[Monday, December 4, 2006] According to an item first posted by Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine: "NASA is ready to announce major new findings about the presence of water currently emerging onto the surface of Mars.

[Monday, December 4, 2006] NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec. 6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor. The briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium.

[Wednesday, December 6, 2006] NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.

[Monday, December 11, 2006] In the first test of a new radar instrument, scientists have seen through more than a mile of Greenland ice to reveal an image of land that has been hidden for millions of years.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] Concentrated ammonium salt solutions and water-in-oil microemulsions, both of which are able to form on extraterrestrial planets and moons in the presence of liquid water, are suitable media for enzyme reactions at subzero temperatures.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] Here we propose that the radioresistance (tolerance to ionizing radiation) observed in several terrestrial bacteria has a martian origin.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] Spatially and spectrally resolved models were used to explore the observational sensitivity to changes in atmospheric and surface properties and the detectability of surface biosignatures in the globally averaged spectra and light-curves of the Earth.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] Here we demonstrated that reactions involved in amino acid biosynthesis can be used to distinguish amino acids formed by life from those formed by nonbiological processes.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] Low-pressured environments may be used to reduce the equivalent system mass of near-term plant biology experiments on landers or future bioregenerative advanced life support systems.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] A NanoSIMS ion microprobe was used to map the submicron-scale distributions of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, silicon, and oxygen in organic microfossils and laminae in a thin section of the 0.85 billion year old Bitter Springs Formation of Australia.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] The Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA), a portable microfabricated capillary electrophoresis instrument being developed for planetary exploration, is used to analyze a wide variety of fluorescamine-labeled amine-containing biomarker compounds.

[Tuesday, December 12, 2006] The discovery of methane in the martian atmosphere is one of the most important discoveries in the field of astrobiology. One possible source of this methane could be a microorganism analogous to those on Earth in the domain Archaea known as methanogens.

[Thursday, December 14, 2006] One interesting trend that has emerged from studies of the Sun-like hosts to Jupiter-mass planets is the larger amount of "metals" - that is, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - in their atmospheres compared to the Sun's atmosphere.

[Thursday, December 14, 2006] Last year, when the Cassini spacecraft discovered an enormous plume erupting on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, scientists speculated that liquid water lay at shallow depths beneath the icy surface.

[Thursday, December 14, 2006] Although years of work remain to fully decipher the secrets of comet Wild 2, researchers are sure that it contains some of the most primitive and exotic chemical structures ever studied in a laboratory.

[Thursday, December 14, 2006] Contrary to a popular scientific notion, there was enough mixing in the early solar system to transport material from the sun's sizzling neighborhood and deposit it in icy deep-space comets.

[Thursday, December 14, 2006] A team of scientists found a new class of organics in comet dust captured from Comet Wild 2 in 2004 by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

[Thursday, December 14, 2006] Join Teachers Ute Kaden and Allan Miller live from the Oden Icebreaker en route to Antarctica!

[Friday, December 15, 2006] NASA's GeneSat-1 is ready to ride an Air Force rocket into Earth orbit on Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.

[Saturday, December 16, 2006] NASA's GeneSat-1 rode an Air Force rocket into Earth orbit on Dec. 16, 2006 at 4 a.m. PST (7 a.m. EST) from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.

[Sunday, December 17, 2006] Geologists have uncovered evidence in the oil fields of Oman that explains how Earth could suddenly have changed 540 million years ago to favor the evolution of the single-celled life forms to the multicellular forms we know today.

[Sunday, December 17, 2006] "You're an astrobiologist standing in the centre of a vast, empty expanse of rock and dust pockmarked with impact craters. There's no water here, no life, but your task is to collect data important for the study of life in the Universe."

[Sunday, December 17, 2006] NASA's GeneSat-1 satellite continues to orbit Earth, and researchers are receiving radioed data from the spacecraft. It was launched Saturday, Dec. 16, 2006, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.

[Monday, December 18, 2006] At 6:26 a.m. PST, Dec. 18, 2006, the GeneSat-1 status report noted that, "All systems are functioning normally, and we have full two-way radio control. It has been verified that we are collecting experiment data."

[Wednesday, December 20, 2006] "We are now in EXPERIMENT phase. The experiment has been activated and data is being downlinked both via the beacon and the primary COM link (2-4 passes/day). We are currently working NO anomalies."

[Wednesday, December 20, 2006] The oldest-known animal eggs and embryos, whose first pictures made the cover of Nature in 1998, were so small they looked like bugs – which, it now appears, they may have been.

[Wednesday, December 20, 2006] Want biodiversity? Look no further than the air around you. It could be teeming with more than 1,800 types of bacteria, according to a census of airborne microbes recently conducted by scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

[Wednesday, December 20, 2006] Aboard the International Space Station, the newly comprised Expedition 14 crew, Commander Mike Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineers Mikhail Tyurin and Suni Williams, enjoyed their first full day together after Discovery's departure yesterday.

[Thursday, December 21, 2006] "We continue to receive excellent data from the GeneSat-1 spacecraft. The biology experiment has passed its halfway point, and continues to perform flawlessly".

[Friday, December 22, 2006] Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have analyzed samples from Comet Wild 2, as part of NASA's Stardust mission, the first solid sample return mission since Apollo.

[Friday, December 22, 2006] For 11 years, Jill Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley, has collected and studied the microbes that slime the floors of mines and convert iron to acid, a common source of stream pollution around the world.

[Friday, December 29, 2006] Long before Astrobiology was even a real word, scientists in Europe had started using space research to try and find answers to deep-rooted questions about life. From simple beginnings, the experiments became more complex and more ambitious.