[Monday, June 1, 2009] Humans are still struggling to get rid of unwanted carbon - but the heavens are really rather good at it. Research has discovered that a stellar explosion recorded in 2006 may have marked the unusual death of an equally unusually carbon-rich star.

[Monday, June 1, 2009] Large bombardments of meteorites approximately four billion years ago could have helped to make the early Earth and Mars more habitable for life by modifying their atmospheres.

[Wednesday, June 3, 2009] Cloud chasers studying Saturn's moon Titan say its clouds form and move much like those on Earth, but in a much slower, more lingering fashion.

[Wednesday, June 3, 2009] In recent times, there has been renewed interest in ground-based visible and near-infrared measurements of earthshine as a proxy for exoplanet observations.

[Saturday, June 6, 2009] NASA scientists modeled freezing conditions on Mars to test whether liquid water could have been present to form the surface features of the Martian landscape.

[Tuesday, June 9, 2009] Scientists have developed a new cleaning protocol for space hardware, such as the scoops of Mars rovers, which could be used on future "Search for Life" missions on other planets.

[Wednesday, June 10, 2009] Astronomers are announcing today that a sequence of images collected with the Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) radio telescope system clearly reveals the presence of a rotating, molecular disk orbiting the young binary star system V4046 Sagittarii.

[Wednesday, June 10, 2009] As astronomers gaze toward nearby planetary systems in search of life, they are focusing their attention on each system's habitable zone, where heat radiated from the star is just right to keep a planet's water in liquid form.

[Thursday, June 11, 2009] A lunar eclipse helped a group of international scientists take a snapshot of earth's chemical fingerprint, which could help to identify planets most similar to earth where life may be thriving.

[Thursday, June 11, 2009] Beginning this week, scientists and nonscientists now have easy access to information about when living species and their ancestors originated, information that previously was difficult to find or inaccessible.

[Friday, June 12, 2009] A team of Scripps Research scientists has created a new analog to DNA that assembles and disassembles itself without the need for enzymes.

[Friday, June 12, 2009] Billion-year life extension for Earth also doubles the odds that advanced life will be found elsewhere in the universe

[Monday, June 15, 2009] The NAI held a strategic science initiative workshop in Tempe, AZ on May 13-15, to identify areas where increased collaboration between the funded NAI teams could lead to greater scientific insights and productivity.

[Monday, June 15, 2009] The general idea was to identify and discuss the areas in the field that are still "in the darkness", i.e. remain poorly understood despite their importance.

[Monday, June 15, 2009] The interstellar stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict, according to the University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

[Monday, June 15, 2009] A novel bacterium that has been trapped more than three kilometres under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120 000 years, may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets.

[Wednesday, June 17, 2009] A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.

[Saturday, June 20, 2009] Angelle Tanner, a post-doctoral scholar at JPL and Caltech, studies planets in distant solar systems, called extrasolar planets. The golden prize in this field is to find a planet similar to Earth - the only planet we know that harbors life.

[Saturday, June 20, 2009] With the assumption that future attempts to explore our Solar System for life will be limited by economic constraints, we have formulated a series of principles to guide future searches.

[Saturday, June 20, 2009] Once it was established that the spaceflight environment was not a drastic impediment to plant growth, a remaining space biology question was whether long-term spaceflight exposure could cause changes in subsequent generations.

[Saturday, June 20, 2009] The 39+/-2Ma Haughton impact structure on Devon Island comprises a thick target succession of sedimentary rocks, mainly carbonates.

[Saturday, June 20, 2009] A central question of astrobiology concerns the origin and distribution of life in the Universe. For this reason, astrobiology can be considered to fall within the science called transitional biology.

[Monday, June 22, 2009] Stephen Warren's research concerns the ice conditions that may have existed during a time dubbed Snowball Earth, when ice and snow blanketed the planet so completely that even the ocean surface at the equator froze.

[Wednesday, June 24, 2009] With the whoosh of compressed gas and the whir of unspooling wire, a team of Boulder scientists and engineers tested a new instrument prototype that might be used to detect groundwater deep inside Mars.

[Wednesday, June 24, 2009] Unfortunately, with the current economy and priorities at NASA, the time has come to close out the program and look forward to the next adventure.

[Wednesday, June 24, 2009] For the first time, scientists working on NASA's Cassini mission have detected sodium salts in ice grains of Saturn's outermost ring.

[Saturday, June 27, 2009] Formic acid, a compound implicated in the origins of life, has been found at record levels on a meteorite that fell onto a frozen Canadian lake in 2000.

[Sunday, June 28, 2009] NASA-sponsored scientists looking back at Earth with the Deep Impact/EPOXI mission have developed a method to indicate whether Earth-like alien (extrasolar) worlds have oceans.

[Tuesday, June 30, 2009] Warm weather near the Martian equator may have melted the ice in ice-rich soils as recently as 2 million years ago, according to a paper published yesterday in "Earth and Planetary Science Letters."