“We don’t yet know where methane on Mars comes from,” tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. “A leading idea is that methane on Mars is being released from underground reservoirs created by past biology. But sometimes, methane is a sign of geology rather than biology.”
“This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team,” said Dr. Danny Price of the search “pipeline” that scans through billions of radio channels, looking for signals of radio-transmitting extraterrestrial civilizations in our Galactic neighborhood that are too narrow and well-defined to result from natural processes.
“Many physicists believe that there must a beautiful set of laws in Nature and that one way to quantify the beauty is by symmetry. Some of the symmetries may be hidden in our world, but they should manifest themselves if we look at Nature at a more fundamental level. We showed that this expectation is wrong once we take into account the gravity,” said Caltech’s Hirosi Ooguri, Director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, about a new study that has found that, when gravity is combined with quantum mechanics, symmetry is not possible.
“It’s the heart of darkness of the genome, we warn students not to go there,” said Charles Langley, professor of evolution and ecology at University of California, Davis. Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
The 1947 crash in the New Mexico desert that become legendary among UFO fans and conspiracy theorists turns out to have been nearly as strange a visit by an alien spaceship. Long after the Cold War ended, observers continue to report a pattern of UFO activity near missile silos and other nuclear weapons sites. Perhaps it is not surprising that two subjects —nuclear war and alien invasion—should be linked.
