3/11/2008 Cassini Touches the Plumes of Enceladus NASA's Cassini spacecraft will make an unprecedented "in your face" flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus on Wed., March 12...
	3/6/2008 The Big Picture: Astrobiology A new article on Space.com from Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, outlines the breadth of research encompassed by astrobiology, and the current state of knowledge in the field.
	2/21/2008 Are We Martians, and Other Strange Questions NAI's David Morrison spoke with US News and World Report recently about the far-flung questions in his 'Ask an Astrobiologist' column. The interview also discusses how astrobiologists search for life on other planets...
	1/14/2008 New Book on Astrobiology This LA Times review of the new book 'The Living Cosmos: Our Search for Life in the Universe' by Chris Impey of the University of Arizona describes the book as "wonderfully readable...".
	1/11/2008 A Quartet of Stars Evgenya Shkolnik of NAI's University of Hawai'i Team reported this week at AAS in Austin that she and her colleagues have discovered an extremely rare quartet of stars orbiting each other within a region smaller than Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. Did they originate in this configuration or were they forced together by a dense disk of gas in their youth?
	12/11/2007 Astrobiology and Atlantis A new set of experiments designed to test how bacteria change in response to space radiation are going up with space shuttle Atlantis and will be delivered to the International Space Station. Once there they will reside for more than a year on an external space station platform called EXPOSE. Space.com has the story...
	11/14/2007 NAI Montana State University Team Releases Website NAI's new team at Montana State has just released their new website! It describes the research of each team member, including those at Stony Brook University and Temple University. The range of academic educational programs and outreach activities of the team are also described.
	10/26/2007 Astrobiologist Builds Native American Research Laboratory NAI MIRS Program alum Michael Ceballos, now a research assistant professor at the University of Montana, has been appointed the lead the development of their two new Native American Research Laboratories. The labs are dedicated to training Native students in the sciences, and are the first research labs at any university in the nation developed specifically to provide hands-on, cross-disciplinary research training opportunities for Native American undergraduate and graduate students.
	10/16/2007 Astrobiology's Pioneers Astrobiologist Cindy Van Dover is the subject of an interview in today's New York Times science section. The article discusses her career in marine ecology, and her pioneering role in exploring the ocean with the submersible Alvin.
	10/12/2007 Astrobiology on Science Friday On today's edition of NPR's Science Friday, new work from NAI's MBL team is featured, focusing on diversity of bacteria at hydrothermal vents. The team conducted a survey of DNA from deep-sea samples, discovering thousands of new kinds of marine microbes at two deep-sea hydrothermal vents off the Oregon coast.
	10/11/2007 New Website for NAI's University of Wisconsin Team NAI's new team at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has released its new website! Check it out to learn more about the people involved and the research they're doing. The website also lists opportunities for graduate students and post docs.
	9/28/2007 The First Astrobiologist Astronaut? Kim Binstead from NAI's University of Hawai'i Team, just back from a Mars Society-sponsored simulated mission to Mars in the Canadian High Arctic, says she plans to respond to NASA's recent call for astronaut candidates. Good Luck Kim!
	9/24/2007 Astrobiology in the Comics Today's "Prickly City" comic strip features the work of Norbert Schorghofer of NAI's University of Hawai'i Team. Apparently, understanding the history of ice ages on Mars doesn't have a positive effect!
	9/20/2007 Astrobiotechnology Chip Successfully Launched Andrew Steele of NAI's CIW Team, a leader in astrobiotechnology for many years, is behind this current experiment, called the "Life Marker Chip." A collection of immunoassays which have the potential to detect trace levels of biomarkers in the Martian environment, it launched earlier this week on ESA's BIOPAN 6 experiment platform. The craft will spend 12 days in orbit, during which time the onboard experiments, including the Chip, will be exposed to microgravity.
	9/14/2007 Astrobiology and the Arts The University of Arizona NAI Team and their "Astrobiology and the Sacred" project present "Astrobiology and the Arts," a two-day symposium next week featuring readings of new fiction, panel discussions, music and dance performances, multimedia presentations, and lectures from the nexus of these two grand endeavors.
	9/10/2007 What Is Life? Definition vs. Theory NAI's "Philosopher in Residence" Carol Cleland of the University of Colorado Team is featured in this thought provoking article from SEED magazine. It gives a history of the problem of defining life, from Schrodinger's "that which avoids the decay into equillibrium," through the molecular revolution, and examines it in the context of ALH84001.
	9/10/2007 The Encyclopedia of Life This week's issue of Nature features an interview with David "Paddy" Paddington of NAI's Marine Biological Laboratory Team discussing his involvement with the Encyclopedia of Life project. Debuting in early 2008, the EOL will be a living catalogue of biodiversity, with one webpage for each of Earth's 1.8 million species.
	8/6/2007 Exoplanet Water Vapor and Weird Life A new article in the Wall Street Journal ties together new discoveries from the frontiers of astrobiology science. The author speculates that "Our knowledge of the universe we call home -- and the search for water worlds hospitable to life -- is expanding almost as quickly as the cosmos itself."
	8/6/2007 Hydrocarbons on Saturn's Moon Hyperion NASA's Cassini spacecraft has revealed for the first time surface details of Saturn's moon Hyperion, including cup-like craters filled with hydrocarbons that may indicate more widespread presence in our solar system of basic chemicals necessary for life.
	7/30/2007 Looking for Life in All the Right Places This new video from JPL shows how NASA astrobiologists are gathering exciting clues that will help them pick the best spots to search for possible signs of life beyond Earth.
	7/30/2007 Seeing Our Reflection This new article from Science & Spirit magazine cogitates on 'following the water' in the search for life elsewhere, and the relationship between water and enlightenment in mythology and human psychology.
	7/20/2007 Phoenix Prepares for Flight Scheduled for launch in August 2007, the Phoenix Mars Mission is designed to study the history of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic's ice-rich soil. A new teaser animation about the mission is available - click here to view it.
	7/20/2007 Astrobiologist Named "Genius Who will Change Your Life" Maggie Turnbull, a 2004 NAI Postdoctoral Fellow and now an astrobiologist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, was recently named a "Genius" by CNN for her work cataloging stars most likely to develop planets that could support life and intelligent civilizations. Congratulations Maggie!
	7/2/2007 Oceans from Comets, A How-To Last week, teachers in the SETI Institute's Astrobiology Summer Science Experience workshop probed questions about the Earth's formation, including "where did the water come from?" The answer discussed was comets, and a classroom activity on how to make them is shared on Space.com...
	6/21/2007 NAI Publication Receives Jubilee Award A recent publication by members of the NAI's Carnegie Institution of Washington Team was honored this week with the Jubilee Award from the Geological Society of South Africa. The team's research, published in the South African Journal of Geology, concerned sulfur isotopes in ancient rocks in South Africa. Congratulations CIW!
	6/18/2007 NAI Scientist Receives Award from L'Oréal Julie Huber from NAI's Marine Biological Laboratory Team received a 2007 L’Oréal USA Fellowship for Women in Science. Now in its fourth year, the highly selective L’Oréal USA Fellowships annually recognize and reward five up-and-coming female scientists who are conducting innovative and groundbreaking research. Please join NAI in congratulating Dr. Huber!
	6/12/2007 Earth's Future Glimpsed on Titan The enigmatic Saturnian moon Titan is still yielding surprising new details years after scientists first pierced its thick haze veil. The vision now emerging of Saturn's largest moon, with its giant dunes and oceanless surface, is perhaps a glimpse of Earth's desert future. Space.com has the story...
	6/7/2007 MESSENGER Probes Venus' Atmosphere On route to Mercury, the MESSENGER spacecraft is doing a flyby of Venus where, on June 5th, it sent out a laser beam to measure the location of Venus' cloud decks. "We are treating the Venus flyby as a full dress rehearsal for the first flyby of Mercury in January 2008," says Sean Solomon, PI of both the MESSENGER mission and NAI's Carnegie Institution of Washington Team.
	6/6/2007 NAI Scientist Receives Presidential Award Please join NAI in congratulating Lou Allamandola of the NASA Ames Research Center Team who was recently bestowed the 'Presidential Rank of Meritorious Senior Professional' in a ceremony held at Ames on June 5th. Congratulations Lou!
	5/17/2007 A Habitable World Around Gliese 581? Astronomers have discovered a far away planet around the M Dwarf star Gliese 581 that might be similar to Earth, but does it have life? Space.com's SETI Thursday has the story...
	5/17/2007 Astrobiology Magazine's European Edition - France The Spring 2007 European Edition of the Astrobiology Magazine focuses on astrobiology research and news from France. The edition features new articles, interviews, and op-ed section, and a special story on testing the Panspermia hypothesis.
	5/9/2007 NAI Expands to Include Four New Teams The NASA Astrobiology Institute is pleased to announce the selections of four new research teams: the University of Wisconsin, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Montana State University. These new teams join the twelve others selected to be part of the Institute in 2003. Welcome to the NAI!
	5/3/2007 NAI’s Tullis Onstott makes “Time 100” Astrobiologist Tullis Onstott has made this year’s “Time 100,” an annual list of “the 100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world,” according to list-maker Time magazine.
	5/2/2007 NASA Astrobiologists Elected to National Academy of Sciences Congratulations are due to astrobiologists Donald E. Canfield and Paul G. Falkowski for their election to the distinguished ranks of membership in the National Academy of Sciences.
	5/1/2007 Found: Earth-Like Planet A rocky planet not much larger than Earth has been detected orbiting a star close to our own neighborhood in the Milky Way, and the European astronomers who found it say it lies within the star's "habitable zone," where life could exist, possibly in oceans of water.
