Dirk Schulze-Makuch
Evidence of life on Mars? NASA may have accidentally destroyed it in the 1970s
Life may have been discovered on Mars almost 50 years ago, but it could have been unintentionally destroyed ...
Life on Earth is carbon-based — but on other planets, could life be built out on other chemical building blocks, like silicon?
When we search for life on other planets, what we usually mean is that we are looking for life as ...
If some dinosaurs developed advanced technology wiped out by asteroids, which species could it have been?
Very little remains from the Neanderthals, who lived just a few tens of thousands of years ago. Even very recent, ...
Post nuclear disaster: What species might dominate the world if humans went extinct?
Grim news showers us every day from the war in Ukraine, and given the real possibility of an extensive nuclear ...
Who are you calling bird-brained? Crows and other corvids display self-awareness and consciousness
The corvid family of birds, which includes crows, ravens, jays and magpies, had been observed previously to use tools, as ...
How can we detect alien organisms that don’t look like life on Earth?
Nearly all previous life detection instruments have looked for volatile organic compounds using a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer, or GC-MS. The Viking ...
‘Game-changer’: Europe’s ExoMars rover armed with new life-testing tool
In a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology, Jacob Heinz, my colleague at the Technical University of Berlin, and I discuss ...
Have we already discovered life on Mars? And did we accidentally kill it?
In a recent opinion piece in Scientific American, former Viking Mars investigator Gil Levin fired up anew the argument over whether that ...
Water world: Does the evolution of intelligent life require land?
Exoplanets come in a variety of types, and so-called “water worlds”—planets with at least ten percent of their total mass ...
What are the odds that aliens might actually look similar to us?
In his new book, Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution, Charles Cockell from the University of Edinburgh makes the argument ...
