Best printers for Home

Best Mixer Grinder

Best wired Earphones

Best 43 Inch TV in India

Best Wi Fi Routers

Best Home Theatre in India

Smart Watch under 5000

Best Laptops for Education

Best Laptop for Students

Despite its barren and unforgiving environment, <keyword id="19905161" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Saudi-Arabia" source="keywords">Saudi Arabia</keyword> has emerged as a blazing beacon of infrastructural development. Remarkably enough, this story of resilience extends far into the past, as the region may also be where the first bits of life on Earth originated.<br /><cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Earliest forms of life" comment="subhead" text="Earliest forms of life"><span data-til="noop">Earliest forms of life</span></cmsannotation><br /><keyword id="20004656" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="scientists" source="keywords">Scientists</keyword> have unearthed living <keyword id="21922967" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Stromatolites" source="keywords">stromatolites</keyword> — ancient geological structures made from algae — on <keyword id="21922969" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="Sheybarah-Island" source="keywords">Sheybarah Island</keyword>, nestled on the northeastern shelf of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. These ancient <keyword id="21922968" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="life-forms" source="keywords">life forms</keyword>, dating back 3.48 billion years, were previously thought to thrive only in select modern environments like Shark Bay, Australia, and the Exuma Islands in the Bahamas.<br /><br />The reason this is such a crucial discovery is because Stromatolites are the earliest geological indicators of life on Earth. Further, these biotic structures were instrumental in the Great <keyword id="20075793" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="oxygen" source="keywords">Oxygen</keyword>ation Event over two billion years ago, introducing oxygen into the atmosphere and transforming the planet's habitability.<br /><br />The oxygenation event initially wiped out many of their competitors, allowing stromatolites to dominate the biosphere during the Archean eon, when life had just begun to bud. However, as life forms adapted to the oxygen-rich atmosphere, stromatolites began to decline, only reappearing in the geological record after mass extinctions or in extreme environments.<br /><br />"The bacteria are always around, but they don't usually get the chance to make stromatolites," explains study author Volker Vahrenkamp. "They are largely outcompeted by corals."<br /><cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="An accidental discovery" comment="subhead" text="An accidental discovery"><span data-til="noop">An accidental discovery</span></cmsannotation><br />The Sheybarah Island’s several hundred stromatolites formations were accidentally found when the researchers were studying tepee structures — massive salt crust domes visible from space. Some stromatolites were well-developed and textbook-perfect, while others were more sheet-like with low relief. This diversity intrigued the researchers, hinting that they may be at different stages of development.<br /><br />The island's harsh environment — characterised by extreme temperature swings, alternating wet and dry conditions, and nutrient-poor waters — mirrors the conditions of the Bahamas, suggesting that similar stromatolite fields might exist elsewhere on the Al Wajh carbonate platform. However, the small size of stromatolites, about 15 cm across, makes them challenging to detect without close inspection.<br /><br />Understanding stromatolite growth rates remains a significant scientific challenge because dating these structures is complicated by the presence of two indistinguishable carbonate components: the newly microbe-precipitated material and environmental carbonate sand. To overcome this, Vahrenkamp's team conducts monthly monitoring, documenting any visual changes. Future plans include experimental attempts to cultivate stromatolites in aquarium settings, aiming to unlock the secrets of their growth and development.<br /><br />The rediscovery of stromatolites on Sheybarah Island not only provides a unique glimpse into Earth’s ancient history but also offers potential insights into the search for extraterrestrial life, particularly on Mars. By studying stromatolites, which thrived before Earth had an oxygenated atmosphere, scientists can develop models to recognise potential signs of life on other planets.<br /><br />The findings of this research have been published in <em><keyword id="6438753" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="geology" source="Orion">Geology</keyword> </em>and can be accessed <a href="https://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G51793.1" data-type="tilCustomLink">here</a>.<br />

The first life forms on Earth might have come from Saudi Arabia, scientists find new proof

<ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mars-landing-nasa-perseverance-rover-touches-down-in-jezero-crater-2021-2">NASA's Perseverance rover</a> landed in <keyword id="47638" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Mars">Mars</keyword>' Jezero Crater on Thursday.</li><li>The dried-up lake bed is the ideal spot to look for alien fossils because a river deposited microbe-trapping minerals there.</li><li>Perseverance will search the lake bottom, shorelines, and river delta for signs of ancient microbes.</li></ul><p>On Thursday, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mars-landing-nasa-perseverance-rover-touches-down-in-jezero-crater-2021-2">NASA landed its most sophisticated rover yet</a> in an ancient Martian lake bed.</p><p>Billions of years ago, Mars was a water world with rivers and lakes. Microbes might have swum in those waters, leaving their imprints behind. on an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater.</p><p>The Perseverance rover is now perfectly poised to hunt for such fossils. After a harrowing plunge to Mars, the $2.4 billion, SUV-sized robot sent a signal to <keyword id="6360409" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Nasa">NASA</keyword> mission controllers confirming that it had safely touched down in the planet's Jezero Crater.</p><p>More than 3.5 billion years ago, rivers spilled over the edge of that 28-mile-wide crater, into an alien body of water about the size of Lake Tahoe. The rivers probably carried clay minerals into Lake Jezero, and if microbes lived in the water, they could have gotten trapped. That would mean that today, there may be fossil rocks called <keyword id="2526951" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="stromatolites">stromatolites</keyword> at the bottom of the lake bed, along what used to be the shoreline, or in the dried-up river delta.</p><p>This makes Jezero Crater one of the best places in our solar system to search for evidence of <keyword id="582933" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Alien-life">alien life</keyword>.</p><p>On Earth, the oldest signs of life are 3.5 billion-year-old stromatolites found in ancient shallow lake beds - exactly what Perseverance will look for on Mars.</p><div type="image" title="jezero crater mars lake water illustration" height="1519" width="2700" msid="80887597" hostid="261"></div><p>"This is a tantalizing similarity," Ken Farley, the project scientist for Perseverance, said in a press briefing before the landing. "It would, of course, be a fabulous scientific discovery to find that life existed beyond Earth."</p><p>Perseverance is designed to scour Jezero Crater, collect about 40 samples that could contain signs of ancient microbes, and store them in special tubes so that a future mission can bring them to Earth.</p><p>NASA had considered the crater as a destination for previous missions, but its steep cliffs, sand dunes, and boulder fields made it a dangerous place to land. New technologies equipped Perseverance to take on the treacherous terrain.</p><h2>A journey from the lake bottom to the crater rim</h2><p>Perseverance landed, as planned, near the cliffs of the fan-shaped river delta - a deposit of mud and clay that the river left as it flowed into the lake.</p><div type="image" title="jezero crater river delta mars perseverance rover landing site" height="1500" width="2000" msid="80887602" hostid="261"></div><p>In the past, it would take mission controllers a few days to figure out where a rover landed, but Perseverance's sophisticated navigation system pinpointed its location. In fact, it picked its own landing spot by analyzing maps of Jezero Crater and steering away from boulder fields, sand dunes, and cliffs on its way down.</p><p>Perseverance ended up about a mile (two kilometers) southeast of the river delta, in a small, flat area. In the map of that landing site below, red indicates a landing hazard.</p><div type="image" title="perseverance mars rover landing spot site hazard map jezero crater" height="1000" width="2000" msid="81114489" hostid="261"></div><p>"You can see that the system managed to find a nice blue spot in the midst of all that red, all that death that's out there for us. So we found the parking lot and and hit it," Al Chen, who led the rover's entry, descent, and landing, said in a press briefing on Thursday.</p><p>Now the rover is set to explore the muddy lake bottom for fossils before climbing to the delta.</p><p>From there, NASA has carved out a few potential routes for Perseverance that would expose it to the diversified landscape of Jezero Crater. The one shown below is about 15 miles long.</p><div type="image" title="perseverance mars rover path nasa jezero crate" height="1414" width="2600" msid="80887599" hostid="261"></div><p>"This is a pathway that connects together all of the different habitable environments that we think existed within this lake and in its surroundings," Farley said. "This is a long traverse. It'll take many years for us to do this. The reason we do this, though, is that this will allow us to come up with the best possible set of samples to be brought back to Earth, to answer the major questions that we have about Mars and about life."</p><p>In the image below, the layer of green between the delta and the crater rim is where scientists think Lake Jezero's shoreline was. It appears to be rich with carbonates: minerals that are especially good at trapping microbes to form stromatolites.</p><div type="image" title="nasa mars 2020 rover landing site jezero crater" height="1495" width="1865" msid="80887603" hostid="261"></div><p>The rover's primary mission is to look for signs of life, and it lasts one Martian year (two Earth years). If the robot is still kicking when that's over, its extended mission will involve climbing the 1,600-foot rim of the crater.</p><p>Jezero Crater was most likely created when an object (probably a meteorite) collided with Mars. The crash exposed rock layers deep within the planet's crust. So at the crater rim, Perseverance aims to study these layers to learn more about Martian geology.</p><div type="image" title="perseverance mars rover jezero crater" height="1519" width="2700" msid="80887606" hostid="261"></div><p>The heat from that impact may have even given rise to hot springs, which could have deposited their own minerals that might also hold signs of aliens.</p><p>"That's why we're so excited about Jezero Crater, because it has so many different ways that it could preserve signs of life," Briony Horgan, a geologist on the Perseverance <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> team, said in the pre-landing briefing.</p><p>Even if Perseverance finds no fossils, that will be a major nonfinding. To date, every habitable environment on Earth that scientists have examined has hosted life.</p><p>"If we do a deep exploration of Jezero Crater with the rover and its instruments ... and we find no evidence of life, we will have shown that in at least one place, there is a habitable environment that is not inhabited," Farley said. "If that's what we find, it would tell us something important: that habitability alone is not sufficient, that something else has to be present - some, perhaps, magic spark - that causes life to occur."</p><p><em>This post has been updated. It was originally published on Feburary 12, 2021.</em></p>

NASA's Mars rover landed in the perfect place to hunt for alien fossils: an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Copyright Yuri Amelin</span></p><p class="caption">Researchers Allen Nutman (left) and Vickie Bennet (right) hold up what may be a fossil of a 3.7 billion-year-old microbial mat.</p></div><p></p></div></div>When snow began melting on Isua island off the southwestern tip of Greenland, revealing a freshly exposed outcrop of rocks, geologist Allen Nutman and his colleagues got to work.</p><p>The team was drawn there because the formation, called the Isua Greenstone Belt, is home to a collection of some of the oldest rocks on Earth.</p><p>And what they recently found - a probable 3.7 billion-year-old fossilized mat of microbes - could have "staggering" implications for the history of life on Earth, says one scientist who wasn't involved in the work.</p><p>The nearly <a href="http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/63/4/381">3.9 billion-year-old rocks</a> themselves are a crap shoot when it comes to fossil-hunting. That's because billions of years of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/goldilocks-exoplanet-habitability-internal-heat-2016-8">plate tectonics and volcanism</a> have squeezed, melted, and crushed what was once softer, sedimentary rock.</p><p>But <a href="http://smah.uow.edu.au/sees/UOW073673.html">Nutman</a>, an earth scientist at the University of Wollongong Australia, and his colleagues found something funny sandwiched between 3.71 billion-year-old and 3.695 billion-year-old layers of rock: cone-shaped, golf ball-size formations that looked like stromatolites.</p><p>Stromatolites are communal piles of microbes that grew in the warm, shallow oceans of ancient Earth, but you can also find them today all over the world in places as warm as hot springs or as frigid as Antarctica.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Google Maps</span></p><p class="caption">Isua, where Nutman and his team recovered what could be 3.7 billion-year-old fossils.</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>"Seeing stromatolites in such a setting would hardly be surprising - if the rocks were half a billion years younger," Abigail Allwood, an astrobiologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn't involved in the discovery, wrote in <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature19429">a commentary piece</a> that accompanied Nutman and his team's <a href="http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature19355">scientific paper in Nature</a>.</p><p>The new fossils, if they are indeed that, trounce the previous record-holder for "oldest fossilized life form," which are 3.5 billion-year-old stromatolites found in Australia - and by a landslide.</p><p>"These are the oldest fossils by 220 million years," Nutman told Business Insider in an email.</p><h2>A 'staggering' yet controversial claim</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature19355">A. Nutman et al./Nature</a></span></p><p class="caption"> Three golf ball-size cones that could be 3.7 billion-year-old mounds of fossilized bacteria. </p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>Allwood writes that Nutman and his team's claim that the cone-shaped structures between the layers of rock "will no doubt also spark controversy."</p><p>For one, bacteria-generated chemicals in the rocks, which can help with verification, are degraded by billions of years of geological punishment. But Allwood says the shapes of the stromatolites and chemical signatures the team did find are "fairly credible hallmarks of microbial activity."</p><p>More importantly, Nutman and his team may see heated skepticism because of the incredible significance the fossils could have in the story of life's emergence on Earth.</p><p>"If these are really the figurative tombstones of our earliest ancestors, the implications are staggering," Allwood said.</p><p>When Earth was 900 million years old and the microbes that would make the fossils were growing, the planet had barely just emerged from an incredibly punishing phase of its existence, called the <a href="http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/nlsis-swri-team-investigates-wandering-gas-giants-and-late-heavy-bombardment-moon/">Late Heavy Bombardment</a>.</p><p>This is when, for possibly 100 million years or more, Earth and the moon <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/giant-asteroids-hit-earth-before-dinosaurs-2016-5">were relentlessly pummeled by asteroids and comets</a> - garbage left over from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.</p><p>The bombardment ended around 3.85 billion years ago, which places Nutman and his colleagues' fossil discovery right on the edge of a truly cataclysmic period of Earth's history.</p><p>"If life could find a foothold here, and leave such an imprint that vestiges exist even though only a minuscule sliver of metamorphic rock is all that remains from that time, then life is not a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing," Allwood said. "Give life half an opportunity and it'll run with it."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1509a/">ESO/M. Kornmesser</a></span></p><p class="caption">Mars once had oceans.</p></div><p></p></div></div>It also could mean our obsessive exploration of Mars with solar- and nuclear-powered robots could be incredibly prescient: "Around the time that the Isua rocks were forming, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/cool-mars-facts-and-statistics-2016-6">Mars did not look too different from Earth</a> from a habitability perspective, with standing bodies of water at the surface," Allwood said.</p><p>Nutman said his team has a "long experience of working on these very ancient rocks," which geologists have been probing for nearly 40 years, and noted they "were surprised to find a small area where the stromatolite structures had survived," given the eons of abuse that was apparent with surrounding rocks.</p><p>"[It] is a strong confirmation that life evolved very early on Earth," he said, in agreement with genetic studies of the tree of life, which suggest life emerged as early as 4 billion years ago.</p><p>Nutman said it's possible scientists could recover older stromatolites from the area. "However ... geological research in Isua started in the early 1970s - it took more than 40 years to find these!"</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/66-million-year-old-t-rex-fossils-found-minnesota-paleontology-2016-8">Scientists have uncovered a 66.3-million-year-old dinosaur skull still intact</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="9zdm1pNTE6ZkRXDC7mHCMEprUmVHhIUj" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