	4/18/2007 Technology Improves Imaging of Exoplanets Imaging Earth-like exoplanets is a daunting challenge because the dim starlight that such relatively small worlds reflect is easily overpowered by the glare of their far larger, brighter parent stars. Now two astrophysicists at JPL have devised new techniques that can overcome this glare, enabling future space telescopes to snap pictures of Earth-like exoplanets up to 10 billion times fainter than the stars they orbit.
	4/13/2007 NAI Scientist Receives Hazel Barnes Prize Margaret Tolbert from NAI's University of Colorado, Boulder Team, is receiving the 2007 UC-Boulder Hazel Barnes Prize. This prize is the University's most prestigious faculty award. Tolbert has earned it, UC-Boulder has announced, "for her contributions to understanding the chemistry and climate of planetary atmospheres, including past and present," and "for her teaching and research efforts with undergraduates and graduate students, 15 of whom have won prestigious NASA and Environmental Protection Agency fellowships in recent years." Congratulations Margaret!
	4/10/2007 An Update from "Mars" EVA continues at the Mars Desert Research Station where graduate student Irene Schneider from the NAI Penn State team is currently on expedition: "Biology: Encountered pond with trees on second stop, unique flower sample collected. Geology: First stop discovered small alcove in Morrison formation about 15 feet deep. Second stop yielded lake discussed above. Third stop found about 3 petrified tree stumps on ridge. Petrified wood and conglomerate samples collected. Astronomy: attempted but due to high winds and clouds was aborted. Medicine: none."
	4/9/2007 Lab-On-a-Chip Works Aboard the ISS The Lab-On-a-Chip Application Development Portable Test System (LOCAD-PTS) is an instrument developed by the NAI Carnegie Institution of Washington Team over the past 4 years in collaboration with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and Charles River Labs. LOCAD-PTS was flown to and recently tested aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to enable crew to monitor microorganisms and potentially hazardous chemicals within the cabin environment. The successful test is the first demonstration of complete biochemical analysis - from sampling to data retrieval - by an astronaut in space.
	3/28/2007 The Virus Hunters Recently produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, "The Virus Hunters" is a fascinating look at viruses, from their role in disease to the possibility of being the oldest form of life on Earth. NAI Virus Focus Group chair Ken Stedman and his team are featured during one of their field trips to Lassen Volcanic National Park.
	3/26/2007 NAI Scientists Honored by American Society for Microbiology The American Society for Microbiology recently announced its 2007 General Meeting Award Laureates, and two NAI scientists have received honors. Mitch Sogin, PI of NAI's Marine Biological Laboratory Team, is presented with the USFCC/J. Roger Porter Award for his research in environmental microbial diversity. Norm Pace, from NAI's University of Colorado, Boulder Team, is presented with the Abbott/ASM Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding contributions and research in the field of microbial ecology. Congratulations Norm and Mitch!
	3/22/2007 Extreme Life in China's Deserts Searching for clues to the potential for life on Mars, NASA astrobiologists recently explored microbial communities in China’s northwest region-some of the world’s oldest, driest and most remote deserts. They found evidence suggesting that conditions there may be similar to those in certain regions of Mars. The study was funded in part by NAI's sister program, Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets.
	3/14/2007 NASA's Cassini Spacecraft Images Seas on Titan Instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft have found evidence for seas, likely filled with liquid methane or ethane, in the high northern latitudes of Saturn's moon Titan. One such feature is larger than any of the Great Lakes of North America and is about the same size as several seas on Earth.
	3/7/2007 DEPTHX Tests the Waters for Future Exploration of Europa The Deep Phreatic Thermal eXplorer, or DEPTHX, is preparing for another series of dives into a 115-meter deep geothermal sinkhole in Mexico. These dives follow a series of successful tests dives to shakedown the vehicle’s autonomous navigation and mapping capabilities. NAI's sister program, Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP), funds the DEPTHX project as a study to develop technology that could one day allow a waterborne explorer to probe the ocean thought to exist beneath the icy outer shell covering Europa.
	3/1/2007 NAI Graduate Student Selected to Help Plan for Future Mars EVA NAI graduate student Irene Schneider from Penn State has been selected by NASA/Mars Society as crew physicist for the upcoming expedition 61 for the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS). MDRS Crew 61 is a two week mission simulation where NASA, in collaboration with The Mars Society, simulates future manned missions to Mars. There she will be developing and helping implement the first Extra-Vehicular Activity emergency radiation protocols.
	2/23/2007 Astrobiologists Discuss Mars Habitability on NPR Last week, NAI scientists were featured in a live broadcast of NPR's Science Friday. Tune in to hear how astrobiologists are following the water and the energy, trying to target those parts of the planet most likely to harbor life. Plus, learn how the rovers Spirit and Opportunity have changed our ideas about the Martian environment, and what evidence future missions will look for.
	1/10/2007 Liquid Water on Mars: Is It Still Flowing? The scientific strategy of NASA's Mars exploration can be summarized as "Follow the water." The habitability of Mars, past or present, is intimately tied to the presence of liquid water. Since the first orbiting spacecraft, Mariner 9, surveyed the planet in the early 1970s, we have known that the Mars polar caps are composed in part of ice, and we have seen large channels cut by water that flowed on the surface billions of years ago. Two of the most important recent discoveries on Mars were "gullies" that indicate much more recent surface flows, less than a million years old, and the evidence from rovers on the surface that shallow ponds or seas of salty water must have once existed, although they may have been transient. However, all these indications of surface water are old - whether the age is measured in millions or billions of years. Now, in what looks to be one of the most important recent discoveries about Mars, we have photographic evidence that flows of liquid water have taken place in the past seven years! The change of perspective from billions or millions of years to something that happened in the twenty-first century could be profound.
	12/14/2006 Astrobiology and Stardust Carl Sagan once said “We are all star stuff.” But how? What does that really mean? One of the fundamental questions of astrobiology, how does life originate and evolve?, provides a structure in which to examine the relationship between life and the cosmos. Everywhere life has been found on Earth, which is essentially every place in which it has been sought, life’s intimate connection with water has also been found. Within the framework of contemplating life’s cosmic origins, one must also ask about the history of water on Earth. NASA’s Stardust mission has provided the opportunity for astrobiologists to gain deeper insight into this history.
	12/6/2006 NAI Researchers Search for Meteorites in Antarctica Follow along as scientists from NAI’s University of Hawai’i Team go on expedition with the NSF/NASA - sponsored Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program. View photos, read about the team and their mission, and stay current with regular dispatches from the “Streets of McMurdo.” The ANSMET program enables researchers to collect meteorites in Antarctica first hand for scientific study. Over 75% of meteorites are recovered from Antarctica, and more than 15,000 samples have been supplied to over 400 scientists in 32 countries over the last 30 years.
	11/6/2006 Earth’s Hidden Biospheres Two recent discoveries in astrobiology challenge many of our assumptions about an integrated biological community on Earth. At the microbial level, it seems that there may be previously hidden biospheres that exist on Earth alongside our more familiar neighbors. One such community has been found deeply buried underground, while the other lives in the sea alongside more familiar life forms.
	11/6/2006 NASA Study Shows Titan and Early Earth Atmospheres are Similar Organic haze in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan, is similar to haze in early Earth's air -- haze that may have helped nourish life on our planet-- according to a NASA Astrobiology Institute study released Nov. 6, 2006.
	10/31/2006 Astrobiology Primer Published! The Astrobiology Primer: An Outline of General Knowledge appears in this month's issue of Astrobiology. Sponsored by NAI, the Primer was spearheaded by editor-in-chief Lucas Mix, and represents the work of 8 editors, 13 authors, and countless contributors. Intended as a reference tool, it provides information in these 7 topics: Stellar Formation and Evolution, Planetary Formation and Evolution, Astrobiogeochemistry and the Origin of Life, Evolution of Life Through Time, Planet Detection and Characterization, Diversity of Life, and Science in Space. The Primer came about in large part because of NAI support for graduate student research, collaboration, and inclusion as well as direct funding. Download your copy today: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/ast.2006.6.735
	10/19/2006 Impact from the Deep Strangling heat and gases emanating from the earth and sea, not asteroids, most likely caused several ancient mass extinctions. Peter Ward from NAI's Alumni Team at the University of Washington asks in this week's Scientific American: "Could the same killer-greenhouse conditions build once again?"
	9/8/2006 A New Book on the Evoution of Earth's Early Atmosphere With significant contribution from NAI's Penn State University Team, a new book entitled "Evolution of Early Earth's Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, and Biosphere - Constraints from Ore Deposits", edited by Stephen E. Kesler and Hiroshi Ohmoto, is available. It grew from a 2002 Pardee Symposium held during the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting sponsored in part by the NAI.
	8/15/2006 NAI Welcomes New Director Dr. Carl Pilcher, Senior Scientist for astrobiology at NASA Headquarters, Washington, has been appointed Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) based at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The appointment is effective Sept. 18, 2006. Pilcher succeeds Dr. Bruce Runnegar, who served as the third director of the NAI from 2003-2006. Runnegar is returning to his home institution, the University of California at Los Angeles in September.
	7/24/2006 Father of Earth-formation models, Carnegie's George Wetherill, dies at 80 Carnegie Institution planetary-formation theorist and founding NAI member, George Wetherill, died from heart failure on July 19, 2006, at his Washington, D.C., home. Wetherill's work revolutionized planet and solar system formation through theoretical models.
	7/7/2006 NAI Scientists Successfully Drill into Subglacial Lake Last month, scientists from NAI's University of Hawai'i Team, in collaboration with Icelandic research institutes, successfully drilled into and sampled a lake deep beneath a glacier in Iceland. The lake and other subglacial lakes are the focus of studies of life in "extreme environments," and may resemble potential habitats on Mars and icy satellites in the outer Solar System
	6/5/2006 A Deeper Look into the Watery Plumes of Enceladus NASA astrobiologists are hard at work examining the nature of the plumes of water vapor recently discovered on Saturn's moon Enceladus. If a new geological theory about the plumes, published in this week's Nature, proves to be correct, it would preclude the existence of a subsurface ocean on the moon. The theory is testable with existing data from NASA's Cassini mission...
