptability have made them key candidates for the transfer of life between planets. But in a recent study by European scientists, lichen survived a trip in space even better than bacteria do. The lichen flew on the European Space Agency's Foton-M2 mission. A "Biopan" facility was located on the outer shell of the Foton return module and, once at the correct orbital altitude, it was opened to expose...

Interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno Curator of Meteorites at the Vatican Observatoryby Henry Bortman Dr. Guy Consolmagno divides his time between Tucson, Arizona, where he observes asteroids and Kuiper Belt comets with the Vatican's 1.8 meter telescope on Mt. Graham, and Castel Gandolfo, Italy, home of the Vatican meteorites. The Vatican Observatory established a research branch in Arizona in 1981 when the growing population of Rome made the sky too bright for astronomical observations. Night sky observations compete with urbanization and street lightsCredit: darksky.org Consolmagno is an author, Vatican astronomer and curator of the Vatican's meteorite collection. His research...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – What are the limits of organic life in planetary systems? It’s a heady question that, if answered, may reveal just how crowded the cosmos could be with alien biology. A study arm of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council (NRC), has pulled together a task group of specialists to tackle the issue of alternative life forms -- a.k.a. "weird life". To get things rolling, a workshop on the prospects for finding life on other worlds is being held here May 10-11. The meeting is a joint activity of the NRC’s Space Studies Board's Task...

Could SARS have come from outer space? Some scientists think so. Instead of jumping from an unknown animal host in southern China, a few researchers in Britain believe the virus that has baffled medical experts descended from the stratosphere. "I think it is a possibility that SARS came from space. It is a very strong possibility," Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe told Reuters. The director of the Cardiff Center for Astrobiology in Wales and a proponent of the theory that life on Earth originated from space, admits the theory defies conventional wisdom. But in a letter published in The Lancet medical journal...