The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the days’ headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“We leave open the question whether the origin of life is genuinely quantum mechanical,” says the team behind exciting new research that provides a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics — a new approach announced October 2018 to one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries in science: how does life emerge from inert matter.
Photographs of rare species from unexplored area of Antarctic seabed highlight the need to protect life in one of the most remote places on the planet. The images below are the first of creatures found in a previously unexplored region of the Antarctic seabed offering a fascinating glimpse of life in one of the most remote and pristine places on the planet.
“I think that if we find life elsewhere it’s going to look, at least chemically, very much like modern life,” says evolutionary biologist William Martin at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. “Among the astrobiological implications of our LUCA paper is the fact that you do not need light. It’s chemical energy that ran the origin of life, chemical energy that ran the first cells and chemical energy that is present today on bodies like Enceladus.”
We know more about the ancient lakes of Mars than we know about Antarctica’s subglacial environment, but in three weeks, a team of intrepid Antarctica scientists will drill 1,000 meters (3,200 feet) into the ice to find out what’s hidden for thousands of years buried in Mercer Subglacial Lake, formed about 10,000 years ago. The lake was first detected via NASA satellite, but never explored by humans. What they find could help to form better hypotheses about life on other planets, like on Mars or Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus.