	5/26/2006 New Astrobiology TV Documentary Features NAI Scientists NAI scientists and their international partners were featured in a new documentary called "Looking for Life" which premiered this week on both PBS and NASA-TV. The program highlights cutting edge field work in the arid Western Australian desert, an acid river in Spain, high altitude lakes in the Bolivian Andes, and the permafrost within an old gold mine in the Canadian Arctic where astrobiologists are characterizing the unique habitats and survival mechanisms of life on Earth, and laying the groundwork for the search for life on other planets. For more information about the program, see http://passporttoknowledge.com/life/. Check your local PBS listings and the NASA TV schedule for viewing times. Educational resources supporting the program from NASA Learning Technologies are available at http://www.quest.arc.nasa.gov/vft/.
	3/15/2006 Hot Rocks from Comet Wild 2 Scientists are finding surprises from analyzing tiny particles of comet dust collected by the Stardust spacecraft and returned to Earth 8 weeks ago. They had expected mostly "primitive" particles that had condensed under cool conditions in the solar nebula and been preserved in the deep freeze of space. However, some of the comet dust is made of minerals that can only be formed at high temperatures -- either close to the Sun or perhaps in other planetary systems that existed before the solar system formed. NAI scientist Don Browlee reports that "In the coldest part of the solar system, we've found samples that have formed at extremely high temperatures." Henry Bortman filed this story for Astrobiology Magazine from the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.
	1/24/2006 Habitable Conditions on the Early Earth Direct information concerning the first 500 million years of Earth history - the Hadean Eon - is very limited, since practically no crustal rocks from that time have survived. We do know that the Earth collided much more frequently than it does today with asteroids and comets, as witnessed by the heavily cratered highlands of the Moon. Astronomers also tell us that the Sun was about 30 percent fainter then, so that the Earth may have been cold, unless there was a large greenhouse effect to trap the Sun's heat and raise surface temperatures above the freezing point. Also of special interest is the apparent fact that life arose on Earth either during or shortly after the Hadean Eon.
	1/10/2006 Chance to View Stardust Return NASA's Stardust mission is nearing Earth after a four billion kilometer round-trip journey to bring back comet dust samples. Viewers in California, Oregon, and Nevada have a chance to see the fiery entry of the return capsule into Earth's atmosphere in the early morning of Sunday January 15 (approximately 2 a.m. PST, 3 a.m. MST).
	12/29/2005 NAI Discoveries Ranked Among NASA's Top Science Stories of the Year Scientists from NAI's NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Lead Team and NAI's Carnegie Institution of Washington Lead Team and their collaborators used the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope to capture the first light ever detected from two planets orbiting stars other than the sun. Spitzer picked up the infrared glow from the Jupiter-sized planets. The findings mark the beginning of a new age of planetary science, in which extrasolar planets can be directly measured and compared.
	11/21/2005 A New Book from NAI's Peter Ward Prolific author Peter Ward leads the pack, speculating on "Life As We Do Not Know It..." The book contains a wealth of information and dazzling speculation drawn from the ranks of Ward's colleagues in the 16 research institutions that operate worldwide as NASA's Astrobiology Institute.
	10/19/2005 Spitzer Telecope Data Suggest that Life's Building Blocks are Abundant Infrared astronomers are discovering that compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) constitute one the largest reservoirs of carbon in space. New observations confirm that PAHs are abundant, even in distant galaxies. Investigator Doug Huggins notes that "This stuff contains the building blocks of life, and now we can say they're abundant in space. And wherever there's a planet out there, we know that these things are going to be raining down on it."
	10/5/2005 Finding Life in Mars Analog Sites on Earth Andrew Steel of the NAI Carnegie Team and other scientists have recently tested life-detection instruments designed for Mars at the Arctic Mars Analog site in a Norwegian volcano. In a press release, Hans Amundsen of the University of Oslo said "The instruments detected both living and fossilized organisms, which is the kind of evidence we'd be searching for on the Red Planet." One instrument, designed by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), detected "minute quantities of aromatic hydrocarbons from microorganisms and lichens present in the rocks and ice," said JPL researcher Arthur Lonne Lane. One goal of the program was to find out if the instruments could be kept sterile, so that they would actually detect life in the volcano rather than fool researchers by detecting life from aboveground that only appeared to have come from below.
	9/29/2005 Astrobiology Education News from the UK Astrobiology is becoming a part of the curriculum in British universities. An introductory course (with specially written text) has been taught for several years at the Open University, and recently the University of Glamorgan has introduced a major in this subject.
	9/15/2005 Teaching Evolution Peter Ward of the University of Washington, the leader of the UW NAI Team, addresses the current attack on teaching evolution by an analogy with teaching students that the Earth is flat. Ward writes that "I teach evolution at the University of Washington. Even at the college level, it is a very difficult and demanding subject, and its abundant proofs require a detailed understanding of genetics, molecular biochemistry and paleontology. But for those who have made the intellectual journey to master these concepts, the stark explanatory power first realized by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago shows clearly how life on this planet evolved from the simple to the complex through natural selection and a lot of time."
	8/29/2005 Digging in the Dirt on Mars The following report is based on a short paper "The Enigma of the Martian Soil" by Amos Banin of the NAI SETI Institute Team, published in Science
	8/15/2005 Robot Astrobiology Rover NAI astrobiologists are involved in developing a prototype robotic astrobiologist to explore the driest desert on Earth, in preparation for later flights to Mars. This Astrobiology Magazine story is based on a news release from Carnegie Mellon University.
	8/11/2005 What Yellowstone Teaches Us about Ancient Mars NAI scientists study Yellowstone National park as an analog for thermal areas that probably existed on Mars long ago. This SPACE.com article by Leonard David also tells how visitors to the park are learning about astrobiology.
	8/5/2005 Extremophiles Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute discusses life living under extreme (to us) conditions, and what this tells us about the search for life beyond Earth.
	8/1/2005 Spitzer Finds Carbon Compounds in Young Universe This news story is based on a JPL/NASA press release dated July 28, 2005, which reports that the Spitzer Space Telescope has found the ingredients for life all the way back to a time when the universe was a mere youngster.
	7/13/2005 A New Class of Planet? Astronomers have recently discovered what appear to be rocky planets intermediate in size between Earth and Jupiter. We have nothing like this in our own solar system, where there is a sharp distinction between small terrestrial planets and giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Alan Boss of the NAI Carnegie Team discusses the significance of these strange objects.
	6/10/2005 Wading in Martian Water The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has been orbiting Mars for over a year. While the high resolution images of the planet's many craters, volcanoes, and other features get the most notice, the spacecraft's seven instruments have also gathered large amounts of data about the planet's atmosphere, geology, and chemistry. Bernard Foing, ESA Chief Scientist, provides on overview of the most notable discoveries made during Europe's first trip to the Red Planet.
	5/12/2005 Seeking the Wisdom of the Ancients: Microbial Mats and Biosignatures Understanding microbial communities can give clues to how life shaped the Earth billions of years ago - and help find signs of life on distant planets.
	4/28/2005 The 2005 General Meeting of the NASA Astrobiology Institute Many attendees felt that astrobiology had come of age. The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) held its fourth biennial meeting at Boulder, Colorado, April 10-14.
	4/7/2005 NAI Scientists turn to Mexican lake for clues to alien life Scientists from NAI's Virtual Planetary Laboratory recently visited the exotic lakes of Cuatro Ciengas in Mexico's Chihuahuan desert. What's being studied there may provide clues what life on other, distant worlds may be like, and help scientists understand and interpret the data coming back from extrasolar planets?
	3/28/2005 Using Isotopes to Probe the Earliest History of the Solar Nebula Members of the NAI UCLA team led by Ed Young are using high-precision analysis of tiny grains in meteorites to probe the earliest history of the solar nebula. The age of the solar system is set at 4.567 billion years, and the new work traces some of the history of these small grains during about 300,000 years, before the formation of comets, asteroids, or planets.
	3/23/2005 New Tools to Study Extrasolar Planets NAI scientists led one of two teams that have announced the first measurements of light from planets around other stars. The Spitzer Space Telescope detected infrared emissions from these two planets, both of which are "hot Jupiters' -- giant planets orbiting very close to their parent star. This brings a third technique to the study of these planets, which had previously been detected by their gravitational pull on the star and by the dimming of the star as the planet crosses in front of it. As noted by Drake Demming of the Goddard NAI Team, "Spitzer has provided us with a powerful new tool for learning about the temperatures, atmospheres, and orbits of planets hundreds of light-years from Earth." Alan Boss of the NAI Caregie team called this "a major milestone along the way to the ultimate goal of finding Earth-like planets and examining their atmospheres for signs of life."
	3/15/2005 A Different Type of Marine Thermal Vent NAI-supported researchers lead by Deborah S. Kelley of the University of Washington have discovered a new type of marine ecosystem. The Lost City seafloor vents are alkaline rather than acidic, and they produce white chimneys rather than black smokers. Their paper, just published in Science, discusses the unique life found at this locations, such as methane-producing microbes and tiny transparent shrimps and crabs.
	3/7/2005 Universe of Disks Living next to a ringed planet in a flat solar system in a spiral galaxy may make you think there are a lot of disk-shapes in space. And, indeed, there are. A January 2005 issue of the journal Science contains a special section featuring the roles disks play in the universe.