These 3.7 billion-year-old fossils could have 'staggering' implications for the history of life on Earth

<ul class="summary-list"><li><keyword id="6360409" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Nasa">NASA</keyword>'s Perseverance rover has landed in Jezero Crater, beginning a new era of exploration on Mars.</li><li>The rover is poised to spend the next two years searching for fossils of microbial alien life.</li><li>It carries the first interplanetary helicopter, and it will test tech that could help astronauts.</li></ul><p>NASA's <keyword id="9569864" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="perseverance-mars-rover">Perseverance Mars rover</keyword> has successfully landed in the red planet's Jezero Crater.</p><p>The touchdown of the nuclear-powered robot is the first step in what could be a decadelong effort to bring the first samples of Martian rock - possibly including alien fossils - back to Earth.</p><p>The rover, nicknamed "Percy" by its engineers, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in July and traveled 300 million miles to Mars.</p><p>On Thursday, the capsule carrying Perseverance screamed through the Martian atmosphere at about 12,000 mph, released a 70-foot-wide <keyword id="6675912" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="parachute">parachute</keyword> to slow its fall, and then dropped its heat shield. That gave the rover's cameras and radar system a view of the landscape below, which an onboard navigation system used to find a safe landing spot.</p><div type="image" title="mars perseverance rover nasa entry descent landing parachute" height="1080" width="1440" msid="81100169" hostid="261"></div><p>About 1 mile above the Martian surface, the capsule dropped the rover. A <keyword id="480985" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="jetpack">jetpack</keyword> attached to the robot fired up its engines and steered Perseverance to its landing site, avoiding hazardous boulder fields, sand dunes, and 200-foot cliffs. Then the jetpack gently lowered the rover on 25-foot nylon cords until its wheels touched the ground.</p><p>At 3:55 p.m. ET, NASA mission managers received the signal that the rover had touched down, and mission control burst into cheers and applause.</p><p>"The team is beside themselves. It's so surreal," Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after the signal came through.</p><p>Perseverance then quickly sent its first two images from the Martian surface.</p><div type="image" title="perseverance rover mars landing first images nasa" height="1000" width="2000" msid="81100412" hostid="261"></div><p>"We took these the second after landing. There's still dust in the air from our landing event," Manning said. "This is what NASA does. This is what we can do as a country."</p><p>Perseverance is decked out with cameras and a microphone that should have recorded its entire descent - a first for a <keyword id="1174940" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Mars-landing">Mars landing</keyword>. Additional images and even video footage could reach Earth as early as this weekend. NASA engineers expect to have full video footage of the landing after a few weeks. (It takes a long time for the rover to beam all that data across space.)</p><h2>A hunt for ancient alien microbes</h2><div type="image" title="mars rover perseverance helicoper ingenuity" height="1483" width="1977" msid="81100170" hostid="261"></div><p>This is NASA's fifth Mars-rover landing, but it's the first interplanetary mission to search for imprints of past alien life.</p><p>Perseverance is poised to spend the next two years exploring the ancient river delta that fed Mars' Lake Jezero about 3.5 billion years ago. Back then, alien microbes may have swum in the water that filled the crater and various rivers and lakes across the Martian surface.</p><p>As the river dumped mud and minerals at the mouth of Lake Jezero, it may have trapped colonies of microbes, forming fossil rocks called stromatolites. That's what Perseverance will look for along Jezero's ancient lake bed, shorelines, and river delta.</p><div type="image" title="jezero crater mars lake water illustration" height="1268" width="1690" msid="81100171" hostid="261"></div><p>But first, the rover will spend the next few weeks checking all of its systems and instruments. After that, it's set to release <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-first-interplanetary-helicopter-in-perseverance-mars-rover-belly-2020-7">the first interplanetary helicopter</a> for some test flights. Once the space drone has flown, Perseverance can begin hunting for signs of long-gone alien microbes.</p><p>The rover carries 43 sample tubes so that it can stash samples of rock and soil. NASA plans to send another mission to retrieve those vials and bring them back to Earth in the 2030s.</p><p>"Samples from Mars have potential to profoundly change our understanding of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system," Lori Glaze, the director of NASA's Planetary <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword> Division, said in a briefing ahead of the landing. "Even now, NASA continues to study moon samples returned by the Apollo program more than 50 years ago. We expect samples of Mars to provide new knowledge for decades to come."</p><h2>Probing the history of a desert planet</h2><div type="image" title="perseverance mars rover jezero crater" height="1519" width="2700" msid="81100172" hostid="261"></div><p>Jezero Crater is the most dangerous landing site that any Mars mission has ever targeted, but the payoff could be great. Various mineral deposits across the crater's bed, the river delta, the ancient shorelines, and the crater rim hold a wide variety of rocks and soil. By collecting samples, Perseverance could help scientists learn about all kinds of environments on the red planet.</p><p>The rover carries seven scientific instruments that can analyze Martian rocks. It can capture images of rocks and soil in ultraviolet and visible light, probe them with radar, scan with X-rays to determine their composition, and search for organic compounds with a laser.</p><p>NASA's Perseverance team expects the rover to gather its first samples sometime in the summer.</p><p>The robot can also move about three times faster than its predecessors, so it could cover up to 10 miles in its first Mars year (two Earth years). After that, it's likely to get an extended mission that could take it up the crater's 1,600-foot rim. There, it would analyze the deep layers of rock cut in the Martian crust, which were exposed by a space object that struck the planet and created this crater billions of years ago. That investigation could provide insight into eons of Martian history.</p><div type="image" title="perseverance mars rover path nasa jezero crate" height="1414" width="2600" msid="81100174" hostid="261"></div><p>Even if Perseverance finds no alien fossils, that will be important information. To date, every habitable environment on Earth that scientists have examined has hosted life.</p><p>"If we do a deep exploration of Jezero Crater with the rover and its instruments ... and we find no evidence of life, we will have shown that in at least one place, there is a habitable environment that is not inhabited," Ken Farley, the project scientist for Perseverance, said in a pre-landing briefing. "If that's what we find, it would tell us something important: that habitability alone is not sufficient, that something else has to be present - some, perhaps, magic spark - that causes life to occur."</p><h2>Perseverance's cargo could revolutionize <keyword id="718929" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Space-exploration">space exploration</keyword></h2><div type="image" title="mars helicopter ingenuity flight nasa gif" height="360" width="640" msid="81100175" hostid="261"></div><p>The small drone Perseverance carries is <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-first-interplanetary-helicopter-in-perseverance-mars-rover-belly-2020-7">called Ingenuity</a>. After its system checks, the rover should drive to an open field, unfold its belly panels, and lower the little helicopter for the first controlled flights on another planet.</p><p>Perseverance will attempt to record video of Ingenuity's flights. They could be the first demonstration of a new way to explore other planets.</p><p>The mission will also test technologies that could support future human expeditions to Mars. The rover's sophisticated landing-navigation system was the first of its kind, and future Mars astronauts may rely on similar technology. Perseverance also carries a device that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. Called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, it's a prototype meant to test the technology on the red planet.</p><div type="image" title="mars human exploration settlement habitat astronauts martian" height="1135" width="1513" msid="81100176" hostid="261"></div><p>Oxygen is scarce in Mars' atmosphere, and it's unlikely that astronauts could bring enough of it to Mars to breathe there, let alone to fuel spaceships for the long journey home. So MOXIE aims to produce the crucial gas out of thin air.</p><div type="image" title="moxie mars perseverance rover Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment jpl" height="1335" width="1780" msid="81100178" hostid="261"></div><p>The device electrochemically splits the molecules into oxygen and carbon monoxide and combines the oxygen molecules into O2. It analyzes the product's purity, aiming for about 99.6% O2. Then it releases both the breathable oxygen and the carbon monoxide back into Mars' atmosphere. Future scaled-up devices would store the oxygen in tanks for astronauts and rockets to use.</p><p>Finally, Perseverance carries a small weather station to monitor dust, radiation, and weather changes on the planet - all things that future astronauts would need to keep an eye on.</p>

TOUCHDOWN ON MARS: NASA's Perseverance rover has landed safely after a supersonic plunge

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21377">Courtesy of Matthew Dodd</a></span></p><p class="caption">These tubes from hydrothermal vent deposits may represent the oldest microfossils and evidence for life on Earth. (This image is magnified 200 times.)</p></div><p></p></div></div>In August 2016, a team of researchers announced they'd found 3.7 billion-year-old fossils of bacteria called stromatolites.</p><p>The fossils were the oldest-known evidence of microbes on the planet - and scientists said the discovery had <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/oldest-fossils-greenland-stromatolites-2016-8">"staggering" implications</a> for the history of life on Earth.</p><p>But now an international team of scientists may have them beat - by at least 300 million years, and possibly even half a billion.</p><p>In some of the oldest rocks on Earth, the researchers found collections of tiny tubes that could represent structures made by ancient deep-sea microbes.</p><p>"These rocks have a minimum age of 3.77 billion years, but some scientists in the field consider them to be as old as 4.28 billion years," Dominic Papineau, an earth scientist at University College London (UCL), said in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynHqD3Elow">a video interview</a> about the discovery. He added that this could mean "they are within a few hundred million years of the accretion of planet Earth and the sun and the moon."</p><p>Papineau led a <a href="http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21377">study about the ancient, iron-rich fossils</a> along with Matthew Dodd, a PhD student in earth <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> at UCL. Their findings were published March 1 in the journal Nature.</p><p>It's not 100% clear whether the newly discovered specimens are evidence of early life on Earth, since these kinds of ancient rocks suffer billions of years' worth of geologic damage and have features that look biological.</p><p>"Just because it looks like something, doesn't mean it is," Kurt Konhauser at the University of Alberta, a geomicrobiologist who wasn't involved in the research, <a href="http://www.livescience.com/58065-evidence-of-ancient-life-unearthed.html">told Tia Ghose at LiveScience.com</a>.</p><p>But if the structures were indeed formed by early bacteria, they'd be the oldest evidence of life ever discovered.(Further chemical analysis and more samples would bolster the argument.)</p><p>What's more, Papineau said, the fossils might tell us what to seek on other worlds in the solar system if we're looking for signs of alien life.</p><h2>Ancient deep-sea ecosystems</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/nur04506.htm">OAR/National Undersea Research Program (NURP); NOAA</a></span></p><p class="caption">A hydrothermal vent or "black smoker chimney."</p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p>The fossil in question came from a coastal region of Quebec, Canada called the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt.</p><p>During an expedition there, Papineau helped find an especially old-looking lump of rusty rock called jasper, or haematitic chert (haematite is an iron-containing mineral).</p><p>He knew such rocks are sometimes made by seafloor structures called hydrothermal vents, which spew out iron, silica, and other minerals. Today they serve as warm habitats and food sources for microbial and animal life in frigid, deep ocean waters.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21377">Courtesy of Dominic Papineau</a></span></p><p class="caption">A sample of iron-rich and silica-rich rock, called haematitic chert, which contains tubular and filamentous microfossils.</p></div><p></p></div></div>"When I saw these structures in the field, I said, 'I have to sample this,'" <span>Papineau</span> said.</p><p>Working with several other researchers from Australia, Japan, Norway, Canada, and the US, the team broke off a piece of the rock.</p><p>Back at the lab, they cut it into thin slices, polished the rock, and slipped the samples under the microscope.</p><p>The images showed clusters of tubes that resembled those similar to structures formed by modern deep-sea microbes.</p><p>"We were able to identify the microfossils as the oldest-known microfossils on Earth," Dodd said in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynHqD3Elow">the video interview</a>. "In diameter, the microfossils are half of a width of a human hair."</p><h2>A possible boon in the search for signs of ancient life</h2><p>The carefully worded study didn't confirm the tubes were made by bacteria. Instead, it stated that the objects are "best explained" as being hydrothermal vent microbes that may represent "the oldest life forms recognized on Earth."</p><p>Further analysis also showed the tubes contained carbon and other minerals in concentrations similar to those of deposits left by living organisms.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1509a/">ESO/M. Kornmesser</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div></p><p> </p><p>The ramifications of the discovery could extend well beyond Earth.</p><p>"If we are right with our new model […] then we might want to look for these things on other ancient planet surfaces, such as the surface of Mars," Papineau said.</p><p>NASA's nuclear-powered Mars 2020 rover mission, which is scheduled to launch in the summer of 2020, will carry a digging tool, high-power microscope, and chemical analysis equipment. If the car-sized robot can't detect signs of ancient life on the red planet itself - it can't polish samples the way researchers did in the study, for example - it's possible that <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nasa-mars-sample-return-mission-2016-12">a future mission</a> to return Mars 2020 samples to Earth just might.</p><p>The stakes are high.</p><p>"We know life managed to get a grip and start on Earth at such an early time in Earth's evolution," Dodd said. "If life happened so quickly on Earth, then could we expect it to be a simple process and start on other planets - or was Earth really just a special case?"</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/66-million-year-old-t-rex-fossils-found-minnesota-paleontology-2016-8">Scientists have uncovered a 66.3-million-year-old dinosaur skull still intact</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="9zdm1pNTE6ZkRXDC7mHCMEprUmVHhIUj" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

These red tubes might be the oldest evidence of life on Earth - and the implications could be enormous

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57991398dd0895fb558b48cc-960/rachel-sussman-googol.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://massmoca.org/event/explode-every-day-an-inquiry-into-the-phenomena-of-wonder/">Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Earth has been around for about <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-science-figured-out-the-age-of-the-earth/">4.5 billion</a> years. The universe has been around for about <a href="http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html">13.8 billion</a> years.</p><p>Taken by themselves, those two numbers probably feel more or less the same. They're both incomprehensibly large, so it's hard to grasp the difference in scale.</p><p>And they're both tiny next to the number of years it may be until the universe ends. According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/adams-universe.html">one physics theory</a>, the number of years until the end of the universe is a googol: 10 raised to the 100th power.</p><p>Numbers with so many digits "become meaningless, obviously," Rachel Sussman told Tech Insider. "It's like, that's a whole lot of zeros."</p><p>Sussman is an artist who likes thinking about time. It featured prominently in her first book, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Oldest-Living-Things-World/dp/022605750X/">The Oldest Living Things in the World</a>," which came out two years ago. She returned to the theme for an art installation called "<a href="http://www.rachelsussman.com/portfolio/#/timeline/">A Selected History of the Spacetime Continuum</a>," part of an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art called "<a href="http://massmoca.org/event/explode-every-day-an-inquiry-into-the-phenomena-of-wonder/">Explode Every Day</a>," focused on exploring the idea of wonder.</p><p>The new installation, which runs through April 2017, offers a visual representation of something that is nearly impossible to comprehend: the timeline of our entire universe, from birth until death.</p><h2>Beyond a human lifetime</h2><p>"Our brain doesn't naturally compute something like [a googol]," Sussman continued, "because why would we need to?"</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art" title_caption="We are here. The " hypersurface="" of="" the="" present="" is="" always="" this="" moment="" now="" not="" I="" just="" wrote="" but="" that="" updated="" every="" fraction="" a="" second.="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57991398dd0895fb558b48cd-960/rachel-sussman-we-are-here.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://massmoca.org/event/explode-every-day-an-inquiry-into-the-phenomena-of-wonder/">Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span></p><p class="caption">We are here. The "hypersurface of the present" is always this moment, now, not the now I just wrote, but the now that is updated every fraction of a second.</p></div><p></p></div></div>But grappling with numbers that large could, Sussman hopes, make us better able to tackle the problems we face.</p><p>"How do we change up our very sort of stuck human perception of time that's very physiologically based?" Sussman asked. "I think it's really important to step outside not just the moment to moment or year to year, but to step outside the human lifespan."</p><p>It's hard to conceptualize periods of time that go so far beyond even generations of human lives. But zooming out - way out - can be valuable.</p><p>"Our world isn't in the best state these days," Sussman says. "Long-term thinking really is something that benefits us all and really is a moral question."</p><p>The timeline shows Sussman's concerns, but it also shows her joys. "I assume that the edges of the universe are sparkly," Sussman laughed.</p><p>The sparkles come at the top and bottom edge of the horizontal timeline, which wraps along the walls of a room in the museum.</p><p>The timeline is built into the existing room, adding an extra layer to the work. Two fire alarms mark the wall near the very beginning of time and the death of the Milky Way.</p><p>A doorway between the short wall that holds all of history and the vertical bar marking the very moment of the present looks into another gallery displaying another installation, a painting of cathedral-like trees peering through. Just past the death of the universe, a staircase drops into the room.</p><h2>The five eras of the universe</h2><p>Sussman encountered the estimate for how long the universe has left to "live" when she discovered the so-called five eras of the universe.</p><p>The theory, which outlines the life and death of the universe, was originally published in a 1997 article in <a href="http://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.69.337">Reviews in Modern Physics</a> by the physicists Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin, who in 1999 published <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/adams-universe.html">a book</a> expanding on the idea. Their paper has since been cited hundreds of times.</p><p>The five eras became the guiding principle of Sussman's timeline, which starts before the Big Bang and ends when the universe is left as "cold, dead, empty space."</p><p>That prospect doesn't get Sussman down. Not only is it an incomprehensible number of years from now, but it has a sort of poetic justice to it, she says.</p><p>"There's so much energy and expansion happening, and that's not permanent, and this idea that so much transformation will happen that will eventually end in decay - it makes sense to me, just in the same way we have our life cycles, of humans and plants and animals and things," said Sussman. "These things have booms and busts."</p><p>The boom, of course, came 13.8 billion years ago with the <a href="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/how-did-the-universe-begin-happened-big-bang/">Big Bang</a>, when the universe first began to expand. But Sussman's timeline starts before this, in a time when <a href="http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html">everything is a hypothesis</a>. "It creates the sense of play because it's a little bit funny to think I'm starting before the Big Bang," said Sussman of her choice.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57991398dd0895fb558b48ce-960/rachel-sussman-before-the-big-bang.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://massmoca.org/event/explode-every-day-an-inquiry-into-the-phenomena-of-wonder/">Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>Throughout the timeline, but particularly here, Sussman was careful to include eraser marks, strikeouts, and additions, to show this uncertainty. She also wrote the timeline out by hand to personalize the experience. "To me that was saying, 'this is a human person trying to make sense of the universe,'" she said. "It's meant to show that it has a human author and that we're all trying to figure it out."</p><p>Sussman's process of trying to figure it all out began when she was working on a project photographing the oldest living things on Earth. The very oldest of these organisms, she said "started to get beyond geologic time and even into cosmic time," with things like stromatolites, mats of bacteria that can be as much as <a href="http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/stepping-stones-through-time/">3.5 billion years old</a>, as you can see here.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57991398dd0895fb558b48cf-960/rachel-sussman-stelliferous-era.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://massmoca.org/event/explode-every-day-an-inquiry-into-the-phenomena-of-wonder/">Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>She was also spending time embedded at space and physics outposts, including CERN, which runs the Large Hadron Collider. Among other questions the collider is tackling is what happened in the first few seconds after the Big Bang.</p><h2>No one right answer</h2><p>So when she decided to put together a timeline of the universe, she knew how to reach out to physicists to learn more. (She says <a href="https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/self.html">Sean Carroll</a>, a theoretical physicist at Cal Tech, was particularly helpful.) But these are not the sorts of question that have cut-and-dried right answers.</p><p>"This is obviously vetted scientific work, but I was able to choose the one that felt, 'oh, this is most conceptually resonant with me,'" said Sussman of using the theory of the five eras of the universe as the skeleton of her timeline.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table full click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art" title_caption="All of human history fits on just one short wall, with another installation in another gallery visible through the doorway." class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57991398dd0895fb558b48d0-960/rachel-sussman-human-history.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://massmoca.org/event/explode-every-day-an-inquiry-into-the-phenomena-of-wonder/">Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span></p><p class="caption">All of human history fits on just one short wall, with another installation in another gallery visible through the doorway.</p></div><p></p></div></div>According to this theory, we're currently in the universe's second era, the stelliferous era, a fancy name for a time when stars are still being created. The primordial era, from the Big Bang until matter began clumping together to form things like stars, is long gone. Down the road hundreds of trillions of years will come the degenerate era, after stars have run out of gas and <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0715/p17s2.html">dark matter is being destroyed</a>. The fourth era will be dominated by black holes and in the last era, the dark era, there's nothing left but waste particles.</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right click-to-enlarge"><div><div class="image on-image"><a title_source="Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="https://static-ssl.businessinsider.com/image/57991398dd0895fb558b48d1-960/rachel-sussman-end-stelliferous.jpg"><span class="sprites click-to-enlarge-icon" title="Click to enlarge"></span></a><p class="source"><span><a href="http://massmoca.org/event/explode-every-day-an-inquiry-into-the-phenomena-of-wonder/">Ethan Hill/Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span></p></div><p></p></div></div>As to what made the cut into Sussman's timeline, "I really wanted to create a combination of things that are fascinating factually, but combined with a little bit of humor."</p><p>"I love when the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide but our solar system will survive," said Sussman of what may happen four billion years in the future. "I mean, of course we don't know that will actually happen." But it's a real possibility that our solar system could outlast our galaxy.</p><p>Others of Sussman's favorite entries include the first painting and the point in time 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe is opaque because particles have been created but universe expansion has not yet spread them out.</p><p>You can visit the <a href="http://massmoca.org/">Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art</a> to read through the entire timeline until April 2017.</p><p>So far, she said, visitor response has been mostly positive, with teachers telling her they plan to share the project with students. The museum did get one letter from a physicist, who wrote to tell Sussman she had a stray minus sign in the equation she used to represent Einstein's theory of general relativity.</p><p>But it's not that simple.</p><p>"Even the theory of general relativity, there's not one right way to write it out, which I hadn't known," Sussman said. It turns out there are three main versions, plus some others. She had physicist Sean Carroll talk her through the options.</p><p>He explained "'none of them were wrong but one of them was righter,'" Sussman said. "That's beyond me, how it could be right both with and without a minus sign."</p><p>But for Sussman, that's the point. "To me, all of this work opens up this reminder that there's so much that we don't know," she said. "When I think about how I was taught <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">science</keyword> as a child, I realized science is taught as facts, and it's really just how we think at the moment."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-milky-way-galaxy-earth-2016-6">There's a black hole in our galaxy, and it's not far from Earth</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="NwNDc2NDE6gT7L8k0NXeKF7iQ-uHelK8" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

You Searched For "stromatolites" and got 6 results

The first life forms on Earth might have come from Saudi Arabia, scientists find new proof

Ankush Banerjee

NASA's Mars rover landed in the perfect place to hunt for alien fossils: an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

These 3.7 billion-year-old fossils could have 'staggering' implications for the history of life on Earth

Dave Mosher

TOUCHDOWN ON MARS: NASA's Perseverance rover has landed safely after a supersonic plunge

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

These red tubes might be the oldest evidence of life on Earth - and the implications could be enormous

Dave Mosher

An artist designed a timeline of the universe that shows you when it began - and when it all will end

Meghan Bartels

Popular Keywords

Buying Guides