BlueSciCon Episode 42: Temperature oscillations near natural nuclear reactor cores and the potential for prebiotic oligomer synthesis

Dr. Zach Adam Listen: [mp3 download] Questions to consider: What are natural nuclear reactors? What planetary conditions allow natural nuclear reactors to occur? What is so special about natural nuclear reactors with respect to the origins of life? There are already lots of theories about geological/atmospheric settings for origins of life, why do we need another one and how is it different? How is the energy of a reactor different from the energy of, say, lightning bolts or UV radiation? […]

October 20, 2015

Outreach in India: Talk About Space

BMSIS Young Scientist Anuti Joshi engaged a group of fifteen engineering teachers at Saraswati College of Engineering in Mumbai, India. Anuti’s engagement was part of her Communications requirements for the BMSIS Young Scientist Program. BMSIS is continuously committed to engaging the public in the wonders of Space Exploration and the Earth System. Our Young Scientist Program continues this tradition by engaging local communities around the world. Read Anuti’s impressions below: I had the wonderful opportunity to spend time with […]

October 16, 2015

Body, Spirit, and the Emptiness of Space

Mohit Nalavadi shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. Characterized by the belief that we can plan and create a better world through action, the 1960s approach to human progress may soon meet us again in 15 years. NASA, the ESA, SpaceX and others agree that the 2030s is the realistic decade in which we send humans to Mars. Inevitably, this in consequence will reinvigorate our primal instinct of exploration […]

September 9, 2015

Dr. Craig Hargrove Leads Mission to Moon

A CubeSat mission led by Dr. Craig Hardgrove was recently selected by NASA as part of its ongoing program of lunar exploration. About the size of a shoebox, the LunaH-Map mission is being developed by a team at Arizona State University with a goal of producing a detailed map of water ice deposits across the moon. CubeSat missions provide low-cost opportunities for investigators to develop their own space-based experiments, and the selection of LunaH-Map represents a big step forward for […]

September 3, 2015

BlueSciCon Episode 41: Genomes, the fossil record and more: Accessing the artifacts of Earth’s earliest evolutionary history

Dr. Betul Kacar Listen: [mp3 download] Questions to consider: What is experimental evolution? How do living microorganisms help us to better understand the fossil record? What is involved in “reconstructing” a genome? How do we understand the connection between protein functions and organism behavior? [ca_audio url=”http://beerwith.bmsis.org/BlueSciCon_41_SEP2015.mp3″ width=”500″ height=”27″ css_class=”codeart-google-mp3-player”]

September 1, 2015

Popular Science: Should We Liberate Mars?

Should Mars be designated as independent of Earth, prior to the arrival of any human colonists? A new article by Popular Science discusses Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra’s proposal of “liberating Mars” to allow for the development of a second instance of civilization. Rather than a conventional colony as has been seen through history, an independent and liberated Mars could provide a testbed for new and radical ideas in civilization. This idea was initially featured by Popular Science and generated subsequent coverage […]

August 20, 2015

BMS Symposium on Astrobiology India

Benu Atri provides an excellent summary of the first Blue Marble Space symposium on the Astrobiology India website. The BMS symposium was held in Chicago on the Sunday prior to AbSciCon, which provided a rare and valuable opportunity for members of our community to converse in person. Benu summarizes the roundtable discussion at the symposium, which was recorded and edited into an episode of our BlueSciCon podcast series. If you missed the symposium, then be sure to check out Benu’s […]

August 6, 2015

Podcast: Astrobiology with Cosmic Rays

Our “BlueSciCon” podcast for July features a conversation with Dr. Dimitra Atri titled “Astrobiology with Cosmic Rays“. The sun provides the primary energy source for life on Earth, and biologists have also speculated that geothermal heat near oceanic vents may have also provided energy for early forms of life. But could life survive on other forms of energy? Galactic cosmic rays are charged particles with origins from outside our solar system, and Dr. Atri suggests that these cosmic rays could […]

August 5, 2015

Solar Events Unlikely to Cause Birth Defects

High-energy cosmic rays can pose threats to airline crews at high altitudes, but how much risk do they pose for everyday life on the surface? A new study by a team of scientists that includes Dr. Dimitra Atri finds that Earth’s atmosphere provides a shilding mechanism that protects us at the surface, further confounding the problem of birth defects but at least giving us a sense of safety from cosmic rays above. This research has been featured by Science Daily […]

August 4, 2015

Spaceward Bound India 2016

Spaceward Bound, a NASA Ames initiative, is an opportunity for astrogeologists and astrobiologists to work with students in remote, off Earth analogous environments to conduct field experiments and engage in scientific discussions with participating students and science educators. As a first, scientists from NASA’s astrobiology community are teaming up with their counterparts in Australia and India to visit Ladakh, India in August 2016 to conduct experiments in a range of research areas. Ladakh is a cold, high altitude (3000-6000m asl) […]

« 1 … 22 23 24 25 26 … 38 »