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Hardy Earth bacteria can grow in lunar soil 00:53 14 March 2008 NewScientist.com news service David Shiga, Houston A hardy life form called cyanobacteria can grow in otherwise inhospitable lunar soil, new experiments suggest. Future colonists on the Moon might be able to use the cyanobacteria to extract resources from the soil that could be used to make rocket fuel and fertiliser for crops. NASA plans to send astronauts back to the Moon starting in 2020, with the ultimate aim of setting up a permanent lunar base. Sustaining such a base will be a major challenge, because it is so...

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, John Podesta, played a central role in another potential Russian collusion scandal that has not yet been investigated. Podesta, the former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, served on the board of Joule Unlimited, a now defunct alternative energy company, from January 2011 to January 2014. He resigned from the company’s board to accept the powerful job of Counselor to President Barack Obama. During Podesta’s tenure on the board of Joule Unlimited, a significant investment in the company by a firm owned by the Russian government escaped review and scrutiny by the Committee on...

Conventional scientific wisdom has it that plants and other creatures have only lived on land for about 500 million years, and that landscapes of the early Earth were as barren as Mars. A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old -- at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet. That evidence... involves fossils the size of match heads and connected into bunches by threads in the surface of an ancient soil from...

Researchers discover evidence for a new type of chlorophyll in cyanobacteria that can absorb near-infrared lightResearchers may have found a new form of chlorophyll, the pigment that plants, algae and cyanobacteria use to obtain energy from light through photosynthesis. Preliminary findings published August 19 in Science suggest that the newly discovered molecule, dubbed chlorophyll f, has a distinct chemical composition when compared with the four known forms of chlorophyll and can absorb more near-infrared light than is typical for the photosynthetic pigments. Chlorophyll f, which was extracted from cultures of cyanobacteria and other oxygenic microorganisms, may allow certain photosynthetic life...

JIM GILCHRIST Charles Cockell opens a growth chamber, tucked away within the Cambridge headquarters of the British Antarctic Survey, to expose rows of Petri dishes. He picks one of them up, its interior slicked with tell-tale green. "These are going into space," he says, matter-of-factly. In the corridor outside hangs a stuffed albatross, a trophy from some bygone Antarctic expedition, but the still-living life forms in the Petri dishes have been gleaned on much more recent trips, and not just to Antarctica. These are photosynthetic cyanobacteria - "extremophiles" as they’re known - some from the Antarctic, but others collected in...