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Category: alien life – Page 14

“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

How did the planet Venus lose its water? This debate has rage on for some time and something a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB) and the University of Arizona (UoA) as they have potentially conducted a groundbreaking study that could help explain the processes responsible for making Venus the hellish world it is today, whereas scientists have long hypothesized that the second planet from the Sun was much more hospitable billions of years ago.

“Water is really important for life,” said Dr. Eryn Cangi, who is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at UCB and a co-author of the study. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to challenge previous studies regarding the mechanisms and speed that Venus lost its water. In the end, the team attributed Venus’ water loss to a process called “dissociative recombination”, which occurs when molecules are broken down and other molecules form as a result. While this process does not naturally occur on Earth and has been found difficult to replicate in the lab, it is a fundamental process in space physics and understanding how the rest of universe works.

Continue reading “Venus Unveiled: The Mystery of Water Loss Revealed” | >

The Sun emitted a strong solar flare, peaking at 10:22 p.m. ET on May 2, 2024. NASA ’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event.

Solar flares are intense bursts of radiation emanating from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. These flares are among the biggest explosive events in our solar system, visible primarily in the ultraviolet range.

Flares impact Earth in a variety of ways: they can disrupt the ionosphere and interfere with GPS navigation and radio communications. They are also responsible for auroras, the beautiful natural light displays often seen in high-latitude skies.

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Hitchhiking aliens are already traveling between planets, new research suggests. This theory, known as panspermia, suggests that life’s building blocks are widespread throughout the cosmos and can travel between different areas in space.

The panspermia hypothesis has been sparking fierce debates for centuries. Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher from the 5th century BCE, proposed the idea that life exists everywhere in the universe, coining the term panspermia to describe the concept of life traveling between planets as seeds.

Other Greek philosophers such as Anaximander and Thales also discussed the philosophical aspects of the panspermia theory.

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Research has uncovered important new insights into the evolution of oxygen, carbon, and other vital elements over the entire history of Earth – and it could help assess which other planets can develop life, ranging from plants to animals and humans.

The study, published today in Nature Geoscience and led by a researcher at the University of Bristol, reveals for the first time how the build up of carbon-rich rocks has accelerated oxygen production and its release into the atmosphere.

Until now the exact nature of how the atmosphere became oxygen-rich has long eluded scientists and generated conflicting explanations.

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One of the world’s foremost experts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) believes that with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, humans are closer to discovering life outside our planet than ever before.

Lisa Kaltenegger, who directs the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, told The Telegraph this week that because the Webb Telescope is designed to detect biosignatures — the scientific word for “signs of life,” including organism-produced methane gas — we may well find ETs very soon.

Kaltnegger, whose new book “Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos” was published this month, waxed enthusiastic when discussing the JWST, bragging that with its technological leaps, humanity is now in “this era of golden exploration, with thousands of other worlds on our doorstep, that we now can actually explore.”

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I believe that utopian societies need to help all people.

Hakeem Oluseyi was born as James Plummer Jr. The book opens the night his parents split up (a bright, proud and decidedly urban mother and handsome, capable and “country” father). For the next few years, Oluseyi’s mom moves him and his sister to different cities and different Black neighborhoods. As Oluseyi grows older, he simultaneously becomes aware of the inherent racism of the social world around him and his own inherent, interior focus on the natural world. The first section of the book details the challenges he faces in communities that are both rich in relationship and struggling with inequality. At the same time, he faces his own struggle as his mother deals with mental illness and his father takes him into the entirely new universe of rural life in Piney Woods Mississippi.

All through these changes, Oluseyi becomes progressively aware of his own questions about the universe and his strange (to everyone else) capacities as a questioner. As a shy kid trying to steer clear of bullies, he counts things relentlessly and, in his counting, begins to find order and pattern in the world. He begins a life of experimentation, much to his mother’s chagrin, pressing burning incense cones into the shower curtain to see how long they take to make a hole. And, on a glorious night out in the country, he catches a glimpse of the dark night sky awash in stars. By his teen years, the fire of inquiry was burning hard in the young man.

A Quantum Life then follows Oluseyi’s journey through high school and on to college, where a series of mentors recognize his talent and drive him forward, opening doors that eventually lead to graduate school at Stanford. While elements of this story that have been told before — a bright kid from an underprivileged background makes good in science through talent and grit — there are important aspects of Oluseyi story that demand their own recognition. Oluseyi is not an ultra-nerdy kid who stands apart from the community. Though born with the heart of a nerd, Oluseyi does not live apart from the streets or their greatest dangers. Along his journey Oluseyi picks up a drug habit that haunts him well into his graduate school years. In this way, Oluseyi’s story is not that of an otherworldly super-genius whose pure mentality allows him to rise above every challenge, but of a young man with a keen and intense talent in physics who must also deal with the very real world problems of addiction and a young family.

Continue reading “From Poverty To Stanford, Memoir Tells A Physicist’s Remarkable Tale” | >