Topic
The scientific study of the origin, distribution and detectability of life beyond Earth, drawing on planetary science, chemistry and biology.
University of Osaka researchers distinguished L- and D-amino acids at the single-molecule level with over 80 percent accuracy. The gold nanogap chip, published in Nature Communications, is far smaller than current instruments but is not yet a scanner.
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Researchers using the EAGLE universe simulations report in MNRAS that the Sun's place in the Milky Way's outskirts is about as good for life as locations get. The ranking rests on modeled hazards and assumed chemistry, so it says where conditions favor life and leaves open whether any life is there.
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University of Osaka researchers used a gold nanogap and AI to tell L- from D-amino acids one molecule at a time, at over 80% accuracy. On meteorite and desert extracts it matched standard methods, so a compact life-detection instrument is still a hope.
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Researchers led by Frank Postberg found sharply different salt mixtures across 961 Cassini spectra of salty Enceladus grains. Tokyo freezing experiments suggest each grain is a shard of a slowly frozen droplet, so the ocean's makeup shows in how often each salt appears.
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Tohoku University researchers and colleagues modelled early Mars's formaldehyde rain, putting about 10 times the global average on Tharsis and Elysium. The prediction links where a raw material for sugars and amino acids landed to the planet's ancient water cycle.
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Ribose, the fragile RNA sugar found in meteorites, helped borate minerals dissolve and stay dissolved in lab tests reported in Scientific Reports. Borate shields ribose from breakdown, so the sugar may have helped keep its own protector in solution on early Earth.
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Perseverance's SuperCam survey of more than 185 targets shows Jezero's Margin Unit is magma-formed olivine rock that met water at least three times. Groundwater and later hot fluids joined the crater lake in reworking it, so its carbonate is a harder record to read.
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UC Riverside's Andrey Bekker and colleagues tie oxygen's persistence after the Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago to recycled phosphorus. If that loop held oxygen up for long stretches, something besides scarce oxygen may have slowed the rise of complex life.
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Institute of Science Tokyo researchers found that salts separate inside 200-micrometre lab droplets frozen at about 10 K a minute or slower. Slow freezing in the vents could explain Cassini's oddly varied Enceladus grains, though the droplets held salts and organics remain untested.
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A Science Advances paper says five ordinary human-associated microbes could stay alive in shadowed south-pole terrain. The expensive consequence is the baseline contamination survey it implies.
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The mission's project scientist describes three hours to triage telemetry and agree on targets, then four more to compile commands that must fit the rover's available time and energy before sunrise on Mars.
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Frank Postberg's team finds that Enceladus plume droplets freeze slowly, sorting salts and organics into separate grains a few micrometers across. A probe would need to check many grains to find one holding microbial material, though that grain should be easy to read.
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Orbiters read the carbonate at Jezero's margin as lake chemistry; Perseverance found volcanic rock that water altered at least three times, in a sequence the team can order but cannot date.
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Chris Doughty's team turned simulated exoplanet climates into lifetime carbon budgets. TRAPPIST-1e came out at 21% of Earth's, low enough for the authors to call it microbial, on a pace curve calibrated from Earth alone.
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Incendiamoeba cascadensis, from Lassen Volcanic National Park, divides at 63 degrees Celsius and still hunts for food at 64, one degree past a membrane-stability limit its lead author says may have narrowed the search.
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Marc Neveu's group ran the biggest collisions it could devise against simulated icy moons, and the result says a shattered past tells you little about whether a moon holds water under its shell today.
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Sara Seager's group reports in PNAS that peptides can fold inside concentrated sulfuric acid, and an outside chemist says the modeling software used to read the spectra was never built for that solvent.
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Researchers at NASA Goddard and the University of Maryland mapped polar sunlight down to five metres per pixel and found small shadows where five skin-borne bacteria and fungi could sit dormant for days.
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An international team converted a century of ultraviolet images of Venus into a laboratory quantity, the absorption coefficient of the liquid inside the cloud droplets, and the value it requires is high enough that only very strong absorbers or very high concentrations qualify.
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A preprint from University College London's Lewis Pinault and colleagues argues the airless Moon has archived interstellar dust for billions of years, and puts the sample needed to test that idea at one cubic meter of regolith.
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