astrobiology

Duffy and Haworth speculate that on remote planets, communities of purple bacteria could swell in black sulfurous oceans, or spread in films around local sources of hydrogen sulfide. If they evolved into plants that could survive on…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans.…

At first glance, the grit crust could seem like a routine example of what researchers call a biological soil crust, or “biocrust”—a community of coexisting bacteria, fungi, algae, and other microorganisms that caps the soil in coherent…

According to assembly theory, before Darwinian evolution can proceed, something has to select for multiple copies of high-AI objects from the Assembly Possible. Chemistry alone, Cronin said, might be capable of that—by narrowing down…

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission team has been working methodically and thoroughly, making good progress on understanding the best path forward to remove the uninvited pebbles from Perseverance’s bit carousel. Over the previous weekend, and…

On Feb. 18, 2021 at 20:55 UTC, the Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of Mars. The flight down was successful and, by all accounts, picture-perfect. The rover landed in the 50-kilometer-wide Jezero crater, within…