	3/3/2005 NASA Study Suggests Giant Space Clouds Iced Earth Astrobiology includes the study of ways that astronomical events can influence the evolution of life on Earth. Alex Pavlov of the NAI University of Colorado team reports in two papers how passage of the solar system through dense cool clouds of dust and gas (called molecular clouds by astronomers) could influence the climate, producing extinctions and perhaps triggering the state known as "snowball Earth". Much of this research was performed while Pavlov was a NAI postdoctoral fellow.
	2/10/2005 Context for the Origin of Life on Earth The origins of life - the nature of the transition from inanimate to animate chemistry - is one of the major mysteries of astrobiology. The first of the three theme-questions in astrobiology - Where did we come from? - deals in part with origins, whether the process took place on the ancient Earth or elsewhere. One perspective suggests that chemical interactions between water and various minerals might have been important.
	1/27/2005 Touchdown on a Strange Land On January 14 the Huygens Probe, built by the European Space Agency, made a soft landing on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. The first data from the atmosphere and surface reveal a remarkable place indeed, as described in a science press conference held in Paris on January 21.
	1/21/2005 The Greatest Mass Extinction: A Bang or a Whimper? At the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods, 252 million years ago, multi-celled life on planet Earth was nearly terminated. This PT mass extinction represents the greatest dying in the fossil record, with more than 90 percent of species lost. New results from South Africa provide the best-ever picture of the PT extinction on land, suggesting that it was a much more complex process than would be expected for a comet or asteroid impact.
	1/13/2005 Titan Or Bust! On January 14th, four weeks after separation with the Cassini spacecraft, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe will enter Titan's atmosphere. Along its several-hour-long journey to the surface, it will collect, along with other data, the sounds of the atmosphere.
	1/10/2005 Activities of Subseafloor Life More Diverse than Expected NAI-funded research on cores recovered through the Joint Oceanographic's Ocean Drilling Program show that the activity of microbial life beneath the seafloor is far more diverse than expected.
	12/14/2004 NASA Selects Investigations for the Mars Science Laboratory NASA has selected eight proposals to provide instrumentation and associated science investigations for the mobile Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled for launch in 2009.
	12/6/2004 The Martian Methane Surprise Is the methane on Mars coming from deep underground? Astrobiologist Mike Mumma discusses some possibilities while explaining how to measure methane on another world.
	12/2/2004 Reports Detail Rover Discoveries of Wet Martian History The most dramatic findings so far from NASA's twin Mars rovers -- telltale evidence for a wet and possibly habitable environment in the arid planet's past -- passed rigorous scientific scrutiny for publication in a major research journal.
	11/19/2004 More Evidence for Methane on Mars Methane on Earth is generated primarily by living microbes, and this gas is often proposed as a biomarker. Papers presented on November 11 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Science (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society strengthened the evidence that this gas has been detected in the atmosphere of Mars.
	11/17/2004 Astrobiology Education Web Adds Dynamic Atmosphere Module As NASA prepares to investigate the atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan, NASA education experts are helping students investigate the importance of an atmosphere to human life.
	10/18/2004 Study Suggests Component of Volcanic Gas May Have Played a Significant Role in the Origins of Life on Earth Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are reporting a possible answer to a longstanding question in research on the origins of life on Earth—how did the first amino acids form the first peptides?
	9/10/2004 Milestone reached for detecting life on Mars "To detect life on Mars, we have to devise instruments to recognize it and design them in such a way to get them to the Red Planet most efficiently," said Dr. Andrew Steele of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, a member of an international team designing devices and techniques to find life on Mars.
	9/9/2004 Molecular Biologists Uproot Perspective of Ancient Ancestry A study funded in part by NASA has uprooted the "Tree of Life" metaphor that describes how all organisms are related.
	9/2/2004 News from the Bioastronomy 2004 Meeting The most recent international astrobiology meeting was held in Iceland July 12-16, 2004.
	9/1/2004 Scientists Discover First of a New Class of Extrasolar Planets The following story reporting the discovery of 2 new Uranus/Neptune sized exoplanets adds to the mystery of planetary systems with hot giant planets.
	8/13/2004 The Measure of Deep Time Most people think of time as a straightforward concept, running smoothly and divided into years, days, minutes, etc. For the geologist, paleontologist, or astrobiologist studying the Earth’s history, it is not so simple, however.
	8/5/2004 Rocks Tell Stories in Reports of Spirit's First 90 Martian Days Scientific findings from the NASA rover Spirit's first three months on Mars will be published Friday, marking the start of a flood of peer-reviewed discoveries in scientific journals from the continuing two-rover adventure.
	5/27/2004 Raw Ingredients for Life Detected in Planetary Construction Zones NASA has announced new findings from the Spitzer Space Telescope, including icy dust particles coated with water, methanol and carbon dioxide, which may help explain the origin of icy planetoids like comets.
	5/18/2004 Faking Titan in the Lab Researchers from the University of Arizona have recreated some of the chemicals thought to be in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
	5/17/2004 Did an Impact Trigger the Permian-Triassic Extinction? New evidence suggests a possible impact cause for the greatest mass extinction of all time, although many scientists remain skeptical that this long-standing mystery has been solved. A NASA news conference was held May 13 to announce the discovery of an impact crater near Australia that might be implicated in the Permian-Triassic or PT extinction event, 251 million years ago.
	4/7/2004 Methane on Mars: A Possible Biomarker? Is the methane discovered on Mars evidence for contemporary life on the Red Planet?
	3/26/2004 NASA Research Focuses on Yellowstone's Hot Springs and Compares Findings to Rocks from Mars Yellowstone Park Foundation receives $66,000 grant from NASA and Lockheed Martin Corporation to help tell the story.
	3/23/2004 More Evidence for Ancient Water on Mars If Mars ever supported life, it must have had liquid water, something that is now precluded on the surface by sub-freezing temperatures and a low atmospheric pressure. One of the main objectives of the current Mars Exploration Rovers is to find evidence on the surface of what might have been a warmer, wetter planet in the past.
	3/22/2004 Surviving With - and Without - Oxygen: An Interview with Christopher Chyba Without oxygen, animal life on Earth would not be possible. But Earth's atmosphere wasn't always rich in oxygen.
	3/8/2004 When Did Earth's Oceans Become Oxygenated? New measurements by University of Rochester geochemists have uncovered evidence that even after 2.2 billion years ago, the amount of oxygen in the oceans remained low, perhaps up to the time when multicelled life began to proliferate a few hundred million years ago.
	3/2/2004 Evidence for Ancient Water on Mars Scientists have concluded the part of Mars that NASA's Opportunity rover is exploring was soaking wet in the past.
	2/29/2004 Can People Go to Mars? Space radiation between Earth and Mars poses a hazard to astronauts. How dangerous is it out there? NASA scientists are working to find out.
	2/4/2004 Mars rover on track of watery mineral The Mars rover Opportunity, which rolled off its landing platform onto the Martian surface early on Saturday, has returned its first real science data to Earth.
	1/25/2004 First Images Of Opportunity Site Show Bizarre Landscape NASA's Opportunity rover returned the first pictures of its landing site early today, revealing a surreal, dark landscape unlike any ever seen before on Mars.
	1/5/2004 Spirit Lands On Mars and Sends Postcards A traveling robotic geologist from NASA has landed on Mars and returned stunning images of the area around its landing site in Gusev Crater.
	12/10/2003 Carl Woese and New Perspectives on Evolution Scientists are proud when they discover a new species or genus of life, but one molecular biologist, Carl Woese, has the unique honor or discovering an entire domain of life, the archaea.
	11/17/2003 Opportunities for Collaborative Research in Astrobiology The NAI Looks at some exciting science initiatives.
	11/14/2003 Delta-Like Fan on Mars Suggests Ancient Rivers Were Persistent Newly seen details in a fan-shaped apron of debris on Mars may help settle a decades-long debate about whether the planet had long-lasting rivers instead of just brief, intense floods.
	10/30/2003 Spotlight: Missing Link Sought in Planetary Evolution Just as anthropologists sought "the missing link" between apes and humans, astronomers are embarking on a quest for a missing link in planetary evolution.
	10/23/2003 NASA Scientists to Study Lake's Primitive Life to Learn About Mars Scientists from NASA, the SETI Institute and other institutions will study microscopic life forms in some of the highest lakes on Earth atop a South American volcano to learn what life may have been like on early Mars.
	9/23/2003 Scientists Practice Mars Drilling Near Acidic Spanish River To develop techniques to drill into the surface of Mars to look for signs of life, NASA and Spanish scientists recently began drilling 150 meters (495 feet) into the ground near the source of the waters of the Rio Tinto, a river in southwestern Spain, part of a three-year effort that will include the search for underground life forms.
	8/25/2003 Infrared Eyes Set to Launch In the early morning of August 25th at 1:35:39 a.m. EDT, NASA successfully launched the new Space Infrared Telescope Facility aboard a Boeing Delta II Heavy Launch Vehicle into the first-ever Earth-trailing orbit.
	8/11/2003 Researchers Find Antarctic Lake Water Will Fizz Like a Soda Water released from Lake Vostok, deep beneath the south polar ice sheet, could gush like a popped can of soda if not contained, opening the lake to possible contamination and posing a potential health hazard to NASA and university researchers.
	8/5/2003 NASA'S First Scout Mission Selected For 2007 Mars Launch NASA has selected Phoenix, an innovative and relatively low-cost mission, to study the red planet, as the first Mars Scout mission. The Phoenix lander mission is scheduled for launch in 2007.
	7/30/2003 The Rise of Oxygen Understanding the history of oxygen accumulation in Earth's atmosphere is an important topic in astrobiology. It has ramifications in the evolution of planetary habitability as well as using oxygen as a biomarker in the search for life on extrasolar planets.
