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Solar System

Enceladus Spray-Paints Its Neighbors’ Yards
February 10, 2007
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is not only Yellowstone unto itself.  Its shares the National Park experience with its neighbors.  The geyser spray coats nearby moons white like snow.  Space.com and National Geographic are calling this a case of “cosmic graffiti.”  How did scientists catch the tagger?     The original paper in Science describes how on […]
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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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Solar System

Moon Origins Not Set in Stone
January 26, 2007
The leading theory for the origin of the moon has been for some time now that a massive object hit the Earth, and the debris formed the moon.  New Scientist reported one astronomer who doesn’t buy it.  “The collision has to be implausibly gentle,” said Peter Noerdlinger to the American Astronomical Society.  “You practically need […]
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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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Physics

Crisis in Comet Formation Theories
December 18, 2006
Results from the Stardust mission last week (12/15/2006) are causing quite a stir.  Detailed analysis of comet dust particles from Comet Wild 2, published in Science Dec 15, reveal the wrong stuff.  Scientists found olivine, pyroxene and osbornite – minerals said to form at high temperatures – instead of the cold volatiles expected for an […]
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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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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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Solar System

Moon Gas Indicates Recent Geologic Activity
November 9, 2006
It’s aliv-v-v-v-e!  Evidence for recent geological activity on our moon has been reported in Nature.1  Katharine Sanderson introduced the findings in News@Nature, in an item titled, “The moon has gas: Eruptions confound the idea that our nearest neighbour is a geological dead zone” – Some think the Moon has been geologically dead for billions of […]
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Solar System

Geologists Puzzle Over Egyptian Craters
November 1, 2006
A set of craters deep in the Egyptian desert has geologists scratching their heads.  Discovery Channel News says that they look neither like impact craters nor known volcanic phenomena.  “It is a strange and new thing,” reported one French scientist.  Jay Melosh of the University of Arizona remarked, “There’s nothing in our current geological literature […]
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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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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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