The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1848, when Louis Pasteur was a young chemist still years away from discovering how to sterilize milk, he discovered something peculiar about crystals that accidentally formed when an industrial chemist boiled wine for too long. Half of the crystals …
Read More »What Will Plants Be Like on Alien Worlds?
Consider the possibility of alien plants. After all, plenty of exoplanets likely have conditions friendly to the development of plants, even if evolution there never makes it as far as complex organisms and animals. But if moss, algae, and lichen envelop lush exoplanets in the faraway realms of the Milky …
Read More »The Secret of How Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light
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. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent …
Read More »Scientists Say You’re Looking for Alien Civilizations All Wrong
An influential group of researchers is making the case for new ways to search the skies for signs of alien societies. They argue that current methods could be biased by human-centered thinking, and that it’s time to take advantage of data-driven, machine learning techniques. The team of 22 scientists released …
Read More »In a Fierce Desert, Microbe ‘Crusts’ Show How Life Tamed the Land
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2017, a team of scientists from Germany trekked to Chile to investigate how living organisms sculpt the face of the Earth. A local ranger guided them through Pan de Azúcar, a roughly 150-square-mile national park on the southern coast …
Read More »A New Idea for How to Assemble Life
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Life on other worlds—if it exists—might be so alien as to be unrecognizable. There’s no guarantee that alien biology would use the same chemistries as on Earth, with familiar building blocks such as DNA and proteins. Scientists might even spot …
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