	7/13/2003 Ancient Planet Some 13 billion years ago in a distant cluster of stars, a planet formed. Remarkably it's still there, according to data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
	7/9/2003 Newly Launched 'Opportunity' Follows Mars-Bound 'Spirit' NASA launched its second Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, late Monday night (July 7) aboard a Delta II launch vehicle whose bright glare briefly illuminated Florida Space Coast beaches.
	6/13/2003 Shining Light on Life's Origin When ultraviolet radiation was more intense than today, and the early Earth had a mix of nitrogen-rich molecules, how did this primordial soup get cooked? And how did it not burn?
	6/10/2003 NASA's 'Spirit' Rises on Its Way to Mars A NASA robotic geologist named Spirit began its seven-month journey to Mars at 10:58:47 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on June 10 when its Delta II launch vehicle thundered aloft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
	5/22/2003 Pictures of Earth from Mars NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has captured unique images of a lovely blue alien world: Earth
	5/15/2003 NAI Europa Focus Group Visits Arctic Ice-Field In this special Feature, NAI Senior Scientist David Morrison recounts a recent trip to Barrow, Alaska with the Europa Focus Group.
	5/5/2003 Photosynthesis in the Abyss Recently, researchers have discovered a bacterium in the nearly pitch-black environment of deep-sea hydrothermal vents that carries out photosynthesis, using light as its only source of energy.
	4/24/2003 Lost City Expedition: Life from Rocky Reaction During their 32 day expedition, 24 scientists onboard the research vessel Atlantis will dive deep into the North Atlantic and use a free swimming robot to create a high resolution map of how life may flourish by living off the 'rocky' heat of a chemical reaction.
	4/8/2003 Solar Influence, Part III: Climatological Effects This concluding feature on solar influence looks at how the Sun affects our environment on Earth. Specifically, we’ll delve into the rather contentious issue of whether near-term solar variability has an appreciable affect on climate change.
	3/31/2003 File Compression: New Tool for Life Detection? Some of Earth's oldest rocks contain intriguing layered structures. Were living organisms responsible, or was it merely a random chemical process? The answer, says one researcher, may be a simple matter of compressing a computer file.
	3/18/2003 Solar Influence, Part II: Effects on and near Earth In Solar Influence Part I, we looked at current and upcoming solar missions and how they are helping us to understand our Sun. In this installment, we will look at how changes in solar output can affect our technology and space missions.
	2/24/2003 Solar Influence, Part I: Understanding our Sun The Sun is a wondrous beacon. It is the primary energy source that drives so many Earth systems. But how much do scientists know about its energy output and the variance of this output? Research into this area has tangible ramifications for life on Earth.
	2/19/2003 Featured Question: A few thoughts on Mass Extinctions These questions were submitted to our Ask An Astrobiologist website recently, and we've added images and video to this comprehensive answer.
	2/7/2003 Rosetta Launch Cancelled The European Space Agency has cancelled the launch of their comet-chasing Rosetta Mission, but comet exploration goes on.
	1/15/2003 Exotic Earths New astronomical techniques are vastly increasing what we know about extrasolar planets. Scientists have already found a large number of Jupiter sized bodies, but what about Earth-like planets in other solar systems?
	12/20/2002 Life: Small but Robust This week, Astrobiology Features takes a look at what’s been going on in the realm of the microbiology research.
	12/17/2002 A Teacher in Space NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced recently that Barbara Morgan, the agency's first Educator Astronaut, has been assigned as a crew member on a November 2003 Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station.
	12/10/2002 Mars Update There have been many recent releases on Mars research; this week, NAI Features takes a brief look about what’s been happening.
	12/4/2002 Ripples in Time Until the last fifteen percent of the Earth's age, the continents were barren, lifeless wastelands. Life had yet to hit the shore. But a kind of molecular clock says the hands of time may have started ticking many billions of years earlier.
	11/28/2002 Jupiter-like planets formed in hundreds – not millions – of years, study shows An accepted assumption in astrophysics holds that it takes more than 1 million years for gas giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn to form from the cosmic debris circling a young star. But new research suggests such planets form in a dramatically shorter period, as little as a few hundred years.
	11/26/2002 Focus on Titan Titan has been in the news quite a bit recently for its relevance to astrobiology research. But why all the attention? This week, Astrobiology Features takes a closer look that this frigid, haze-covered world.
	11/7/2002 The Rover Naming Contest Are you ready for your six months of Fame? NASA and the LEGO Company announce a contest for K – 12 students to name the twin Mars Exploration Rovers due to launch in late spring 2003.
	11/6/2002 Studying Europa from the Outside In Recent research and announcements on Europa have fueled optimism for learning about the interior of this icy Jovian orbiter.
	11/5/2002 Building Planets in Cyberspace Recipe: Take a rocky mass [about 12.8 thousand kilometers (nearly 8 thousand miles) wide], add carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane. Place in stable, circular orbit, the same distance from a sunlike star as the distance between Earth and the Sun. Heat to an average of 10 degree Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) for 1 billion years.
	10/24/2002 NAI Lead Team Member Awarded Donath Medal Dr. Ariel Anbar receives the 2002 Young Scientist Award (Donath Medal) from the Geological Society of America.
	10/18/2002 NASA Researchers Seek Astrobiology Insights on the Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign This November, Peter Jenniskens will again be leading a NASA team to explore the 2002 Leonid meteor storm from high altitudes.
	10/10/2002 NASA Astrobiologists to study Extreme Life at Earth's Highest Lake Scientists from NASA, the SETI Institute and other organizations are preparing to ascend nearly 4 miles to the summit of a dormant volcano in the Chilean Andes to find out how the organisms that live there can survive in the volcano's hostile environment.
	10/9/2002 NAI Congratulates and Welcomes Another Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Sydney Brenner was awarded the The 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
	9/19/2002 G. Scott Hubbard Named NASA Ames Research Center Director G. Scott Hubbard, Deputy Director for Research at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has been selected as Center Director, effective immediately.
	9/16/2002 Do You See What I See? NAI molecular biologist Michael Cummings studies one of the most basic interactions an organism has with its environment - the perception of light and color. But does the world hold the same colors for everyone?
	9/13/2002 Mars Exploration Rover 2003 Landing Sites With the Mars Exploration Rover (or MER) landing sites narrowed from 150 alternatives, the prospect of roaming around ancient lakebeds has the orbital cameras clicking.
	9/6/2002 Runnegar to Lead NASA Astrobiology Institute NASA today announced that it has selected Dr. Bruce Runnegar of the University of California, Los Angeles, as the next director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute (NAI).
	8/27/2002 Bacteria: Survival in Siberia Find out more about a test that could help determine if life once existed on Mars-or even if living organisms still reside in the Martian permafrost.
	8/21/2002 Rehearsal Readies Scientists for NASA's Next Mars Landing With less than a year to go before the launch of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, scientists have spent the last few weeks at a high-tech summer camp.
	8/15/2002 Prospecting for Viruses Scientists are prospecting for viruses in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park - and they are being richly rewarded with intriguing new finds.
	8/6/2002 Eukaryotic Origins Scientists are still struggling to understand the evolutionary relationships among different types of cells.
	7/30/2002 A World Without Elephants? Thoughts on the future of evolution with Harvard paleontologist Andy Knoll. Watch the video to experience the entire interview.
	7/13/2002 Antarctic Microbes Colonize under Mars-like Conditions American and New Zealand research teams uncover what some might call the closest Mars-like simulation found terrestrially.
	7/11/2002 Ice Cube of Exotic Microbes A permafrost subglacial lake discovered beneath Antarctica offers scientists a chance to test their sterile drilling techniques.
	6/26/2002 Former Flood Identified on Mars Geologists at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum have discovered a large former lake in the highlands of Mars.
	6/23/2002 High-pressure Living Findings suggest looking for life deep underneath planetary bodies like the surface of Mars.
	6/21/2002 Defining Life What is life, exactly? The science of biology is the study of life, yet scientists can't agree on an absolute definition.
	6/14/2002 Whither Europa? Researchers Regroup to Make Jupiter's Moon NASA's Priority Space.com reports on the May 2002 meeting of the NAI Europa Focus Group.
	6/12/2002 Salt of the Early Earth Scientists have long assumed that life originated in the sea. If life did spring from salt water, that could explain why all organisms use salt.
	6/5/2002 The Search for Distant Earths Astronomers search for small, rocky Earth-like planets around other stars.
	6/3/2002 Tandem Evolution Several kilometers beneath the ocean surface a fascinating evolutionary synchrony is occurring.
	5/31/2002 Found It! Ice on Mars Instruments on board NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft have revealed more underground ice on the Red Planet than scientists expected.
	5/29/2002 Uranus and Neptune - and the Origin of Life on Earth Constraints on the giant planets and birth aggregates of the solar system
	5/22/2002 NAI Members Elected into the National Academy of Sciences The NASA Astrobiology Institute extends congratulations to two new members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
	5/6/2002 A Pothole in the Road of Life Desert potholes may provide clues to the evolution of life on Earth.
	4/24/2002 The Driest Place on Earth How much water does life need to survive?
	4/17/2002 Unfamiliar Life Why should the particular polymer combinations of Earth reign supreme?
	4/15/2002 Planetary Embryos Hatch in the Southern Constellation Centaurus Distant planetisimals may have similar sun-distances and temperatures to Earth.
	3/4/2002 Odyssey Finds Large Concentrations of Water on Mars The first results from the Mars Odyssey are in, and they reveal that the Southern Hemisphere of the Red Planet has a lot of water ice just below the surface.
	2/27/2002 Earth from Afar: A Tiny Flickering Dot With over 70 planets identified around distant stars, astronomers are now looking for ways to classify which ones are most like Earth – that is to say, the ones most likely with biological potential.
