Arsenic is an element that is deadly to most living creatures, but bacteria living in California’s Lake Mono thrive on it. Today NASA explains how those poison-eating organisms are changing the way we search for extraterrestrial life.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Thanks to a brave group of British researchers, the age-old question finally has an answer.
Remember when all of those scientist people told us that multicellular life on Earth began about 1.9 billion years ago? New evidence suggests they might have been off by a few hundred million. Is it time for a Spore patch?
The irRegular Game of Life is a weird but fun little game (by irRegular Games) based on mathematician John Horton Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ theory. In this iteration, you are given puzzles to solve and must set the little cells into motion to meet the goals of each level. It’s surprisingly hypnotic at times — after getting past the initial introductory levels, you watch the cells shuffle back and forth, creating a variety of patterns and interacting with each other. There’s also a sandbox mode and some other features; the regular puzzle mode was plenty fun for me.
Reader Denis F. sent us a heads up about an interesting chat between Will Wright and Jill Tarter, noted astrobiologist and director of SETI whose research helped inspire Spore. As you can probably guess, the discussion is pretty abstract at times and goes from gaming to the value of science to where we’ll be in 10,000 years. It’s pretty interesting, and there’s a transcript of the interview: