Respect for the Unseen

Hadeel Saad shares her ethics & society case study, which she completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. Ethics, when defined by science, is discovering and designing a code of values to guide choices and actions for those in the scientific community. The codes created then serve as an outline for what is morally acceptable in experiments. However, many of these codes were created long ago, and our understanding in nearly every field has altered, yet our ethical codes have […]

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The Problems of Contaminating Mars with Earth’s Microorganisms

Rodrigo Abans shares his ethics & society case study, which he completed as part of our Young Scientist Program. There has been much concern about whether humankind is taking enough care in space exploration. There are a plethora of ethical issues. One of these concerns is the fact that anything that goes offworld carries a certain amount of dormant microorganisms. This led to the decision of destroying the Juno spacecraft by crashing it into Jupiter instead of risking an accidental crash […]

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BlueSciCon Episode 40: Astrobiology with Cosmic Rays

Dr. Dimitra Atri Listen: [mp3 download] Questions to consider: What organisms on Earth can survive solely on non-solar sources of energy? What sources of high-energy radiation could provide habitable conditions to subsurface environments? Could galactic cosmic rays power life beneath thick sheets of ice or deep oceans? What regions in the Solar System are the most likely to have increased habitability from galactic cosmic rays? How would this additional habitability mechanism direct the remote search for life in the universe? […]

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Dr. Rika Anderson Awarded NAI Fellowship

Our own Dr. Rika Anderson was selected for the prestigious NASA Astrobiology Postdoctoral Program for her proposal titled, “Unraveling the impact of ecological selection pressures on the archaeal pangenome”. In her research, Dr. Anderson seeks to understand the evolution of microorganisms and how they adapt to fill new ecological niches. She will compare the genomics of organisms adapted to extreme environments by studying several species collected from Yellowstone National Park. The goal of this research is to understand the factors […]

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