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"The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental...
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Specialist scientific fields are developing at incredibly swift speeds, but what can they really tell us about how the universe began and how we as humans evolved to play such a dominant role on Earth? John Hands' extraordinarily ambitious book merges scientific knowledge from multiple disciplines and evaluates without bias or preconception all the theories and evidence about the origin and evolution of matter, consciousness, and mankind. In the clearest...
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Our neighboring planets may have the answer to this question. Scientists have already identified ice caps on Mars and what appear to be enormous oceans underneath the ice of Jupiter's moons. The atmosphere on Venus appeared harsh and insupportable of life, composed of a toxic atmosphere and oceans of acid -- until scientists concluded that Earth's atmosphere was eerily similar billions of years ago.
An extraterrestrial colony, in some form, may...
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Mohamed A. F. Noor, besides being a Trekkie, is a professor in the Biology Department at Duke University. He is the editor in chief of the journal Evolution and author of You're Hired! Now What?: A Guide for New Science Faculty. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
An engaging journey into the biological principles underpinning a beloved science-fiction franchise
In Star Trek, crew members travel to unusual planets, meet diverse beings, and encounter...
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Are we alone in the universe, or is life a universal phenomenon? For fifty years, astronomers in SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have scanned the universe for intelligent signals, but with no success. In this book, Edward Ashpole explains the probable reasons for this and discusses other avenues of investigation more in line with the nature of science and technology.--from publisher's description.
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"Light of the Stars tells the story of humanity's coming of age as we awaken to the possibilities of life on other worlds and their sudden relevance to our fate on Earth. Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life and intelligence from the ancient Greeks to the leading thinkers of our own time, and shows how we as a civilization can only hope to survive climate change if we recognize what science has recently discovered: that we are...
8) Astrobiology
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Astrobiologists compare life on Earth to signs of life on other planets, study space mission photos, and listen for signals from alien civilizations. Learn all about this cool and amazing research in this fast-paced peek into future life!
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"Any reader of science fiction or viewer of Star Trek will be awake to the dream that there may be life elsewhere in our universe that isn't like life here on Earth. Maybe, like E.T., it has new letters in its genetic alphabet! Maybe it's made of silicon! Maybe it gets around on wheels! Or maybe it doesn't. In The Equations of Life, biologist Charles Cockell makes the surprising argument that the Universe constrains life, making its evolutionary outcomes...
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"In the past year, we have witnessed unprecedented breakthroughs in the seemingly unrelated fields of synthetic biology and exoplanetary astronomy. Just recently, arsenic-based bacteria was discovered in a California lake-both puzzling and electrifying the scientific world. In The Life of Super-Earths, expert astronomer Dimitar Sasselov aims to highlight these groundbreaking findings and explain how what we learn in the laboratory informs our investigation...
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"When scientists discovered the first ocean beyond Earth, they had two big questions: 'Is it habitable?' and 'How do we get there?' To answer the first, they had to solve the second, and so began a vivacious team’s twenty-year odyssey to mount a mission to Europa, the ocean moon of Jupiter. Standing in their way: NASA, fanatically consumed with landing robots on Mars; the White House, which never saw a science budget it couldn’t cut; Congress,...