	2/25/2002 Clues to the Last Common Ancestor Molecular detectives have traced human ancestry back to the so-called Mitochondrial Eve, the last female common ancestor. More recent research has posited a Y-chromosome Adam, the last male common ancestor.
	2/22/2002 Genetic Alchemy: Turning Lobsters into Fruit Flies Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, now have genetic evidence that explains how such drastic alterations to body plans were able to occur during the early evolution of animals.
	2/20/2002 Warm-nosed Robot Breaks the Ice An adventurous science team recently returned from the deep Norwegian glacial fields, having tested an instrument which may one day be used to explore areas beneath the frozen surfaces of other worlds.
	2/15/2002 From Lightbulbs to Life A one-celled organism that lives in deep-sea volcanic vents has developed an alternative metabolism that uses tungsten - an element popularly used to make lightbulb filaments.
	2/13/2002 Interview with Michael Meyer In a recent interview with Kathleen Connell of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, Michael Meyer discusses the past, present, and future of NASA’s Astrobiology program.
	2/12/2002 The Great Dying 250 million years ago something unknown wiped out most life on our planet. Now scientists are finding buried clues to the mystery inside tiny capsules of cosmic gas.
	2/6/2002 Earthshine When the crescent moon is just a sliver each month, the phrase--'old moon in the young moon's arms'-- poetically describes a marvel of nature.
	2/1/2002 Digital Zookeepers Take a Census Cataloguing the taxonomy of an entire planet's history, a 'digital zoo' holds great promise for resolving century-old debates about how the Earth got to be such a rich spawning ground for life's diversity.
	1/30/2002 Living in the Dark Over the past several years, scientists have discovered life in the most unusual places. From rocky abodes deep underground, to hot volcanic vents under the seas, there seems to be no place on Earth that life doesn’t exist.
	1/28/2002 The Tagish Lake Meteorite: A scientific consortium of 4 universities and NASA is now trying to uncover the debris and sample the early solar system's unique chemistry.
	1/25/2002 NASA Scientist Finds Some Meteorites Not Sugar-free A discovery by a NASA scientist of sugar and several related organic compounds in two carbonaceous meteorites provides the first evidence that another fundamental building block of life on Earth may have come from outer space.
	1/23/2002 Bugs From Hell Geochemists and microbiologists are delving into the details of extreme biochemistry deep within the Earth, where chemical and metabolic processes go at glacial pace, and life appears to be completely disconnected from the photosynthesis-based biological cycles that dominate surface life.
	1/18/2002 In Search of E.T.'s Breath Advanced space telescopes might soon probe far-off worlds for the chemical signatures of alien life.
	1/16/2002 Living on Fool’s Gold Reseachers study chemolithotrophy bacteria that survive by getting its energy by oxidizing pyrite, also known as ‘fool’s gold'.
	1/11/2002 Life without Volcanic Heat An 18-story undersea vent off the Atlantic, near what has been called the 'Lost City', has recently revealed itself as ripe with exotic microbial life.
	1/9/2002 Evidence of bacteria on Europa? Jupiter's moon Europa is thought to be one of the most likely abodes for microscopic life in our solar system. The ice-covered world may have liquid water, energy, and organic compounds - all three of the ingredients necessary for life to survive.
	1/4/2002 Water on Mars: Not So Ancient, After All When Mars Global Surveyor began mapping Mars in sharp detail early in 1999, it disclosed startling evidence that water has shaped martian landforms within the past 10 million years.
	1/2/2002 Jurassic Spark: Early Ancestor of Mammals Found What is nearly 200 million years old, furry, weighed less than a paper clip and scurried beneath the feet of dinosaurs? A team of fossil-finders, led by researchers at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History, suggest the answer may include one of your relatives - a distant cousin of modern mammals.
	12/31/2001 Scientists Find Evidence of Ancient Microbial Life on Mars An international team of researchers has discovered compelling evidence that magnetite crystals in the Martian meteorite ALH84001 are of biological origin.
	12/28/2001 The Oldest Life on Land Fossilized remnants of a microbial mat provide evidence that life existed on land as early as 2.6 to 2.7 billion years ago. The findings suggest that an oxygen atmosphere and a protective ozone layer were in place around Earth by that time.
	12/26/2001 One-Handed Life Scientists with the NASA Astrobiology Institute have created self-replicating molecules that produce only "left-handed" molecules or only "right-handed" molecules.The findings may help explain why life is based on left-handed amino acids.
	12/24/2001 Earth's Oldest Mineral Grains Suggest an Early Start for Life The hills of Western Australia are home to zircons nearly four-and-a-half billion years old. The tiny crystals may change our understanding of the newly-formed Earth.
	12/19/2001 The Heat is On: Asteroid Belt Found around Nearby Star When unusually warm dust was first discovered around a nearby star, called zeta Leporis, infrared astronomers began hunting in detail for the heat source.
	12/17/2001 The First Sulfur Eaters Scientists have found indications of a type of bacteria that consume sulfate and produce sulfide as a waste product, possibly one of the oldest known life forms on the planet.
	12/14/2001 Test-tube RNA Research done by scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research offers insights into evolutionary origins of life.
	12/10/2001 NASA’s Global Surveyor Sees Possible Climate Change on Mars The planet Mars we know today is a cold, dry, desert world, but suppose the martian climate is changing even now, year to year and decade to decade?
	12/5/2001 Atmosphere of an Extrasolar Planet Detected for the First Time Astronomers have made the first direct detection and chemical analysis of an atmosphere of a planet that exists outside our solar system.
	12/3/2001 Doubts About ALH84001: The JSC Mars Meteorite Team Responds A response by the JSC Mars Meteorite Team regarding a paper "Magnetite morphology and life on Mars" by Buseck et al. that appears in the 19 November 2001 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
	11/30/2001 Café Methane In recent years, researchers discovered life also thrives in other, much colder, lightless deep-sea ecosystems besides hydrothermal vents.
	11/28/2001 Eating Kerogen A team of researchers discovered that microorganisms in Kentucky's New Albany Shale are eating kerogen.
	11/26/2001 Dedication of the Carl Sagan Center NASA Ames Research Center dedicates a site for the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos.
	11/23/2001 Evidence of Martian life dealt critical blow There may have once been (and perhaps still is) life on Mars, but the evidence for it is barely stirring.
	11/14/2001 Europe Heads for Mars The Beagle 2, a compact, lightweight lander carried on the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express, will search for signs of life on the red planet.
	11/2/2001 Why Microbes Matter Research of possible microbial life on Mars can lead to advances in biotechnology and medicine while, at the same time, bringing us closer to understanding our origins.
	10/31/2001 The Invasion of the Deep-sea Microbes The microscopic life around hydrothermal vents may have an ancient heritage -- genetic comparisons suggest that modern vent microbes are close kin to the earliest forms of life on Earth.
	10/29/2001 Glass Munchers Under the Sea A team of researchers recently announced that they have found the deepest-living microbes on the planet that eats into rock at the bottom of the sea floor.
	10/26/2001 The USA Returns to Mars NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft reached Mars and was captured into orbit after a successful main engine burn.
	10/22/2001 The Three Domains of Life When scientists first started to classify life, everything was designated as either an animal or a plant. But as new forms of life were discovered and our knowledge of life on Earth grew, the original classification was not sufficient enough to organize the diversity and complexity of life.
	10/19/2001 Titan: Biological Birthplace? Saturn’s giant moon Titan, cloaked in a thick nitrogen atmosphere laced with hydrocarbons, could provide a laboratory in the sky for scientists seeking insight into the origins of life.
	10/17/2001 Photosynthesis: Take It or Leave It A serendipitous examination of ocean waters last year brought a big surprise for a team of US and Canadian scientists, a surprise that’s causing marine ecologists to rethink the details of how ocean ecosystems function.
	10/12/2001 Carbonaceous Clues to the Early Solar System Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites contain vital clues to the evolution of carbon compounds in our solar system preceding the origin of life.
	10/10/2001 Space Bones Weightlessness sure looks like a lot of fun, but prolonged exposure to zero-G in space can have some negative side effects -- like the weakening of human bones.
	10/3/2001 Finding Distant Worlds We know that there are at least 75 planets outside our own solar system, orbiting their distant stars. Although we have never seen any of these planets with our own eyes, several different techniques exist to detect these extrasolar planets.
	9/28/2001 Evolution’s Double Take The origin of hydrogenosomes has been debated for some time. Some researchers believe that hydrogenosomes have repeatedly evolved from mitochondria in the course of evolution.
	9/26/2001 Cometary Closeup In a risky flyby, NASA's ailing Deep Space 1 spacecraft successfully navigated past a comet, giving researchers the best look ever inside the glowing core of icy dust and gas.
	9/24/2001 Making the Moon The "giant impact" theory, first proposed in the mid-1970s to explain how the Moon formed, has now received a major boost. New computer simulations demonstrate how a single impact could yield the current Earth-Moon system.
	9/14/2001 A Greener Planetary Greenhouse In recent years Earth-orbiting satellites have seen plants growing more vigorously than usual over northern parts of our planet.
	9/10/2001 Genomics Meets Geology Chemist Steven A. Benner and his colleagues are combining chemistry, geological history and paleontology in an approach aimed at better understanding how life on Earth works now and how it evolved.
	9/7/2001 Evidence of Recent Climate Change on Mars New images of the surface of Mars provide the first direct evidence that the climate of Mars has changed during the last 100,000 years. This is much earlier than previous estimates, which calculated a climate change dating back hundreds of millions of years.
	9/4/2001 Jupiter-Size Planet Found Orbiting Star in Big Dipper A team of astronomers has found a Jupiter-size planet in a circular orbit around a faint nearby star, raising intriguing prospects of finding a solar system with characteristics similar to our own.
