astrobiology
sb admin | June 22, 2010by Nathalie A. Cabrol
I realize how immodest the title of this first blog may sound and it is certainly not my intention to convince anybody that I will answer this question in the limited space allowed here or even in a lifetime. My hope is, instead, to stir thoughts and invite an exchange of diverse perspectives to make this a thread that we can all pull from time to time. It is an immense subject debated in an abundant literature, but discussing it is certainly not the exclusive privilege of those called explorers. All beings, from the greatest minds to the simplest forms of life on this…
krandall | June 22, 2010by Nathalie A. Cabrol
I realize how immodest the title of this first blog may sound and it is certainly not my intention to convince anybody that I will answer this question in the limited space allowed here or even in a lifetime. My hope is, instead, to stir thoughts and invite an exchange of diverse perspectives to make this a thread that we can all pull from time to time. It is an immense subject debated in an abundant literature, but discussing it is certainly not the exclusive privilege of those called explorers. All beings, from the greatest minds to the simplest forms of life on this…
cagapakis | May 18, 2010My silkworms are starting to turn into silkmoths! The first moth emerged from his cocoon this weekend, I hope more are close behind so that he can mate before he dies! I didn't expect him to come out so soon so I didn't have my real camera but I wanted to share my blurry phone pictures of the event:
In industrial silk production they can't use the cocoon that gets left behind because the moth uses an enzyme called cocoonase to chew his way out, breaking the otherwise continuous silk thread. I'm starting to explore ways that I can use this silk though--so far I've only made friendship…
cagapakis | May 17, 2010Are aliens little green men of unpredictable motives? Horrible insect-like face-hugging, chest-exploding monsters? Are they super-smart, super-slimy, super-fishy, body-cavity-probing, disc-flying creatures, searching for planets to colonize and people to destroy as Stephen Hawking warned, or are they something much more mundane? Could there be alien life already on earth, too microscopic, too different to notice? Could life on earth have been seeded from an alien land, with secret messages encoded in our DNA? We've been scanning the sky for extraterrestrial radio signals for years, should we…
vlicata | May 2, 2010While driving to the Astrobiology 2010 Conference last week, I and a graduate student from my lab briefly discussed Stephen Hawking's recent declaration that humans should try to avoid contact with what would surely be hostile aliens. It seemed odd to be attending a conference where a primary aim is finding extraterrestrial life while the news media and the blogosphere was reverberating with Hawking's hawkish alien opinions. What really made the whole situation even more odd, however, was the almost total absence of any reaction to, or even general acknowledgement of Hawking's remarks at…
pontiff | November 13, 2007Okay, there are some weird plots in science papers out there, but something about this one (which Pak at scirate.com pointed me to), taken from arXiv:0711.1751 "Paleontological Tests: Human-like Intelligence is not a Convergent Feature of Evolution," by Charles H. Lineweaver made me laugh: