We have only one example of biology forming in the universe ' life on Earth. But what if life can form in other ways' How do you look for alien life when you don't know what alien life might look like' These questions are preoccupying astrobiologists, who are scientists who look for life beyond Earth. Astrobiologists have attempted to come up with universal rules that govern the emergence of complex physical and biological systems both on Earth and beyond. I'm an astronomer who has written extensively about astrobiology. Through my research, I've learned that the most abundant form of extraterrestrial life is likely to be microbial, since single cells can form more readily than large organisms. But just in case there's advanced alien life out there, I'm on the international advisory council for the group designing messages to send to those civilizations. Many of these exoplanets are small and rocky, like Earth, and in the habitable zones of their stars. The habitable zone is the range of distances between the surface of a planet and the star it orbits that would allow the planet to have liquid water, and thus support life as we on Earth know it....
We are two astronomers who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence ' or SETI. In our research, we try to characterize and detect signs of technology originating from beyond Earth. These are called technosignatures. While scanning the sky for a TV broadcast of some extraterrestrial Olympics may sound straightforward, searching for signs of distant, advanced civilizations is a much more nuanced and difficult task than it might seem. The modern scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence began in 1959 when astronomers Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison showed that radio transmissions from Earth could be detected by radio telescopes at interstellar distances. The same year, Frank Drake, launched the first SETI search, Project Ozma, by pointing a large radio telescope a two nearby Sun-like stars to see if he could detect any radio signals coming from them. Following the invention of the laser in 1960, astronomers showed that visible light could also be detected from distant planets....
Life-sciences companies are navigating unprecedented yet uncertain times. The collision of scientific progress, technology disruptions, and innovation in clinical practice has tremendous potential to improve patientsâ lives and create corporate value. Yet it is not proving easy to realize that potential.Most life-sciences executives agree that long-term value creation lies in innovation-led growth, with digital and analytics at its core. And most companies have made significant investments to harness that value, undertaking projects and pilots that give glimpses of the exciting rewards ahead for stakeholders. But the vision of a digitally transformed life-sciences company in which people, data, technology, and partner organizations work together to create a virtuous cycle of innovation and value creation remains tantalizingly out of reach because it has proven hard to scale projects.Pioneering life-sciences companies are now beginning to discover the solution, however, by approaching digital transformations differently. Rather than working on discrete and sometimes random innovation projects, they are taking a more holistic approach that super-scales and supercharges the power of data and analytics by focusing on entire parts of the business system, from innovation and clinical trials to commercialization models. We may see these companies break away from the pack in the next three to five years thanks to the structural advantages gained by getting to scale faster than their peers and being able to anticipate and adopt new technology advances faster too....
Earthâs sister planet, Venus, has not been regarded as a high priority in the search for life. Its surface temperature of around 450°C is thought to be hostile to even the hardiest of micro-organisms, and its thick, sulphurous and acidic atmosphere has kept the surface almost completely free from visiting spacecraft.We have only had the briefest of glimpses of a barren landscape from the two Russian landers that made it down to the ground back in the 1980s. So itâs no wonder that a report published in Nature Astronomy that the upper levels of Venusâ atmosphere contain a molecule that is a potential signature of life, comes as something of a shock.The molecule in question is PH3 (phosphine). It is a highly reactive and flammable, extremely smelly toxic gas, found (among other places) in heaps of penguin dung and the bowels of badgers and fish....