	8/31/2001 Scientists Hunt For Light Flashes From Extraterrestrial Civilizations Astronomers are broadening the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by looking for powerful light pulses coming from other star systems.
	8/24/2001 Guerrero Negro Guerrero Negro is a popular destination for ecotourists to gaze at the gray whales, but scientists go to investigate an ecosystem full of microscopic organisms that hold important clues to what life was like on early Earth.
	8/22/2001 Having a Ball on Mars An amusing accident in the Mojave desert has inspired a new kind of Mars rover -- a two-story high beach ball that can descend to the Martian surface, land safely, and explore vast stretches of the Red Planet.
	8/20/2001 Advances in our Understanding of Life Over the past two decades, advances in a number of scientific disciplines have helped us better understand the nature and evolution of life on Earth. These scientific developments also have helped lay the foundation for astrobiology, opening up new possibilities for the existence of life in the Solar System and beyond.
	8/15/2001 Water on Mars: Not So Ancient, After All When Mars Global Surveyor began mapping Mars in sharp detail early in 1999, it disclosed startling evidence that water has shaped martian landforms within the past 10 million years.
	8/12/2001 Gravity Hurts (so Good) Strange things can happen to the human body when people venture into space -- and the familiar pull of gravity vanishes.
	8/10/2001 Life on Ice From Arctic sea ice to Antarctic lakes and dry valleys, scientists study microbes that tolerate freezing temperatures on Earth to learn where to look for life on other worlds.
	8/8/2001 Extrasolar Planets with Earth-like Orbits Scientists are discovering extrasolar planets with Earth-like orbits. Could it be possible for Earth-like orbiting planets to habor life just like Earth?
	8/6/2001 Are We Alone? Where are our Nearest Neighbors? Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science discusses the search for life in the Universe. Are we alone?
	8/1/2001 Did Tectonis Get an Early Start? A recent discovery near the Great Wall in China adds new support to the theory that plate tectonics began very early in the Earth's history.
	7/30/2001 SETI and the Search for Life Christopher F. Chyba of the SETI Institute discusses the search for life in the Universe. Are we alone?
	7/27/2001 Starved for Nitrogen A team of researchers, including a NASA scientist, reports that an early-life nitrogen crisis may have triggered a critical evolutionary leap about 2 billion years ago.
	7/25/2001 Happy Anniversary, Viking Lander On July 20, 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander touched down safely on the surface of Mars, revealing an alien world that continues to puzzle scientists and tempt explorers.
	7/23/2001 The Search for Life in the Universe Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses the search for life in the Universe. Are we alone?
	7/20/2001 NASA Picks Mars Scout Mission Ideas for Further Study NASA recently selected the ten most promising "Scout" mission concepts from among the 43 proposed for possible launch to Mars in 2007.
	7/18/2001 Mars: Dead or Alive? Recent research on the planet has convinced some scientists that Mars may still be geologically active.
	7/16/2001 Water Worlds As an alien sun blazes through its death throes, it is apparently vaporizing a surrounding swarm of comets, releasing a huge cloud of water vapor.
	7/13/2001 Life Down Under Recent work by Christopher Chyba (SETI Institute) and Kevin Hand (Stanford University) suggests that there may be ways to nourish biology in watery environments where the Sun's rays don't penetrate.
	7/9/2001 How Small Can Life Be? As advanced microscopes enable us to peer deeper into the realms of inner space, biologists have been faced with a vexing question: Is there a size limit on life?
	7/6/2001 The Meaning of Life Sitting beneath a dark night sky, looking up at the vast array of stars, what human has not wondered, "Are we alone?"
	6/22/2001 Europa: Chewy or Crunchy? For geophysicist William B. Moore, the question of whether life exists on Jupiter's moon Europa boils down to whether the moon's center is chewy or crunchy.
	6/18/2001 A Pregnancy Test for Mars The test that tells women they are pregnant might also be able to find signs of living organisms on Mars.
	6/15/2001 Do We Know What Killed the Dinosaurs? What killed the dinosaurs? Many geologists and paleontologists now think that a large asteroid or comet impacting the Earth must have caused a global catastrophe that led to this extensive loss of life.
	6/13/2001 Swept Away: Evidence of Erosion on Mars Massive erosion shaped the surface of Mars, according to planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.
	6/6/2001 Watching Earth Breathe The first continuous global observations of the biological engine that drives life on Earth will be used by scientists to study the fate of carbon in the atmosphere, the length of terrestrial growing seasons and the vitality of the ocean's food web.
	6/4/2001 Cold Clouds and Water in Space Astronomers have for the first time determined how much of the water in cold regions of space is in gaseous form and how much is frozen. This is especially interesting because these regions are the future birthplaces of low-mass stars like the Sun, and solar systems like our own.
	6/1/2001 Tropical Glaciers Glacial deposits that formed on tropical land areas during snowball Earth episodes around 600 million years ago, lead to questions about how the glaciers that left the deposits were created. Now, Penn State geoscientists believe that these glaciers could only have formed after the Earth's oceans were entirely covered by thick sea ice.
	5/30/2001 Did Hades Freeze Over? Initially, the surface of our planet was a fiery, molten stew. Within a few million years, the crust cooled and water vapor rained down to form the oceans, where life may have made it's first appearance.
	5/25/2001 A Taste for Comet Water When Comet LINEAR broke apart last year it revealed what many scientists thought all along: Water in Earth's oceans could have come from outer space.
	5/23/2001 Growing Glowing Martian Mustard A team of University of Florida scientists has genetically modified a tiny plant to send reports back from Mars in a most unworldly way: by emitting an eerie, fluorescent glow.
	5/21/2001 The Mass Extinction that Left the Dinosaurs Standing A mass extinction about 200 million years ago destroyed at least half of the species on Earth, but left the dinosaurs standing.
	5/18/2001 Galactic Habitable Zones Our Milky Way Galaxy is unusual in that it is one of the most massive galaxies in the nearby universe. Our Solar System also seems to have qualities that make it rather unique. These qualities make the Sun one of the few stars in the Galaxy capable of supporting complex life.
	5/13/2001 Raising Baby Tubeworms For years scientists have wondered how giant red-tipped tubeworms and other exotic marine life found at hydrothermal vents get from place to place and how long their larva survive in a cold, eternally dark place. Now biologist Lauren Mullineaux and colleagues have helped answer those questions.
	5/9/2001 Life's Baby Steps Billions of years ago, amino acids somehow linked together to form chainlike molecules. Now scientists have discovered what may be a key step in this process - a step that has baffled researchers for more than a half a century.
	5/7/2001 How Jupiter Got Big How did the largest planet in our solar system form? New theories on how planets like Jupiter form put traditional theories to the test.
	5/4/2001 Unpuzzling Proteins Thanks to a new supercomputer, scientists may be a step closer to understanding one of nature's more difficult puzzles.
	5/2/2001 Space Weather on Mars Future human explorers of Mars can leave their umbrellas back on Earth, but perhaps they shouldn't forget their Geiger counters! A NASA experiment en route to the Red Planet aims to find out.
	4/27/2001 Reflections From a Warm Little Pond Scientists theorize possible scenarios on how life could have first originated on Earth.
	4/23/2001 Keeping "Cool" at Deep-Sea Vents Using a novel detector attached to a submarine, a research team led by University of Delaware marine scientists has determined that water chemistry controls the location and distribution of two species of weird worms that inhabit deep-sea hydrothermal vent sites.
	4/20/2001 Was Johnny Appleseed a Comet? A new experiment suggests that comet impacts could have sowed the seeds of life on Earth billions of years ago.
	4/18/2001 Roses for the Red Planet Scientists discuss the importance and the possible risks of seeding the Red Planet.
	4/16/2001 Oily Fossils Rrovide Clues to the Evolution of Flowers A team of Stanford geochemists has found evidence that flowering plants may have evolved 250 million years ago - long before the first pollen grain appeared in the fossil record.
	4/13/2001 Focus on Europa Scientists from a variety of disciplines met recently to consider the possibility of life on Europa, and to plan how to look for it.
	4/11/2001 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea An expedition to geysers on the floor of the Indian Ocean is studying how animals there evolve and disperse geographically.
	4/9/2001 Life's Chemical Fingerprints Using a technique called Raman spectroscopy, researchers are developing instruments that may one day search for life on Mars, Europa, or Callisto.
	4/6/2001 Return to the Red Planet On Saturday, April 7, NASA's next mission to Mars is set to launch. The 2001 Mars Odyssey will investigate the history of water on the Red Planet.
	4/2/2001 Taking the Temperature of a Martian Meteorite A chunk of Mars that was hurled to Earth remained cool enough to preserve any microorganisms aboard. So says a group of researchers who have examined martian meteorite ALH84001.
	3/26/2001 Can Liquid Water Exist on Present-day Mars? Scientific consensus holds that liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars. But now a pair of scientists argue that liquid water—in limited amounts and for limited times—may indeed be present on Mars' surface.
	3/23/2001 NASA Astrobiology Institute Announces New Teams NASA has selected four new teams to become part of the agency's Astrobiology Institute (NAI), a national and international research consortium that studies the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and in the universe.
	3/21/2001 Evo Devo Learns a Larval Lesson Scientists have studied the life history of animals, part of a field called development, for many decades. Other scientists have studied how life arose and evolved on Earth. For the first time since the early part of this century, the two fields are coming together, in a new discipline called "Evo Devo."
	3/19/2001 An Astronomy First: Telescopes Double-team Hawaiian Night Sky Proving that two telescopes are better than one, NASA astronomers have gathered the first starlight obtained by linking two Hawaiian 10-meter telescopes.
