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Origin of Life

Earth’s Core Values Questioned
May 11, 2008
Geologists have long assumed that iron attracted certain elements toward the earth’s core during its formation.  The amounts of them we find today were added by meteorites and comets as a veneer on the surface later.  A press release from Florida State University is questioning those core values.  New research “calls into question three decades […]
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Solar System

Iapetus Is Losing Its Dry Ice
May 5, 2008
How long can a moon afford to leak?  Iapetus is losing its dry ice (carbon dioxide) through sublimation at a prodigious rate, say scientists in a paper in Icarus this month.1  “One can see that the long-term stability of CO2 is problematic.”     Solving the mystery of the dark side on this mystery moon […]
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Health

Mars Lacks Safety Shield for Humans
April 3, 2008
Forget all those optimistic, futuristic sci-fi tales of humans landing on Mars.  It isn’t safe, said Space.com.  NASA’s space radiation program doubts that a human body could survive prolonged exposure to space.  This is a problem for long stays on the moon, too.     “The magnetic field of Earth protects humanity from radiation in […]
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Origin of Life

Enceladus: Hotter Chemical Plume Found
March 26, 2008
Initial results of Cassini’s March 12 flyby of Enceladus have been published.  You can watch a replay of today’s press briefing, read the blog, and read illustrated bulletins about the organic material, chemical signatures, hot spot locations, the stellar occultation (see also the Quicktime animation).  Another article shows the plume locations.  An astrobiologist (Chris McKay) […]
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Physics

Crater Dater Deflator: Impactors Can Be Recycled
March 25, 2008
They came from outer space – that was the old paradigm about impactors that made craters on planetary bodies.  Then, we learned how secondary craters can confuse a surface’s history (06/08/2006, 09/25/2007).  Now, two papers in Icarus show that moons can do a lateral pass.     Alvarellos et al,1 showed that Jupiter’s moon Io […]
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Solar System

March Moon Madness
March 25, 2008
Moons of our planetary system are supposed to behave themselves.  They were expected to just quietly orbit their host planets like nice, cold, frozen, inactive chunks of rock and ice.  It seems like whenever we get a close look at them, they are madly at work destroying theories – just like their planets have been […]
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Origin of Life

Simple Molecules: The Building Blocks of Lie
March 19, 2008
At a physical level, everything in the universe is made of atoms and molecules.  Life, being a subset of everything in the universe, is composed of a subset of all molecules that exist.  It could be said that any atom or molecule present in a living thing is a building block of life, but how […]
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Physics

Falling Rocks Leave Holes in Science
March 13, 2008
Hard data in astronomy is hard to come by, except when it comes by special delivery – as with meteorites.  If there is any class of phenomena that should be well understood, it should be space debris and the craters they form, because the processes involved can be watched in real time.  Meteorites adorn many […]
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Solar System

Saturn Moons Continue to Surprise Scientists
March 10, 2008
Just days before a long-awaited dive into the plume of Enceladus (see PhysOrg and JPL press release, flyby stats and news release), Cassini found another surprise in the Saturn system: a moon with rings.     A Jet Propulsion Lab press release on March 6 reported that the large moon Rhea may have rings – […]
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Origin of Life

Mars Life Hung Out to Dry in Salt
February 18, 2008
Scientists have just about hanged the possibility for life on Mars.  At first, the acid measured by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers made the environment look inhospitable.  “Now, we also appreciate the high salinity of the water when it left behind the minerals Opportunity found,” said Mark Knoll on a JPL press release.  “This tightens […]
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Solar System

Titan Is Old-Age Problem, Despite News Media Coverage
February 15, 2008
A paper in Geophysical Research Letters1 about Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, reads like a good-news, bad-news joke.  The good news is that Titan appears to have more hydrocarbons than Earth.  The bad news is that it is not enough to save the assumption that Titan is 4.5 billion years old.     Several science news […]
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Solar System

Something is Cooking Under Enceladus
February 9, 2008
Planetary scientists have been puzzling over Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn, since geysers were discovered erupting from its south pole three years ago.  Some models suggested that eruptions could occur without liquid water, but others were not sure.     Opinion now seems to be shifting back to the necessity of a wet interior, […]
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Physics

Are Long-Term Climate Models Trustworthy?
February 5, 2008
Everything from global warming policy to evolutionary history depends on long-term climate models.  Textbooks make it seem like earth keeps reliable recordings that allow scientists to simply read off the record of years, decades, centuries, millennia and millions of years objectively.  It’s not that simple, wrote Maureen E. Raymo and Peter Huybers in Nature last […]
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Intelligent Design

Explorer 1 Chief Discovers Design
January 31, 2008
On this day 50 years ago, America entered the space race.  On January 31, 1958, America gave its answer to Sputnik: a civilian satellite named Explorer 1.  Within a few hours of the time of day these words are being written, von Braun’s Jupiter-C rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, successfully launched a JPL satellite into […]
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Solar System

The Geologists Were Wrong
January 25, 2008
More examples of collapsing theories have appeared in the literature this week (compare last week, 01/21/2008): Dirty Comet:  The Stardust spacecraft that collected comet samples in 2006 was so named because it was believed comets contained pristine material from the birth of the sun.  That has all changed.  National Geographic News summarized a paper in […]
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