Lifeboat Foundation

The rover will dig deeper into Mars than any previous mission in search of ancient life.

The rover, set for launch in 2,022 will bring to a head a decades-in-development program that has suffered a series of setbacks. If all goes well, the Rosalin Franklin rover may be scientists’ best shot at getting a definitive answer about whether there was ever life on Mars and what its fate can tell us about our own planet.

What is the Rosalind Franklin rover?

Continue reading “Everything you need to know about the ExoMars’ rover, the ESA’s bid to find life on Mars” »

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are set to welcome a most unusual guest, as “the Blob” blasts off into orbit on Tuesday.

An alien on its own planet, the Blob is an unclassifiable organism – neither fish nor fowl. Nor is it plant, animal, or fungus.

As such, Physarum polycephalum – a type of slime mold – has long fascinated scientists and will now be part of a unique experiment carried out simultaneously by astronauts hundreds of kilometers above the Earth and by hundreds of thousands of French school students.

The skies of Venus may contain signatures of alien life, according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the search for alien life, the second planet from our Sun has long been ignored. It’s easy to see why: the Venusian surface reaches temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit; its dense atmosphere applies nearly 100 times more pressure to objects than Earth’s atmosphere; and the planet rains sulfuric acid, a corrosive chemical that causes severe burns to humans.

As such, most scientists have focused on finding signs of ancient alien life on Mars, or current life on moons like Europa or Enceladus. But Earth’s closest neighbor might have been the place to look all along.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb launches new project to search for extraterrestrial life.

An effort announced Monday called the Galileo Project aims to search for and investigate physical objects that could be the result of an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.

It’s helmed by Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard University’s department of astronomy, who was recently the subject of scrutiny for claiming that interstellar comet ‘Oumuamua was in fact a piece of annihilated alien technology.

Continue reading “Galileo Project: A new hunt for alien objects in the universe” »

Yesterday, LHCb presented results consistent with the presence of charm content in the proton.

See our news: #IC

Continue reading “LHCb — Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment” »

A team of scientists will embark on a new international research project led by Harvard University to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life by looking for advanced technology it may leave behind.

The Galileo Project is led by the Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb co-founded the project with Frank Laukien, CEO of Bruker Corporation, a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of scientific equipment.

The search for extraterrestrial technology is “daring to look through new telescopes.”

Avi Loeb is heading a new project which will search for extraterrestrial technological signatures that could prove there is life beyond Earth.

Continue reading “‘Galileo Project’ will search for evidence of extraterrestrial life from the technology it leaves behind” »

A new tool that enables thousands of tiny experiments to run simultaneously on a single polymer chip will let scientists study enzymes faster and more comprehensively than ever before.

For much of human history, animals and plants were perceived to follow a different set of rules than rest of the universe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this culminated in a belief that living organisms were infused by a non-physical energy or “life force” that allowed them to perform remarkable transformations that couldn’t be explained by conventional chemistry or physics alone.

Scientists now understand that these transformations are powered by enzymes – protein molecules comprised of chains of amino acids that act to speed up, or catalyze, the conversion of one kind of molecule (substrates) into another (products). In so doing, they enable reactions such as digestion and fermentation – and all of the chemical events that happen in every one of our cells – that, left alone, would happen extraordinarily slowly.

As long as a white dwarf star is alive, life will likely not survive.

New research sheds light on the possibility of life emerging on planets orbiting white dwarf stars.