Astrobiology

The NASA-funded Infiniscope project is developing a new technology-enabled framework to empower education outreach by astrobiologists, aligned with NASA planetary exploration missions. The framework is built around two key technologies advanced by the Infiniscope team: Torus, a new open-source adaptive learning platform developed in collaboration with the Open Learning Initia...

In this paper, we report a fully automated, end-to-end (sample-in/data-out) capillary electrophoresis system. The system’s dimensions conform to the cylindrical shape and power/data requirements of the science payload compartment of the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), a snake-like robot capable of autonomously navigating challenging terrain on Earth or other worlds. C...

The deep entanglement of biomolecular structure and function with aqueous systems supports the view that water actively sculpted both molecules and processes during the origins of life and continues to constrain evolution today. Nature’s rules of biochemistry and biophysics have survived for nearly 4 billion years. The in vivo roles of water, the architectures of […]

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The geophysical evolution and astrobiological potential of ocean worlds are indelibly linked to the chemical compositions of their oceans and ice shells. In the absence of direct measurements, empirical estimates of subsurface ocean compositions have relied on the assumption that the ionic compositions of ice shell surfaces are representative of their underlying ocean composi...

A new study of infant stars in the Perseus and Orion star-forming regions suggests that most close pairs of stars are born as twins in the same disk, rather than drifting together later from larger distances. By watching powerful streams of gas blasting away from baby stars, a team of researchers has shown that most […]

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