Posts tagged life

The Grand Prismatic hot spring is a deep thermal spring, richly colored by growths of exotic heat-loving micro-organisms. Some believe they offer a glimpse of what the first life on earth would have looked like.

(Source: futurenow321)

A parachute destined for Mars experiences 81,250 pounds of drag force in the world’s largest wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center. Scientists went on to deploy the parachute 13 more times this past spring before deeming the 51-foot-diameter mammoth fit to land the next Red Planet rover, the Mars Science Laboratory. Cushioning a 2,000-pound rover from a supersonic descent in the thin Martian atmosphere demands special stamina. The chute gets its strength from stronger synthetic fiber, called Technora, in its suspension lines. Now a parachute identical to the one that was tested is packed and ready for the 2011 launch of the MSL mission, which will explore Mars for signs that it could have once supported life. “The parachute’s got a tough job,” says Douglas S. Adams, the MSL parachute senior engineer. “It passed [the tests] with flying colors.”

(Source: futurenow321)

Light from an alien “super-Earth” twice the size of our own Earth has been detected by a NASA space telescope for the first time in what astronomers are calling a historic achievement. NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope spotted light from the alien planet 55 Cancri e, which orbits a star 41 light-years from Earth. A year on the extrasolar planet lasts just 18 hours. The planet 55 Cancri e was first discovered in 2004 and is not a habitable world. Instead, it is known as a super-Earth because of its size: The world is about twice the width of Earth and is super-dense, with about eight times the mass of Earth. But until now, scientists have never managed to detect the infrared light from the super-Earth world. “Spitzer has amazed us yet again,” said Spitzer program scientist Bill Danch of NASA headquarters in Washington in a statement today (May 8). “The spacecraft is pioneering the study of atmospheres of distant planets and paving the way for NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope to apply a similar technique on potentially habitable planets.”

(Source: futurenow321)

A tiny microorganism found in Norwegian lake sludge may be related to the very oldest life forms on this planet, a possible modern cousin of our earliest common ancestor. It is not a fungus, alga, parasite, plant or animal, yet it has features associated with other kingdoms of life. It could be a founding member of the newest kingdom on the tree of life , scientists said. Life on Earth is divided into two main groups, the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes. Prokaryotes are simple life forms, with no membranes or cell nuclei; this group includes bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotes, which include humans, animals, plants, fungi and algae, have cell membranes and nuclei. This new organism is a eukaryote. More specifically, it’s an algae-eating protozoan, a type of creature that have been known to science since the Civil War but which have lacked genetic studies because they’re difficult to culture. Researchers in Norway were able to harvest them from a lake bed and breed them in the lab. This one is called Collodictyon.Researchers led by Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, head of the Microbial Evolution Research Group (MERG) at the University of Oslo, were examining the species’ genes and morphological makeup and found it is not like anything else. It evolved a billion years ago, give or take a couple hundred million years. It could have been living the same way since then, providing scientists a glimpse of what the earliest life forms looked like. The organism is weird in several key ways. It has four flagella, for instance, which makes it different from bacteria and eukaryotes. Mammals, fungi and amoebae only have one flagellum — that’s the propeller-like feature that helps cells move (think of the “tail” of a sperm cell). Algae, plants and single-celled parasites called excavates are thought to have had two flagella. Collodictyon is somewhere between an excavate and an amoeba. Also, the organism has the same internal structure as a parasite, but it uses amoeba-like protuberances to catch its food, which are blue-green algae. So again, it combines features from two branches of the eukaryotes, further evidence that it’s a primordial creature, the researchers say. Even at its highest levels, the tree of life is mutable — the domain archaea was only recognized in 1990. So it wouldn’t be out of the question for this organism to spark an entirely new kingdom.

(Source: futurenow321)

Once-wet Mars has long been the primary focus of the search for life on other planets. But Saturn’s moon Enceladus could be an even more promising place to start the search for extraterrestrials. Startling new images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft indicate that Enceladus may contain pockets of liquid water below its icy crust.

These pockets, described in an article published today in the journal Science, may be ideal habitats for life-forms similar to those found in hydrothermal vents beneath the Earth’s oceans.

“This is extraordinary,” said Carolyn Porco, a Cassini team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado and primary author of the new study.

“I think our results are significant enough to redirect the planetary exploration program, placing Enceladus as the primary target of astrobiological interest in our solar system.”

(Source: futurenow321)

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

Further, NASA doesn’t need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News.

“The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope — watch the bacteria move,” Miller said.

“On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there,” he added.

(Source: futurenow321)