	3/16/2001 Through Thick or Thin: Exploring Europa's Outer Layer of Ice When NASA's Galileo spacecraft sent back images and data of the Jovian moon Europa, scientists began thinking seriously that life just might exist on this enigmatic, frozen world.
	3/14/2001 Looking for Signs of Life in Acid-washed Rocks Extraordinary clues to the history of biological evolution on Earth often come from something as mundane as rocks. To better understand the close connection between life and geology - and how one affects the other - new laboratory methods are being developed to tease out the information that ancient rocks contain.
	3/12/2001 TNA World DNA is the building block for life on Earth. But it is a highly complex molecule, and could not have arranged itself spontaneously. What did it develop from? Astrobiologists examine possible ancestors of DNA: nucleic acids called PNA, p-RNA, and TNA.
	3/9/2001 Ganymede's Liquid Past Long swaths of bright, flat terrain on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Ganymede may testify that water or slush emerged there about a billion years ago, say planetary scientists.
	3/7/2001 Some Like It Hot NASA astrobiologist Jack Farmer studies microorganisms in the hot springs of Yellowstone and in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. His work may help NASA search for traces of life on Mars.
	3/5/2001 A Shortage of Planets When they turned the Hubble Space Telescope on a distant globular cluster of stars, astronomers expected to find fifteen or twenty planets. They found zero.
	2/28/2001 Scientists Find Evidence of Ancient Microbial Life on Mars An international team of researchers has discovered compelling evidence that magnetite crystals in the Martian meteorite ALH84001 are of biological origin.
	2/26/2001 Apocalypse Then A violent collision with a space rock, like the one that doomed the dinosaurs, may have also caused our planet's greatest mass extinction 250 million years ago.
	2/21/2001 Squaring Off with a Robotic Serpent NASA engineers are developing an intelligent robot snake that can slither over or around obstacles and into cracks in a planet's surface. The "snakebot" may one day search for water and fossils on other planets.
	2/14/2001 Carbonated Mars Here on Earth the only way to make carbonate rocks is with the aid of liquid water. Finding such rocks on Mars might prove, once and for all, that the barren Red Planet was once warm and wet.
	2/12/2001 A Visit to Cupid for Valentine's Day On February 12, NEAR Shoemaker becomes the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. Its findings may tell us something about our planet, our solar system, and solar systems beyond our own.
	2/9/2001 Seeing Mars Through a Test Tube By recreating the Martian surface in the laboratory, NASA scientists may have begun to answer two questions: why the Martian surface is so red, and why organic life has not yet been found there.
	2/7/2001 Looking for life, Astrobiologists Dive Deep Coral-like mounds on the floor of a Canadian lake may make it easier someday to identify life on other planets.
	2/2/2001 Jovian Moons Jupiter's four largest moons were discovered by Galileo in 1610. Three of them might hold oceans of liquid water beneath their icy exteriors. Liquid water is a prerequisite for life.
	1/30/2001 Scientists Find Clues That Life Began in Deep Space Duplicating the harsh conditions of space in their laboratory, NASA scientists have created primitive cells with membrane-like structures. These chemical compounds may have played a part in the origin of life.
	1/29/2001 Without Jupiter, Home Alone The giant planet Jupiter swallows up asteroids and comets, or flings them into space. Without Jupiter, comet and asteroid impacts might have wiped out any life on Earth.
	1/26/2001 Mars Ocean Hypothesis Hits the Shore Photographs of the Martian surface find no sign of a sea cliff along a possible ancient shoreline.
	1/23/2001 The Greening of the Red Planet A hardy microbe from Earth may one day transform the barren ground of Mars into arable soil.
	1/22/2001 Thawing Mars Greenhouse gases might one day be used to warm the cold surface of Mars, and make the planet habitable for humans.
	1/18/2001 Astrobiologists Find Evidence of Early Life on Land Scientists with NASA's Astrobiology Institute have discovered evidence that microbial life emerged on land between 2.6 billion and 2.7 billion years ago, much earlier than previously thought.
	1/16/2001 The Dance of the Giant Planets A team of planet hunters January 9th announced a discovery that will help researchers better understand planet migration and how planets' gravitational pulls influence each other.
	1/9/2001 Terrestrial Powerhouses A remarkable protein called bacteriorhodopsin converts light into metabolic energy. After 30 years of investigations, this protein has finally revealed some of its secrets.
	1/8/2001 Kepler Planet-finding Mission Selected for Discovery Program NASA has selected the Kepler space telescope one of three candidates for NASA's next Discovery Program mission. Kepler will search for habitable Earth-size planets around stars beyond our solar system.
	1/4/2001 Martian Micromagnets The Allan Hills meteorite from Mars is peppered with tiny magnetic crystals that on our planet are made only by bacteria.
	12/28/2000 More Distant Planets Discovered Imagine discovering eight new worlds outside our solar system while the rest of the world is on summer vacation. See what's out of this world, thanks to the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory and the European Southern Observatory.
	12/21/2000 Evidence of ocean on Jupiter's moon Ganymede Data from the Galileo space probe suggest that liquid water may lie beneath Ganymede's icy crust.
	12/19/2000 Titanic Moon: Orange Soup from Saturnian Turn Researchers for the NASA Astrobiology Institute and Penn State have recently developed a new method that has improved our understanding of Titan's atmospheric chemistry.
	12/18/2000 Pyruving the Origin of Life For the origin of life, chemical synthesis of pyruvic acid is a critical step. In a difficult experiment, Carnegie Institute/NAI researchers report that the natural synthesis of such compounds would occur wherever hot ocean vents pass through iron sulfide-containing crust.
	12/14/2000 Evidence Of Martian Land Of Lakes Discovered Layers of sedimentary rock paint a portrait of an ancient Mars that may have featured numerous lakes and shallow seas.
	12/12/2000 New Images Suggest Present-day Source of Liquid Water on Mars Using data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, imaging scientists have observed features that suggest there may be current sources of liquid water at or near the surface of the red planet.
	12/11/2000 The Case of the Missing Water Did an ancient flood cover the northern lowlands? Mars Orbiter images give a front row seat.
	12/7/2000 Back to the Surface: NASA’s 2003 Mission to Mars Two Mars rovers, one in May and the other in June of 2003 will land six months later at different locations. Both take on the daunting task of probing for water clues.
	12/4/2000 NASA Astrobiology Architect, Dr. Gerald Soffen, Remembered NASA Scientist Dr. Gerald Soffen, who led the Viking science team that performed the first experiments on the surface of the planet Mars and a key architect of the Astrobiology Institute, is fondly remembered.
	11/27/2000 Mars Lakes A 'young' Martian lake would be at least half-billion years old, but Martian deltas might not seem as remote as the present day desert.
	11/27/2000 Life Under Bombardment Does Greenland give a clue as to whether life was seeded twice: 'stock' cultures surviving one big impact event? Life Under Bombardment looks for the evidence of our terrestrial past.
	11/27/2000 Leonid Meteors Yield Rich Astrobiology Research Results In search of meteor showers, an airborne research mission indicates that the chemical precursors to life found in comet dust may well have survived a plunge into early Earth's atmosphere.

Update on a New Photosynthetic Protein [10-1-2001]
A recently discovered pigment that converts light into energy occurs in microbes throughout the world's oceans.

Rare Canadian Meteorite Tagged as First of Its Kind Found on Earth [8-27-2001]
In a triumph for space geology, a team of scientists said they found a rare meteorite, it's the first of its kind to be found on Earth -- a dark and rare type called a D asteroid.

Study Doubles Number of Potential Earth-Like Planets [8-17-2001]
The standard model for the formation of rocky planets like Earth appears to be on solid ground even when applied to systems in which two stars orbit each other, according to a new study.

Rethinking Viking: The Life on Mars Debate Rages On [8-3-2001]
Twenty-five years ago, the Viking mission scooped up Martian soil and analyzed it for signs of life. When Viking found no organic compounds, many scientists concluded that the Red Planet was lifeless. Today these conclusions are being reexamined.

Wandering Mystery Planets [7-2-2001]
Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted mysterious planet-sized objects apparently running loose in a distant cluster of stars.

Simulating a Martian Colony in the Arctic [6-28-2001]
Once again, an island in the Canadian high arctic, a polar desert of a world, will serve this summer as a little bit of Mars on Earth.

New Signs of Recent Water at Mars [6-25-2001]
Piles of crater-topped debris snapped by NASA's Mars orbiter and caused by the teakettle explosion of water through volcanic lava flows at the planet's equator are the best evidence yet for recent liquid water at the Red Planet, a team of scientists say.

Mars Meteorite Discovered in Oman Desert [6-20-2001]
The meteorite, known as SAU 094, could help determine if life ever existed on Mars.

The Birth and Death of Embryonic Planets [5-11-2001]
Researchers study how planets form around stars in the Orion Nebula, hoping to understand better how planets in our own solar system formed.

Life As We Didn't Know It [4-25-2001]
Biologists always thought life required the Sun's energy, until they found an ecosystem that thrives in complete darkness.

Back-to-School Time for Astrobiologists [4-04-2001]
NATO and NASA are joining forces to host an Advanced Study Institute for students and practitioners of astrobiology.

The Lure of Hematite [3-30-2001]
On rusty-red Mars, a curious deposit of gray-colored hematite (a mineral cousin of common household rust) could hold the key to the mystery of elusive Martian water.

Mars or Europa: Where Does Life Exist? [3-28-2001]
Leading experts—including Jack Farmer and Bruce Jakosky of the NASA Astrobiology Institute—discuss where and how best to conduct the hunt for life elsewhere in our solar system.

Two Rovers in Search of a Landing Site [3-2-2001]
In the spring of 2003, NASA will send two rovers to Mars to search for signs of water in the planet's ancient past. But where exactly on Mars should they look for it?