DailyDirt: Life On Other Worlds
The origin of life is a pretty enormous mystery. There are several theories for how life might have come about, but it's difficult to design experiments to narrow down these options. In the meantime,...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Life On Other Planets
We've discovered thousands of exoplanets beyond our solar system, and some of them are even in the "Goldilocks zone" where liquid water could possibly exist. Some astronomers think life could be...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Life on Mars
Manned missions to Mars have been in the works for decades, but we still haven't worked out all the details for getting humans to safely set foot on the red planet. Technology has clearly improved...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Searching For Life Forms
Discovering an alien life form would be quite an achievement, but we've been burned before by over-eager press releases that claimed to find evidence of life from beyond our planet. NASA might be more...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Nature Abhors A Vacuum
Studies have shown that spore-forming bacteria can survive in space under certain conditions, so it doesn't seem so implausible that life -- as we know it -- has accomplished interplanetary travel...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Water, Water, Everywhere... In The Universe?
Water is an essential substance for life (as we know it), so it's not too surprising that as we look for evidence of extraterrestrial life, we often start by looking for signs of water. (We also look...
View ArticleDailyDirt: All Kinds Of Bugs Living In Outer Space?
Panspermia isn't a crazy idea, especially when we seem to keep finding extremophiles that can survive in very harsh environments. The components of life may be traveling between planets or solar...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Somewhat Alien Life And Outer Space
The rumors had it all wrong. Nobody discovered a new lifeform on a different planet or moon -- but a new bacterium was found in California. (Why are all the alternative lifestyles living in...
View ArticleDailyDirt: We Should Have Written Down ET's Phone Number...
The search for extraterrestrial life has been going on for ages, but we still haven't found much convincing evidence that life on other objects in space exists. There's at least one bold prediction...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Life Across The Universe
Astrobiology is a field that doesn't have a whole lot of experimental evidence, but it's interesting to entertain the possibilities of life that might exist elsewhere in the universe. So far, we've...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Mounting Evidence For Life On Mars
A warmer, wetter Mars might have been a habitable world, but it's not clear exactly how the conditions on Mars changed and became so different. Our neighboring planet had the best chances for...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Alien Lifeforms In Our Solar System
So far, we only have one example of life -- the biosphere of Earth. Our planet probably isn't unique in the universe, but compared to the other large objects in our solar system, Earth looks special....
View ArticleDailyDirt: To Seek Out New Life And New Civilizations...
The search for extraterrestrial life hasn't yielded much evidence that there's anyone else out there. We could be looking in the wrong places or not looking with the right instruments to detect faint...
View ArticleDailyDirt: More Clues To The Origins Of Life On Earth
The beginnings of life on our planet aren't well known because we simply don't know the exact conditions that were present billions of years ago. However, experiments under lab conditions that try to...
View ArticleDailyDirt: All Alone In The Universe With Nowhere To Go...
People have been looking up into the sky for centuries, wondering what's out there and if we're alone on this world. Astronomers, more recently, have been looking into deep space with some relatively...
View ArticleDailyDirt: Solving Mysteries Of The Universe...
The vast blackness of space might not look like much to the naked eye, but the origins of all life have come from distant stars. As Carl Sagan put it, we are all "star stuff" -- we're made of atoms...
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