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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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Dumb Ideas

Active SETI: If the Mountain Will Not Come to MyHomeET
October 14, 2006
SETI researchers must be getting bored sitting around waiting for a message.  To bide the time, some have come up with a game called “Active SETI” – sending our messages to the aliens.  It’s not that this game hasn’t been played before.  The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft each carried messages from earthlings, and the Arecibo […]
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Cell Biology

Science Potpourri
October 13, 2006
Interesting articles from recent issues of Science have piled up in the queue.  These might have made separate entries in CEH if time and space were unlimited. Deep Impact:  The team of the Deep Impact mission to a comet published spectral results in the July 13 issue.  “Emission signatures due to amorphous and crystalline silicates, […]
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Amazing Facts

Glory Be Behind Saturn
October 12, 2006
Don’t look at this picture till you’re ready.  Switch off the phone, turn off the radio, rub your eyes, and sit down.  Ready?  Click Here.     This is a view of Saturn we could never see from Earth.  It’s the backside of the planet, with the sun shining through the rings.  According to a […]
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Astronomy

Nature Potpourri
October 11, 2006
Articles of interest from Nature have been piling up in the CEH queues.  Perhaps a brief mention is better than nothing, before they fall into archive oblivion. Carbon 14:  In the Sept 14 issue, there was a give & take between critics of a carbon-14-dated study and the author.  The critics pointed out, “We appreciate […]
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Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design Detected on Mars
October 9, 2006
Astronomy Picture of the Day used design detection reasoning to infer the presence of intelligent agents at work on another world.  “An unusual spot has been found on Mars that scientists believe is not natural in origin,” the caption says of a photo taken from orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  “The spot appears mobile […]
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Dating Methods

Supernova 80% Younger Than Thought
October 1, 2006
The age of a supernova remnant has dropped from 10,000 years to less than 2,000 years. How?
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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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Astronomy

Deep Field Survey Shows Oldest Galaxies Yet
September 24, 2006
Astronomers continue to find mature galaxies at higher and higher redshifts.  The latest record, reported in Nature,1 is z=6.96, interpreted to mean the galaxy was present 700 million years after the big bang (usually dated at 13.7 billion years ago).  A survey of distant galaxies from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), also reported in […]
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Mind and Brain

Mars Radiation Would Fry Astronaut Brains
September 23, 2006
Imagine the first Martian astronauts coming home confused, impaired and demented. This is the risk from solar radiation on Mars, say a group of NASA medical researchers (see RxPG News). Among the gravest risks of a manned flight to Mars ranks the possibility that massive amounts of solar and cosmic radiation will decimate the brains […]
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Education

Farewell to the “Face on Mars” – A Teachable Moment
September 21, 2006
ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has just sent back pictures of the Cydonia region on Mars.  Objects seen in early Viking images of this region resembled a face, a skull and pyramids that gave rise to a cult following on late-night talk shows.  NASA always discounted these resemblances as coincidental, and when JPL released higher-resolution photos […]
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Solar System

Cassini Photographs Earth from Saturn, Discovers New Ring
September 19, 2006
A new ring, geysers from a distance, and our home planet from 930 million miles away – these and more wonders are visible in new photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn.  Now at opposition (facing the sun), the orbiter’s cameras can pick out fainter details in backlighting.  Highlights of the three published photos […]
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Physics

Ethane Cloud at Titan: Too Little, Too Late?
September 14, 2006
Those following the Titan exploration by Cassini-Huygens have wondered where the ethane went.  Oceans of ethane hundreds of meters deep, if not kilometers deep, were predicted but not found, as reported previously (see 04/25/2003 and 10/16/2003 pre-Huygens reports, 01/15/2005 and 01/21/2005 Huygens early results, and 12/05/2005 review; see also New Scientist analysis of the “total […]
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Astronomy

Whistling in the Dark Matter Debate
September 7, 2006
Who’s right?  Douglas Clowe’s team at U of Arizona claimed two weeks ago that they found dark matter in the Bullet Cluster – they even had a picture of it.  The Chandra X-Ray Center called it “direct proof” of dark matter.  Two days later, EurekAlert posted a story about a new proposal to bring back […]
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