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POPSFree Lectures and Courses... This was clipped some time ago by someone to whom I add thanks. Newer clippers may find it interesting. I've detailed the astronomy items as that is what I was searching for.
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POPS"A kid from Harlem reaches toward extraterrestrials" more: "My idea was to send sounds of nature into space. Thunder, lightning, the ocean, rain. I thought aliens might hear them and recognize them," he said. Kamau also made other recordings he thought would offer little glimpses of our world: a man grilling chicken on the street, a crow's caw being drowned out by an airplane overhead and so on. Kamau was one of six winners of the Kids' Science Challenge, a new nationwide competition funded by the National Science Foundation in which third through sixth graders submit experiments and problems for working scientists and engineers to solve. Kamau posed the question, "How can we communicate with extraterrestrials if we donÕt know if they have a language similar to ours and if we donÕt know their communication system?"
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POPSDoes Earth harbour a 'shadow biosphere' of alien life? "Our search for life based on our assumptions of life as we know it. Weird life and normal life could be intermingled, and filtering out the things we understand about life as we know it from the things we don't understand is tricky." The tools and experiments researchers use to look for new forms of life - such as those on missions to Mars - would not detect biochemistries different from our own, making it easy for scientists to miss alien life, even if was under their noses.
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POPSThe blurry line between life, nonlife Twitches of life are showing up where life shouldn't exist. In southern Africa, for example, scientists burrowed 2 miles beneath the earth's surface,discovering bacteria that feed on radioactive rocks. "That's crazier than any science fiction," said Pratt, part of the team that made the 2006 discovery. "This is life that shouldn't be there. Except it is." interesting concept.
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POPSWhy Life Originated (And Why it Continues)
Although the researchers don’t speculate on the specific chemical reactions that created life, they explain that the molecules involved most likely underwent a series of more and more complex reactions to minimize mutual energy differences between matter on Earth and with respect to high-energy radiation from Sun. The process eventually advanced so far that it cumulated into such sophisticated functional structures that could be called living. The researchers considered a primordial pool that contained some basic compounds. By reacting with one another and coupling with an external energy source such as the Sun, the compounds formed a chemical system. The compounds continually engaged in chemical reactions, thriving the most when capturing and distributing more and more of the Sun’s energy in the quest for a steady state. The evolutionary process was and still is non-deterministic, even chaotic, since the energy flows create energy differences that in turn affect the flows.
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POPS"Will We Soon find Life in the Heavens?" 'let's hope there's intelligent life somewhere up in Space 'cos there's bugger all down here on earth" continues In the coming months, two new tools will greatly expand astrobiologists' capacity to hear and see other promising signs of life. Later this summer, the nonprofit SETI Institute, named with the acronym for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, will begin listening for alien broadcasts on the new $50 million Allen Telescope Array. A spread of 42 radio dishes in California's Cascade Mountains, the array is the first such facility built specifically to listen for E.T. "We're looking for life that's clever enough to hold up its side of the conversation," says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. The array, half funded by Microsoft mogul Paul Allen, will search for alien signals at a clip "hundreds to thousands times faster" than current SETI projects, says Shostak.
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POPSMicrobes Could Travel from Venus to Earth So our first life may have come from Venus or, you guessed, Mars. This gives greater credence to the book "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus." (The book needs all the credibility it can get)
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POPSArctic Scientists Explore a "Lost" 26-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem “The origin of life discussion comes up because the rocks that are exposed on this very slow spreading ridge are not volcanic, but instead come directly from Earth’s mantle,” says geochemist Susan Humphris. “The chemistry is very much like the volcanism that occurred on the primordial Earth. If you are thinking about origins of life, you’d like to have an area that is the closest analog to what was happening on the early Earth.”
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POPSCan the Martian arctic support extreme life? While the possibility for ET seems to grow with new extremophile discoveries on Earth, the truth is there's no evidence that life ever evolved on Mars or if it even exists today. But if there were past or present life on the red planet - a big if - scientists speculate it would likely be similar to some extreme life on Earth - microscopic and hardy, capable of withstanding colder-than-Antarctica temperatures and low pressures.
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POPSalien talks next week Section of Integrative Biology Dr. Jessica Gurevitch Stony Brook University (SUNY) “Alien species, extinctions, and working towards a general theory of invasion.” 2:00 p.m. - MBB 1.210 Host: Dr. Norma Fowler
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POPSThe Astrobiology Roadmap # Astrobiology recognizes a broad societal interest in its endeavors, especially in areas such as achieving a deeper understanding of life, searching for extraterrestrial biospheres, assessing the societal implications of discovering other examples of life, and envisioning the future of life on Earth and in space. # The intrinsic public interest in astrobiology offers a crucial opportunity to educate and inspire the next generation of scientists, technologists and informed citizens; thus a strong emphasis upon education and public outreach is essential.
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POPSVirtual Planetary Laboratory The Virtual Planet Laboratory (VPL) is a team of scientists who are building computer simulated Earth-sized planets to discover the likely range of planetary environments for planets around other stars. These simulated environments allow us to visualize what these planets look like from space to help future missions recognize signs of possible life in the spectra of planetary atmospheres and surfaces. VPL findings will directly influence the development of future space missions designed to look for habitable planets around other stars by allowing them to distinguish between planets with and without life.
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