A new estimate of the number of habitable planets orbiting the most common type of stars in our galaxy could have huge consequences for the search for life. According to a recent study, tens of billions of planets around red dwarfs are likely capable of containing liquid water, dramatically increasing the potential to find signs…
Research by a Danish physicist suggests that the explosion of massive stars – supernovae – near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. Professor Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark sets out his novel work in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When the…
When it comes to adapting to climate change, diversity is the mammal’s best defense. That is one of the conclusions of the first study of how mammals in North America adapted to climate change in “deep time” – a period of 56 million years beginning with the Eocene and ending 12,000 years ago with the…
The earliest cells were unstable chemical systems that survived by combining a handful of shaky carbon-based assemblies together, researchers say. All life on Earth is based on carbon. To create living matter from carbon, organisms carry out chemical reactions such as photosynthesis to generate organic compounds from the carbon dioxide in the environment. These mechanisms,…
Researchers have succeeded in mimicking the chemistry of life in synthetic versions of DNA and RNA molecules. The work shows that DNA and its chemical cousin RNA are not unique in their ability to encode information and to pass it on through heredity. The work, reported in Science, is promising for future “synthetic biology” and…
Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions…
An incoming asteroid may benefit microbes living deep underground, according to a recent study of an ancient impact in the United States’ Chesapeake Bay. A biological census of the subsurface life forms suggests that impacts create new niches for these deep dwellers to spread into. In the last couple of decades, biologists have come to…
Even though bacteria in Lechuguilla Cave have been cut off from the surface for millions of years and were never exposed to antibiotics for medicine or agriculture, most of the 93 strains analyzed in a new study are resistant to several antibiotics. Bacteria found in the cave have ways of fighting off up to 21…
The second-largest mass extinction in Earth’s history coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped. Although it has long been agreed that the so-called Late Ordovician mass extinction — which occurred about 450 million years ago — was related to climate change, exactly how the climate…
From the Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog: Somewhere, out in the interstellar void, there may be a planet inhabited by hyper-advanced dinosaurs. At least, that’s what a new paper by Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow says. One idea, favored by Breslow, is that meteorites carried specific types of amino acids and other organic flotsam to earth around 4…