News Items

Is there life on other planets? NASA's newest mission hopes to shed light on this question. Last Friday, NASA launched the Kepler Mission, a spacecraft-based telescope that will enable scientists to search a small area of the Milky Way for earth-like planets, capable of supporting life.

At the heart of the mission is the Kepler telescope. The telescope contains a very sensitive photometer, capable of measuring very small changes in light intensity. By continuously monitoring the light being emitted by over 100,000 stars, it can detect a subtle "dimming" of a given star's light if an orbiting planet passes in front (view a graphic of the "transit method" for detecting planets).

The mission's goal is to identify planets in the "habitable zone," the distance from a star where a planet is likely to have liquid water present. Once a planet is detected, NASA researchers will use information including the planet's period (the time it takes to orbit the star), the star's temperature and mass, and the planet's mass to calculate the planet's surface temperature.

For the next several months, Kepler will travel to its final vantage point: a carefully-calculated, unobstructed orbit around the sun. From there, Kepler's three-and-a-half year unblinking gaze will begin.

The birth of octuplets to a California woman who already had six children, all fourteen via IVF, has drawn strong criticism from both the medical and ethics communities. In the United States, the $1 billion assisted reproductive technology industry results in more than 50,000 babies per year. A third of these are "multiple births," twins or higher. These children are at elevated risk for a variety of health problems.

The article highlights the tension between patients, physicians, and insurance companies. Patients naturally want a child, physicians want to maximize their success rates but minimize the possibility of multiple births, and insurance companies often won't pay for the procedure. With the cost of IVF at $10,000 per attempt, doctors are under pressure from patients to implant multiple embryos at once.

Though voluntary professional guidelines recommend implanting only two embryos per attempt, this was obviously not followed in the California octuplets case. Some have also argued that the physician should have declined to treat a single woman who already had six children.

New research from the University of Washington and NASA indicates that climate change in Antarctica is more widespread than previously thought. Using satellite and weather station data from 1957-2006, researchers deduced that both the western and eastern halves have warmed significantly, approximately 0.1 degree Celsius overall per decade. The warming has serious repercussions for melting ice, sea levels, and wildlife.

Previously, global warming skeptics pointed to earlier data from scattered ground-based coastal sensors that suggested the eastern region of Antarctica was actually cooling, an observation at odds with climate change predictions. The current study, however, with its broader geographic coverage of the continent, suggests that all of Antarctica is warming.

Using special infrared telescopes, NASA scientists have discovered the presence of regular methane “plumes” on Mars, further raising the possibility that life once existed – or currently exists – on Mars. Methane gas is one of the simplest organic molecules, a common byproduct of biological life. In fact, more than 90% of the Earth’s methane comes from biologic sources.

It is important to point out that the presence of methane is, in and of itself, not conclusive evidence of life. Methane can be produced from purely non-biological chemical reactions. Based on NASA’s current findings, it’s impossible to say if the gas is from biologic or geologic sources.

Interestingly, the article also highlights recent research showing that microbial life can live quite happily miles underground. A team from Indiana University recently discovered microbes living two miles beneath the Earth’s surface. These microbes harnessed energy from the radioactive decay of nearby rocks to generate fuel. If Martian life does actually exist, it would likely be deep underground, where the temperature is significantly warmer and liquid water would flow freely.

It will be interesting to see if the next Mars rover mission, scheduled for 2011, will target one of the suspicious methane-rich sites.