As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched. Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.
The discovery of meteorites from an asteroid that exploded over Sudan in October completes an astronomical trifecta. For the first time, scientists have detected a space rock ahead of a collision with Earth, watched it streak through the atmosphere, and then recovered pieces of it. Analysis of the meteorites could shed light on conditions in the early solar system more than 4 billion years ago.
hey might not be green or spit out cute catchphrases, but there could be forms of "alien" life right here on Earth.
If life arose not just once, but multiple times on Earth, life as we don't know it could be here on our own planet, perhaps using different chemical processes than we've ever seen before. And because scientists have only studied a tiny slice of the world's microbes in depth, the microscopic remnants of a second (or third or fourth) biogenesis could be hiding right beneath our noses.
Cold and allergy experts at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland have deciphered the genome sequences for all ninety-nine known strains of the common cold virus.
U.S. geneticist Stephen B. Liggett, an asthma expert at the Cardiopulmonary Genomics Program, University of Maryland School of Medicine (Baltimore), and U.S. molecular biologist Ann C. Palmenberg, a cold virologist at the Institute for Molecular Virology at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), headed the team that accomplished this monumental accomplishment.
NASA has completed a delicate set of flight tests to measure how modifications to an F-15 jet can affect the way shock waves form. The results could help turn sonic booms into distant rumbles.
The measurements will be used to calibrate a computer model of shock wave propagation which will be a crucial aid for engineers designing a new generation of quieter supersonic aircraft. "We're pretty close to being able to control sonic booms," says Peter Coen of NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia, principal investigator for the agency's supersonic research programme.
AN ASTEROID that had initially been deemed harmless has turned out to have a slim chance of hitting Earth in 160 years. While that might seem a distant threat, there's far less time available to deflect it off course.
Two suns rise and set over Tatooine, a planet in the film Star Wars, and now a Korean research team has discovered a planetary system just like it.
Drs. Lee Jae-woo and Kim Seung-ri of the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and a team led by Prof. Kim Chun-hwui of Chungbuk National University on Thursday said they discovered a planetary system that has had two suns have existed since its birth, the first in the world. The teams named it "HW Vir."
Malaysian archaeologists have announced the discovery of stone tools they believe are more than 1.8 million years old and the earliest evidence of human ancestors in Southeast Asia.
The stone hand-axes were discovered last year in the historical site of Lenggong in northern Perak state, embedded in a type of rock formed by meteorites which was sent to a Japanese lab to be dated.
If we know enough to say the solar system is a filigree construction, we might reasonably assume we know where all its bits are. But lurking in the solar system's dark recesses, rumour has it, is an unsighted world - Planet X, a frozen body perhaps as large as Mars, or even Earth.
If every scientist hopes to make at least one important discovery in her career, then University of California-Davis professor Pamela Ronald and her colleagues may have hit the jackpot.
Ronald's team works with rice, a grain most Americans take for granted, but which is a matter of life and death to much of the world. Thanks to their efforts to breed a new, hardier variety of rice, millions of people may not go hungry.
