Physics Buzz

Gonçalo, from Portugal wants to know: "Can a planet, theoretically, manage life without a sun?" Gonçalo, Your suggestion is surprisingly plausible! To understand how, we'll have to explore some of the darkest places on Earth, where life is as close to "alien" as you're ever going to find.

Simulated Martian soil supports plant life, but questions about extraterrestrial plant growth remain. Originally published: Sep 11 2014 - 2:45pm, Inside Science News Service By: Patricia Waldron, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- Any explorers visiting Mars and the moon will have to boldly grow where no man has grown before. Setting up lunar or Martian colonies will require that explorers raise their own food. New research finds that simulated Martian soil supported plant life better than both simulated moon soil and low-quality soil from Earth. But many problems must be solved before astronauts can pick their first extraterrestrial eggplant. The study appears in the journal PLOS ONE . "Research like this is needed to fine-tune future plans for growing plants on Mars, which I think is going to be a very useful thing if we want to have colonization or even a shorter-term stay on Mars," said John Kiss, a plant biologist at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, who did

Originally published: Jun 26 2014 - 1:30pm, Inside Science News Service By: Ker Than, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- Terrestrial animals may owe a special debt to the sun and the moon. It may have been their combined pull on ancient Earth's oceans that helped primitive air-breathing fish gain a toehold on land, new research suggests. In a new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A , physicist Steven Balbus argues that the gravitational forces generated by the sun and moon would have been conducive to the formation of a vast network of isolated tidal pools during the Devonian Period, between 420 to 360 million years ago, when fish-like vertebrates first clambered out of the sea. Image credit: supersum via flickr | http://bit.ly/1rDLJFJ Rights information: http://bit.ly/c34Awz “By the end of the Devonian, there were vertebrates that were quite at home moving around on land,” said Balbus, who is at the University of Oxford in the Unite

This week on the physics central podcast I talk with David Waltham, a geologist at the University of London and the author of Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional—and What That Means for Life in the Universe.  In the book, Waltham presents the evidence supporting the idea that Earth is a very rare, very lucky planet, and that there may not be another life-supporting planet in our galaxy or even in the visible universe. Waltham doesn't think we're totally alone in the universe—but he does think we are effectively alone. This debate includes information from biology, geology, astronomy, cosmology and even history. Listen to the podcast to hear some of the evidence that supports this side of the argument—and a few of the things that could prove it wrong. Also, there are rumors flying that scientists have detected an Earth-like planet and will announce it soon.

Originally published: Sep 30 2013 - 4:15pm, Inside Science News Service By: Amanda Alvarez, ISNS Contributor ( ISNS ) -- An international team of researchers has developed a simple way to make a future planetary rover behave more like a human geologist, using just a cell phone camera and laptop. Dubbed "the cyborg astrobiologist," the system is designed to pick out novel features in rocky landscapes to speed up exploration and identification of alien terrain. The science missions of current rovers, like Curiosity on Mars, are slowed in part by their reliance on human operators, whose instructions take 14 minutes to reach the rover from Earth. Despite Curiosity's high-tech cameras, a human pair of eyes is still required to evaluate any images of Martian rocks, and even the rover's navigation is mostly under external control. The goal of the cyborg astrobiologist is to automate the geological analysis portion of the decision-making for future rovers, said the pro

In a preprint article posted late last week, a team of astrobiologists claimed to have found fossilized algae embedded in meteorites that crash landed in Sri Lanka late last year. They're making a huge claim: purportedly, remnants of life from space have rained down on our tiny blue planet. The research may seem unbelievable, but it was even published in a "peer-reviewed" journal. These claims, however, are highly dubious. A closer look at this research — and where it was published — reveals how biased, suspicious research can make its way into the headlines. A paralia sulcata diatom found on Earth. Image Credit:  University of Tasmania