Never mind rogue planets—their rogue moons could support life

At a young age, we're told how the sun warms Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we learn that Earth has ...

How to spot life in the clouds on other worlds

Cloud cover is bad for picnics and for viewing stars through a telescope. But an exoplanet with dense or even total cloud cover could help astronomers search for signs of life beyond our planet.

Saturn's icy moon may host a stable ocean fit for life

A new study led by researchers from Oxford University, Southwest Research Institute and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona has provided the first evidence of significant heat flow at Enceladus's north pole, ...

Taking the moon's temperature with beeswax

Sometimes space exploration doesn't go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might ...

Chemists find clues to the origins of buckyballs in space

Far from Earth, in the vast expanses of space between stars, exists a treasure trove of carbon. There, in what scientists call the "interstellar medium," you can find a wide range of organic molecules—from honeycomblike polycyclic ...

Muscle tissue from a 3D printer—produced in zero gravity

Human health is the Achilles heel of space travel. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now succeeded in printing complex muscle tissue in zero gravity. This will enable drugs for space missions to be tested in the future.

A mundane universe and the rarity of advanced civilizations

How could the principle of "radical mundanity" proposed by the Fermi paradox help explain why humans haven't found evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs)? This is what a recent study posted to the ...

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