Free Republic

“It is dangerous to assume life is common across the Universe.” These were the words of Charles Cockell at a Royal Society event on March 11 this year. While many people have freely debated the existence of extraterrestrial life, Cockell’s words carry a bit more weight than most. He happens to be the director of the U.K. Center for Astrobiology, based at the University of Edinburgh. Bringing to mind the argument made by Fermi’s paradox — if the universe is teeming with life, where exactly is everyone? — this may seem at first to be a slightly pessimistic outlook. Evidently,...

A fireball that appeared over the Sri Lankan province of Polonnaruwa on December 29, 2012 was a meteorite containing algae fossils, according to a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology. A team of researchers, led by Jamie Wallis of Cardiff University, believes that these fossils provide evidence of cometary panspermia, the hypothesis that life originated in outer space and comets brought it to Earth. Scientists at the Sri Lankan Medical Research Institute in Colombo forwarded 628 stone fragments that allegedly fell from the fireball to Cardiff University, where Wallis' team indentified three as originating from a carbonaceous chondrite. The...

NASA is reporting that an analysis of a rock powder sample collected by the Curiosity rover suggests that ancient Mars could have supported living microbes. The sample contained traces of sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon -- key chemical ingredients for life. For astronomers, the news constitutes the latest clue in their pursuit of a scientific holy grail: Answering the big question about whether life ever existed on the Red Planet. Their challenge until now has been to confirm whether the Martian atmosphere could have supported a habitable environment. The preliminary evidence now suggests the answer is yes...

Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples. Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years. This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "We are calling this life form unclassified...

Explanation: Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate. That's because tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA...

Canadian geologists have found more evidence that impact craters may, in fact, be the best places to look for signs of past life on Mars and other worlds, and could even have been the place life began on Earth... It was during some field work on the 15-mile (24 kilometer) wide Haughton crater that he and his colleagues recognized what appeared to be the remains of hydrothermal structures. These would have been steaming vents at one time, releasing heat for millennia that had been generated by the impact event.

 Two potential signatures of life on Saturn's moon Titan have been found by the Cassini spacecraft. But scientists are quick to point out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations.Titan is much too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but some scientists have suggested that exotic life-forms could live in the lakes of liquid methane or ethane that dot the moon's surface.In 2005, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field and Heather R Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, calculated that such microbes could eke out an existence by breathing in hydrogen...

Physicists of the University of Granada and the University of Valencia (Spain) have developed a proceeding to analyse specific data sent by the Huygens probe from Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, proving "in an unequivocal way" that there is natural electric activity in its atmosphere. The scientific community thinks that there is a higher probability that organic molecules precursors to life could form in those planets or satellites which have an atmosphere with electric storms. Researcher Juan Antonio Morente, from the Department of Applied Physics of the University of Granada, has informed the SINC that Titan is considered to...

The potential discovery of water on one of Saturn's moons would add a new environment in the solar system where life could exist, according to scientists. NASA's Cassini spacecraft made the surprising find on Enceladus during its mission around Saturn and the ringed planet's natural satellites. The probe may have found evidence of liquid water that erupts like geysers from Yellowstone park in the western United States, NASA said Thursday. "The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon," NASA said. "We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that...

On Aug. 28, 2012, during the 22nd Martian day, or sol, after landing on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover drove about 52 feet (16 meters) eastward. The drive imprinted the wheel tracks visible in this image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech After decades of following the water, the reality that “life as we know it” may never have gotten a foothold on Mars’ surface, at least, has arguably taken root within the planetary science community. If life ever was or is lurking on the Red planet, it’s been extremely coy about revealing itself. The recent news that the Mars Curiosity rover has thus far...

Transport proteins show 4,000-fold preference for phosphate over arsenate.A bacterium that some scientists thought could use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its DNA actually goes to extreme lengths to grab any traces of phosphorus it can find.The finding clears up a lingering question sparked by a controversial study1, published in Science in 2010, which claimed that the GFAJ-1 microbe could thrive in the high-arsenic conditions of Mono Lake in California without metabolizing phosphorus — an element that is essential for all forms of life.Although this and other key claims of the paper were later undermined (see 'Study challenges existence...

SETI and Intelligent Design By Seth ShostakSETI Instituteposted: 01 December 200506:37 am ET If you’re an inveterate tube-o-phile, you may remember the episode of "Cheers" in which Cliff, the postman who’s stayed by neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night from his appointed rounds of beer, exclaims to Norm that he’s found a potato that looks like Richard Nixon’s head.This could be an astonishing attempt by taters to express their political views, but Norm is unimpressed. Finding evidence of complexity (the Nixon physiognomy) in a natural setting (the spud), and inferring some deliberate, magical mechanism behind it all,...

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought. That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late...

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought. That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an...

An oasis of liquid methane has unexpectedly been discovered amid the tropical dunes of Saturn's moon Titan, researchers say. This lake in the otherwise dry tropics of Titan hints that subterranean channels of liquid methane might feed it from below, scientists added. Titan has clouds, rain and lakes, like Earth, but these are composed of methane rather than water. However, methane lakes were seen only at Titan's poles until now — its tropics around the equator were apparently home to dune fields instead.

From the University of Colorado at Boulder, proof that life can inhabit just about anywhere. CU-Boulder-led team finds microbes in extreme environment on South American volcanoesA CU-Boulder-led team has discovered some rare, primitive microorganisms on high volcanoes in South America that may be fueled by drifting gases in the region rather than photosynthesis. Credit: University of Colorado A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for organisms that eke out a living in some of the most inhospitable soils on Earth has found a hardy few.A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the Martian-like landscape on some...

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows that NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

Sir Fred Hoyle Vindicated (Via Dr. Benny Peiser of the GWPF) According to new research to be published in Nature Geoscience  (embargoed until 1800 GMT/10AM PST, Sunday 8 January 2012), the next ice age could set in any time this millennium where it not for increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions that are preventing such a global disaster from occurring. The new research confirms the theory developed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe in the 1990s that without increased levels of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere ‘the drift into new ice-age conditions would be inevitable.’Hoyle and Wickramasinghe...

Astronomers report in the journal Nature that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. The results suggest that complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life but can be made naturally by stars.

In today's issue of the journal Nature, astronomers report that organic compounds of unexpected complexity exist throughout the Universe. The results suggest that complex organic compounds are not the sole domain of life but can be made naturally by stars. Prof. Sun Kwok and Dr. Yong Zhang of the University of Hong Kong show that an organic substance commonly found throughout the Universe contains a mixture of aromatic (ring-like) and aliphatic (chain-like) components. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble those of coal and petroleum. Since coal and oil are remnants of ancient life, this type of...