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Researchers produce healthy mice without using fertilized eggs
A mammal needs fertilized egg cells to have children, right? Not so fast. University of Bath scientists report that they're the first to successfully breed healthy mice without any fertilized eggs, instead relying on inactive embryos. The team first doused eggs in strontium chloride, which prevents them from going into a state of arrest while they're turned into embryos -- previous attempts to fool the eggs saw them die within a few days. Researchers then inserted sperm nuclei that reprogrammed the embryos, readying them for the wombs of their surrogate mothers.
There's a potentially habitable planet just one star over
Locating potentially habitable planets outside of our own solar system is pretty difficult -- and when we do find them, they're usually unfathomably far away. Today, one isn't. Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet in the habitable zone of Earth's nearest neighboring solar system. For now, it's called Proxima b, and it's just over four light years away.
Molecules in space may show how life formed on Earth
Scientists have known for a while that the molecular ingredients of life can be found in nearby comets and meteorites, but it's now clear that those building blocks exist much, much further away from home. A research team has used spectral analysis to discover evidence of organic chiral molecules, the "mirror-image" molecules that are key to biology as we know it, in the Sagittarius B2 cloud near the heart of the Milky Way. This doesn't meant that life is forming in space, but it does suggest that the necessary molecular properties can appear in space first and transfer to planets through meteorite impacts.
Time's 'Life VR' will 'showcase the world through virtual reality'
NextVR just announced its virtual reality broadcasting tech will bring live concerts home in a partnership with Live Nation, and today it's announcing a team-up with Time Inc. Life Magazine has historically provided a peek into different areas of the world via photojournalism, and the new Life VR project will offer "immersive, next-level storytelling" from Time Inc. media properties like Time Magazine, People, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly. Word of the launch came at today's NewFronts event in NYC, and the two say it should result in three to five VR events each year, available in the NextVR app.
NASA's chemical 'laptop' would help find life on other planets
Planetary rovers can already find potential signs of life, but they're not really meant to find life itself. NASA may have just the device to find that concrete evidence, though. Its newly tested Chemical Laptop is the first device built to detect amino acids and fatty acids (the telltale signs of life as we know it) on other worlds. The battery-powered device needs liquid samples to work, but it has a coffee machine-like mechanism that uses hot water to get the organic material out.
Indiegogo rebrands charity as Generosity(.com)
Indiegogo will rebrand Indiegogo Life, its service to raise money for good causes, as Generosity.com. Launching later today, the platform will charge no fees, set no deadline and use Indiegogo's backend to run each campaign, much as it has done for the past year. The site will (re)launch with four new high-profile initiatives that require your cash, including helping Syrian refugees start new lives and funding STEM education for girls. It's another high-profile break with rival crowdfunding site Kickstarter, which had to break its own rules to launch a campaign to help Syrian refugees. It's also interesting that Indiegogo has opted to take its name off the service, perhaps showing a degree of self-awareness that its online reputation isn't the best. Update: The site hasn't gone live yet, but we've been told that the site will be branded as "Generosity by Indiegogo," so ignore that line about it being aware of its own terrible reputation.
New data suggests Mars had lakes that could have supported life
If you asked most star-gazers about water on Mars a month ago, you'd likely be told there is evidence for liquid H2O in the past, but it's probably long gone. How things can change. First was the big announcement that liquid water is still present (in some form). Now, new data from the Curiosity rover suggests there could have been a lot more of it than first thought, for longer periods of time, with the conditions needed to support life.
Researchers draft the first comprehensive tree of life
It's very poetic to talk about a tree of life, where every species can trace its roots, but actually illustrating this tree is no mean feat when Earth has been home to at least 2.3 million known species. However, scientists have finally given it a shot. They've published the first draft of a comprehensive tree of life that shows every major evolutionary branch, ranging from the very first organisms to complex beings like humans. This isn't a complete tree, of course (it's doubtful that we'll ever know all the species that ever existed), but it beats the patchwork from before.
Internet investor pours $100 million into the search for alien life
The hunt for extraterrestrial life just got a big leg up. Internet investor Yuri Milner and his Breakthrough Prize Foundation will spend $100 million supporting Breakthrough Listen, a project that will use radio telescopes, lasers and other equipment to search for alien signals. The cash will not only guarantee equipment time, but lead to dedicated processing equipment that could dramatically improve the discovery process. Researchers should not only cover several times more sky and radio wavelengths, but inspect both in greater detail and at higher speeds -- the radio telescope searches should run 100 times faster, even as they tackle five times as many wavelengths.
NASA forms a coalition to look for life on other planets
NASA knows that it can't rely solely on astronomers and robotic rovers to find life on other worlds, so it's recruiting some help. The space agency has formed the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), a coalition of scientists who study astrophysics, Earth, other planets and the Sun. The group will use its collective knowledge to search for alien lifeforms using perspectives that NASA wouldn't always have -- how does the loss of atmospheric chemicals affect the chances for life, for example? NASA hopes that the group will not only determine the habitability of planets, but develop technology to study those planets in greater detail. There's no guarantee that NExSS will discover organisms, let alone organisms that you might see within your lifetime, but the odds of success are now a bit higher. [Image credit: NASA]
NASA thinks we'll find signs of extraterrestrial life in 20 years
The quest to find proof of life beyond Earth hasn't been without its setbacks, but NASA isn't deterred. If anything, it's optimistic -- Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan now claims that there will be "definitive evidence" of extraterrestrial life within the next 10 to 20 years. Given the sheer number of oceans within just our solar system, she argues, it's "not an if, it's a when." The more pressing questions are what kind of life we'll find, and how we'll find it. It'll most likely involve a probe or rover detecting microscopic organisms rather than a close encounter of the third kind, so there probably won't be much drama involved. Still, the very fact that we could find alien species within our lifetimes is exciting. [Image credit: Lynette Cook, NASA]
Curiosity finds evidence of life-giving nitrates in Mars rocks
NASA's Curiosity rover isn't done finding signs that Mars once had the prime ingredients for life... not by a longshot. The explorer robot has discovered evidence of nitrates, the nitrogen compounds that are some of the key nutrients for life, in rocks at three places near its landing site. This still doesn't mean that Mars did harbor life in its heyday, but it's now that much more likely. The big question is whether the processes that formed those nitrates are still active, or if they died out when the planet became barren -- scientists aren't sure, and it could take a while to get an answer.
