Spitzer Searches for the Origins of Life of Earth
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Astronomers suspect the early Earth was a very harsh place. Temperatures were extreme, and the planet was constantly bombarded by cosmic debris. Many scientists believe that life's starting materials, or building blocks, must have been very resilient to have survived this tumultuous environment.
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Comment is free: Johnjoe McFadden: The location of a newly discovered planet is good news in the search for extraterrestrials.
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Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage â so experts believe.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres.
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Thousands of samples from the Genesis space capsule have arrived at the Johnson Space Center, where the project's curator must assemble a giant jigsaw puzzle that could hold clues to the origins of the solar system.    Wafers on five collector panels that broke into thousands of pieces when the capsule slammed into Earth last month secured samples of atoms and ions from solar wind...
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From the big bang to the search for ET, a new PBS miniseries seeks the meaning of life, the universe and beyond. The show brings together the latest research on ancient frozen moss, far-flung meteors and organisms that live in boiling water. By Jason Silverman.
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Tooling up in the hunt for aliens For the first time, astronomers have measured the composition of a planet outside the solar system, in what NASA says is a key step in its quest for extraterrestrial life.â¦
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NEW YORK A spectator with an especially intimate view of human evolution is beginning to tell its story and has so far divulged two quite unexpected findings.
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An ambitious two-year effort aims to understand the vital, shifting dynamics of ice, oceans and life at the ends of the earth.
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An asteroid with a wild orbit is about to zoom by our planet. Plus: Solving the mystery of the Pioneer anomaly could take decades.... A biologist finds a chunk of space shuttle Columbia. By Amit Asaravala.
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LOS ANGELES - It may take much longer than scientists have thought for violent turbulence to turn grains of space dust into new planets.    A NASA telescope recently discovered evidence that the most violent part of the process in forming an Earth-sized planet - the collisions between colossal chunks of rock - may last hundreds of millions of years instead of 10 million years, scientists said Monday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif...
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New methane readings from a space probe raise the possibility that microbial life could exist on Mars. Some scientists, though, remain skeptical.
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German scientists are using a new computational method to analyze DNA taken from microorganisms that make up more than a third of the Earth's biomass.
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By Unnati Gandhi  Paleontologists have discovered dozens of fossils of a soft- bodied, deep-sea dweller that lived more than half a billion years ago, adding one more piece to the enigmatic puzzle that is the history of life on Earth.
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Astronomers said the work was another steppingstone in the search for life elsewhere in the universe.
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This summer, NASA will launch a robotic probe to visit two stange and giant asteroids -- one is covered with ice while the other may have been blasted by an ancient supernova. The tales these asteroids tell may reveal the true beginnings of our solar system.
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By ALICIA CHANG   Associated Press writer  LOS ANGELES  -- For decades, scientists have scoured Mars in search of water, a basic ingredient for primitive life.   But the best clues were always tied to the ancient past when the Red Planet was warmer and wetter.