With billions of planets in our galaxy, including small Earth-like worlds, the possibility of life out there is an exciting thought to many people. So, humans have set out to look for planets that might support life. » More …
Dirk Shulze-Makuch, a professor in the WSU School of the Environment, is a co-author of an upcoming paper that suggests scientists should look for evidence of life-forms that survived on the Martian surface when most or all of the liquid water had disappeared. » More …
Alien life might flourish on an exotic kind of carbon dioxide, according to a new study co-authored by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, professor at Washington State University’s School of the Environment. This “supercritical” carbon dioxide, which has features of both liquids and gases, could be key to extraterrestrial organisms much as water is to biology on Earth. » More …
Results from an environmental study of the world’s largest asphalt lake shine new light on how life on Earth can survive in even the most inhospitable environments.
Scientists already knew that microbes can thrive at the boundary where water and oil meet, but the discovery at Pitch Lake on the Caribbean island of Trinidad that they can live within the oil and were found to be actively degrading the oil opens up new possibilities for using them to clean up spills.
“We discovered that there are additional habitats where we have not looked at where life can occur and thrive,” says Dirk Schulze-Makuch, co-author of the study and a professor in the WSU School of the Environment.
The wiliness of these microbes suggests that life on other planets — at least at the microscopic level — may not be so far-fetched after all.
Read more about the research, results, and possibilities:
WSU News
Science Magazine
Discover Magazine
Nature
The Daily Galaxy
China Topix
The Times of India
Astrobiology.com
Mother Nature Network
Photos: Live Science
The number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy which could harbor complex life may be as high as 100 million, according to WSU astrobiologist Dirk Shultze-Makuch and a team of researchers from Cornell and the University of Puerto Rico. It is the first quantitative estimate of the number of worlds in our galaxy that could harbor life above the microbial level, based on objective data.
Read more
Shultze-Makuch’s column on the Air & Space/Smithsonian website