‘Geobiology: Microbial Mats in Sandy Deposits from the Archean Era to Today’ by Nora Noffke
Astrobiology today covers many disciplines, among them being the search for microbial life on planets in our own solar system, such as Mars. Following the discovery of features created by water on Mars, we should be using these features as a starting point to look closer for microbial life. One of the ways in which microbial life can leave an imprint on sandy rocks like those on Mars, is through the formation and preservation of microbial mats and their associated structures. In this book, Nora Noffke deals systematically with these microbially-induced sedimentary structures on Earth, both...
Read More‘FutureWorld: Where Science Fiction Becomes Science’ by Mark L. Brake & Neil Hook
FutureWorld aims to convey the continuous interaction between science fiction, science research and science fact. It focuses on the feed-forward and feedback between plausibility and reality. It takes upon itself the ambitious task of bringing pure science closer to the general public – an admirable feat towards broader education, understanding the world around us and stimulating curiosity for further discoveries. Professor Mark Brake and Reverend Neil Hook achieve a significant impact on the reader in all three of these significant areas. The book relates science fiction to pure science by...
Read More‘From Dying Stars to the Birth of Life’ by Jerry L. Cranford
From Dying Stars to the Birth of Life emphasises the broad multidisciplinary nature of the emerging field of astrobiology. The author, Jerry L. Cranford, is a former professor of psychology and neuroscience who has a passion for stargazing and astrobiology. His book is an informal overview of the emergence of astrobiology as a new and rapidly growing subject, and is as broad as the title implies. The book aims to take the reader on a journey from the Big Bang right through to the development of instruments that allow us to observe extra-solar planet. Key scientific concepts are explained in...
Read More‘Formation and Evolution of Exoplanets’ by Rory Barnes (ed.)
A lot of research in astrobiology is directed toward the question of how life can, and did, arise given a certain set of conditions, in an attempt to shed light on how likely it is that it might have happened elsewhere in the Universe. Another area, somewhat less well represented, is the study of how these conditions are created in the first place. That is: what physical mechanisms must conspire for the formation and stable existence of a habitable planet such that chemical and biological can take over and cause life to be created? With an ever-increasing number of observed exoplanets,...
Read More‘Fitness of the Cosmos for Life’ by John D. Barrow (ed)
This volume is a collection of essays written after an interdisciplinary symposium of the same title, held at Harvard University in October 2003 to commemorate 90 years since the publication of Lawrence J. Henderson’s The Fitness of the Environment. In general, the book considers whether the universe is ‘biocentric’ in some way; tailored or fitted for life. The concept of fine-tuning of the universe with respect to the value of different physical constants and how they define the broad architecture of the cosmos and permissible physical processes has been well-explored in the past. For...
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