A biocontainment facility designed to protect Earth from potentially hazardous biotic contaminants from space should be part of a planned NASA base on the moon, a policy paper maintains.
Space Exploration
Jun 19, 2026
7
2655
Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought. The planet, known as GJ 3378b, orbits ...
Astrobiology
Jun 30, 2026
0
422
Debris is still raining down on Earth more than 100 million years after the giant cosmic explosion that created it. A study published this week in Nature Astronomy by an international team reached this conclusion using measurements ...
Astrobiology
Jun 15, 2026
0
298
Vegetarians need not worry yet—plants will be on Earth for a long time to come. But not forever. The sun will ultimately determine the long-term existence of life on Earth. Its total energy output, called luminosity, has ...
Could Earth have seeded Jupiter's moon Europa with bacterial life, where it could have taken hold in Europa's ocean and perhaps evolved into something more? That's the hypothesis of a new paper in the International Journal ...
Billions of years ago, environmental conditions on Mars were significantly more hospitable than they are today. Our neighboring planet was likely warm, humid and surrounded by a dense atmosphere. Whether simple microorganisms ...
Astrobiology
Jun 18, 2026
0
235
In September 2025, NASA announced that its Perseverance rover had discovered a potential biosignature, which is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin. A new paper, published in Science Advances, unambiguously ...
Astrobiology
Jun 24, 2026
1
141
It's 2158, and you're chugging away on your Ph.D. in planetary volcanology from the University of Utopia Planitia on Mars. Graduate students still get paid a sub-living wage, so you've been stuck eating freeze-dried ramen ...
Astrobiology
Jun 17, 2026
0
116
Between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, two physicists, Michael Hart and Frank Tipler, published a controversial series of papers arguing that extraterrestrial intelligence didn't exist. As they argued, the likelihood that ...
Astrobiology
Jun 13, 2026
2
110
Researchers from the University of Oxford have uncovered evidence that Mars once hosted enormous, Earth-like magmatic systems deep beneath its surface—despite the planet lacking the plate tectonics long thought necessary ...
Astrobiology
Jun 26, 2026
0
108
