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Extraterrestrial Life: Ancient Microbes May Help Us Find Alien Life Forms

Lead Image: Artist’s rendering of the process by which microbes captured sunlight for energy with rhodopsin proteins. Credit: Sohail Wasif/UCR Light-capturing proteins illuminate Earth of billions of years ago. Scientists have reconstructed what life was like for some of Earth’s earliest organisms by using light-capturing proteins in living microbes. These endeavors could help us recognize signs of alien life on other planets, whose atmospheres may more closely resemble our early, pre-oxygen planet. The earliest living things on Earth, which included bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea, inhabited a primarily oceanic planet without an ozone layer to protect them from the…

Tiny Motors Take a Big Step Forward: First-Ever Solid-State Optical Nanomotor

Lead Image: Spinning motors. Credit: The University of Texas at Austin Motors are ubiquitous in our everyday lives — from cars to washing machines, even if we rarely notice them. A futuristic scientific field is working on the development tiny motors that could power a network of nanomachines and replace some of the power sources we currently use in electronic devices. Researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin created the first ever solid-state optical nanomotor. All previous iterations of these light-driven motors reside in a solution of some sort, which limited their potential…

“Black Hole Police” Discover Needle in a Haystack: A Dormant Black Hole Outside Our Galaxy

Using the Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own. A stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own, has been found by a team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says project leader Tomer Shenar. Furthermore, they discovered that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished with no trace of a massive explosion. Six years…

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Scouts Mars Sample Return Campaign Landing Sites

In this illustration of a Mars sample return mission concept, a lander carrying a fetch rover touches down on the surface of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech The six-wheeled roving explorer has inspected a stretch of the Red Planet to see if it is flat enough for NASA’s next Mars lander. While NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is conducting its science campaign, taking samples at Jezero Crater’s ancient river delta, it’s also been busy scouting. The rover is searching for locations where the planned Mars Sample Return (MSR) Campaign can land spacecraft and collect sample tubes Perseverance has filled with rock and sediment.…

James Webb Space Telescope Just Proved It’s Value in the Search for Alien Life

Lead Image: TRAPPIST-1e is a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of a star 39 light-years from Earth and may have water and clouds, as depicted in this artist’s impression. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech To search for alien life, astronomers will search for clues in the atmospheres of distant planets – and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just proved it’s possible to do so. The ingredients necessary for life are spread throughout the universe. While Earth is the only known place with life in the universe, detecting life beyond our planet is a major goal of modern astronomy and planetary science. We…