Scientists take detailed pictures of the smallest known life forms
Just how small can life get? Almost unbelievably small, if you ask a team of Berkeley Lab researchers. They've taken the first detailed electron microscope pictures of the tiniest bacteria known to date -- at a typical 0.009 cubic microns in volume, you could fit 150 of them in an already miniscule e. coli cell. Scientists had to catch the hard-to-spot microbes by using a new portable cryo plunger, which flash-froze groundwater to near absolute zero (about -458F) to keep the cells intact while they were in transit.
AT&T's connected car tech now works with AT&T's connected home
Controlling your home's temperature from your smartphone is cool, but it'd make your neighbors even more jealous if you could do the same thing from your car's dashboard. That's the thinking behind AT&T's latest move, which is to bring its home automation platform in harmony with AT&T Drive, its connected car offering. Such integration means that users can control their security, door locks, thermostat and even garage doors straight from the navigation panel. Perhaps it won't be long before the company starts warning users not to mess with the A/C while riding down the highway in the same way it currently does for text messaging.
Motion-detecting nanosensors could help find life on other planets
Much as we'd love to discover grey aliens with warp drive technology, any extraterrestrial life we're lucky enough to find will likely be pretty basic. But the chemical detection methods used by space probes like Curiosity or Philae are hit-and-miss -- they can't actually tell if something is alive or not. Scientists in France have developed a new nanosensor that may help: a simple cantilever with a laser motion sensor that can accept about 500 bacteria. As long as they're alive, the cells will cause minute vibrations on the cantilever, which are captured by the lasers as a sign of life. After scientists kill the cells, the signals stop.
Rosetta data puts the origin of Earth's water in doubt
Scientists are pretty sure that Earth's water didn't originate on Earth itself, so where did it come from, exactly? Many believe the source is water-rich comets that bashed into our planet billions of years ago. However, new observations from the Rosetta spacecraft have weakened that theory. After it scanned the water vapor streaming from Comet 67P (above), ESA scientists found that there was three times more deuterium (heavy water) than found on Earth. That's significant, because of 11 comets measured to date, only one has the same water we do -- Comet 103P, a Jupiter-class (Kuiper Belt) comet analyzed by the ESA's Herschel telescope in 2011.
Artificial evolution is now possible in chemicals, but life remains elusive
We're still a very long way from creating an evolving lifeform from scratch in a lab. However, the University of Glasgow has managed to foster artificial evolution in chemicals. Their technique uses a 3D printing robot to both create oil droplets and choose the next generation based on desirable properties, like stability. No, the chemicals aren't evolving on their own, but the process works much like natural selection -- after 20 generations, the droplets were noticeably more stable. In the long run, the scientists hope to use this discovery both to study the beginnings of life and maybe, just maybe, create it.
NASA's new telescopes could spot alien life within 20 years
Convinced that there's got to be life on other planets? You're not alone in the universe -- in fact, many NASA scientists agree with you. And a panel convened recently by the space agency (see the video below) believes that finding it could happen soon, too -- perhaps "in twenty years" -- thanks to incoming telescope technology. Recent projects, like the Kepler Telescope, Dark Energy Survey and the Very Large Telescope have detected the presence of planets and even their atmospheres. But astronomers are even more excited about future projects like the Transiting Exoplanet Surveying Satellite (TESS) and James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
'Super-Earth' is closest planet yet that could support life
Thanks to a wobble in its host star, researchers from UNSW have spotted a planet only 16 light-years away that could harbor life (shown in an artist's conception, above). However, being there would bear little resemblance to living on Earth. It's at least five times as massive, for starters, and is so close to its sun that a year is only 16 days. Though you'd think that'd make the planet, called Gliese 832c, a fried hunk of rock, its sun is a red dwarf star which emits much less energy than our yellow dwarf. That means it'd receive about the same amount of heat energy, so scientists granted it an Earth Similarity Index (ESI) rating of 0.81 -- the third best seen yet (Earth is 1.0). That said, living there could present some challenges. The extra gravity from its larger size could trap a denser atmosphere, resulting in a strong greenhouse effect and hellish, Venus-like climate. Life would also have to put up with that ridiculously short year and five times our gravity. Wait, much higher gravity and a red sun? This is starting to sound super-familiar. [Image credit: PHL, University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo]
Digitally simulated worm wriggles for the first time (video)
It's relatively easy to simulate life in an abstract sense, but it's tricky to do that cell by cell -- just ask the OpenWorm Project, which has spent months recreating a nematode in software. However, the team recently cleared an important milestone by getting its virtual worm to wiggle for the first time. The project now has an algorithm that triggers the same muscle contractions you'd see in the real organism, getting the 1,000-cell simulation to "swim" in a convincing fashion. There's still a long way to go before OpenWorm has a complete lifeform on its hands, mind you. The group has to introduce code for a nervous system, and performance is a problem -- it takes 72 hours to emulate one-third of a second's worth of activity. If all goes well, though, you'll eventually get to play with the worm through a browser. In the meantime, you can check out the digital critter's motion in a video after the break.
