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Human Body

The Space Race: Just Staying Alive
January 30, 2007
“Ad astra!” the sci-fi slogan announces with eternal optimism: “To the stars!”  Medical doctors and astrobiologists are not sure you would want to stay there long, though.  Some recent findings give a dismal picture of the prospects for life – human or bacterial – at least in our solar system, if that can be assumed […]
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Origin of Life

Dreams of Planetary Oceans Dry Up
January 9, 2007
Astrobiologists like oceans.  The vision of life evolving on Earth in a primordial soup drives the quest to find liquid on other worlds.  It doesn’t have to be liquid water: just liquid that stimulates the imagination with visions of exotic life.  Two solar system bodies once considered prime candidates for ocean front property, though, have […]
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Dumb Ideas

Mars Life With Bleached Hair
January 8, 2007
Mars has hydrogen peroxide.  Bombardier beetles use peroxide.  So maybe the Viking landers in 1976 didn’t find life, because they didn’t look for peroxide-based life.  That’s the essence of the reasoning in an Associated Press story circulating on the net (see Breitbart.com).     Reporter Seth Borenstein earns Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  Comets as Life’s Lego Jumper Cables
December 15, 2006
Results of the Stardust mission made the cover of Science this week.1  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory put out a press release that condensed the abstruse papers into a simplistic story built around the L word life.  Publicist David Agle wrote for the Lego generation: Just as kits of little plastic bricks can be used to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Darwinists Award New Inductee
December 11, 2006
The journal Science published the winning entry in the 2006 contest “GE and Science Prize for Young Life Scientists.”  The Grand Prize went to Irene A. Chen (Harvard) for her essay entitled, “The Emergence of Cells During the Origin of Life.”1  Her chemical-evolution scenario makes generous use of that word emergence and its synonyms. Modern […]
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Dumb Ideas

To Get Complex Life, Just Add Oxygen
December 10, 2006
A story is circulating in the science news media that a burst of complex organisms in the Cambrian coincided with a rise in oxygen in the atmosphere.  Reporters seem to be drawing a cause-and-effect relationship.  Examples: News@Nature:  “A sharp increase in the amount of oxygen in the air may have sparked the evolution of complex […]
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Origin of Life

Mars Waterpark a Booming Place
December 6, 2006
Two surprises about Mars came from NASA this week: (1) water may be flowing today down gullies in places (NASA press release), and (2) meteorites are still hitting the surface (NASA press release).  The water evidence comes from fresh deposits downslope of a gully on a crater wall.  One photo in the second article shows […]
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Origin of Life

SETI a Descendant of OOL
November 30, 2006
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) may seem a different subject than origin of life (OOL), but researchers in both depend on each other’s assumptions.  The common bond is illustrated in a SETI article on Space.com today.  Devon Burr of the SETI institute wrote an article not about intelligent aliens trying to broadcast signals to […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week:  It’s a Gas
November 8, 2006
This week’s entry by Sara Goudarzi in Live Science requires no comment.  The title of the article is, “Life’s Origin a Gas.” Life on Earth emerged out of thin air, scientists now say.     By mimicking in a lab the gases that could have been present on early Earth, researchers have concluded that a […]
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Origin of Life

Mars Life: Hope Against Hope
October 30, 2006
Good news: the Viking landers (1976) may have been unable to detect life on Mars if it were present.  Bad news: the dust devils on Mars probably would kill anything alive on the surface.  These contrasting stories recently tugged in opposite directions on hopes to find life on the red planet.  A report on PNAS1 […]
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Origin of Life

New Titan Ethane Theory Proposed
October 18, 2006
They wonder where the ethane went (see 09/14/2006 and its links).  The case of the missing ethane on Titan has only gotten more puzzling since the Huygens Probe landed last year and found almost none, when oceans a mile deep were anticipated.  In Nature last week,1 D. M. Hunten (U of Arizona) posited a new […]
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Origin of Life

Europa: The Link Between OOL and SETI
September 30, 2006
Why would searchers for extraterrestrial intelligence be interested in Europa?  After all, despite the movie 2010 command to “attempt no landings there,” no astrobiologist believes it could host anything more than primitive life – certainly no one who could send messages to us.     Cynthia Phillips, a principal investigator for the SETI Institute, explained […]
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Origin of Life

Early Oxygen Fuels Fire in OOL Camp
August 25, 2006
Live Science reported a new claim about oxygen on the early earth appearing far earlier than usually assumed.  A Penn State astrobiologist is claiming that uniformly high oxygen levels existed on earth 3.8 billion years ago, a billion years before previous estimates.     Oxygen’s presence on Earth has been typically inferred from sulfur isotope […]
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Origin of Life

Origin of Left-Handed Proteins Solved?
August 24, 2006
As noted in prior entries here (09/06/2003, 11/19/2004) and in our online book, the origin of left-hand proteins is recognized as one of the most formidable challenges to naturalistic origin-of-life research.  Occasionally researchers develop lab techniques for getting slight excesses of one hand over the other.  Astrobiologists agree, however, that 100% purity in a protein […]
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Astronomy

Stellar Habitable Zones: Don’t Forget the Sunscreen
August 15, 2006
Astronomers concerned with the origin of life on earth have long thought about the “habitable zone” (sometimes called continuously habitable zone, or CHZ) of our solar system.  They’ve discussed this aerobee-shaped zone around our sun – or any star – mainly in terms of locations where the temperature would permit water to exist as a […]
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