-
Hummus in Space
By Dr Valerie Jeffries FLS Undeterred by the loss of astronaut tardigrades spilt on the Moon when their 2019 Beresheet spacecraft crashed, the same team has switched to edible plants, with their Space Hummus Experiment. The basis of Hummus, a delicious internationally popular and highly nourishing food, is the Chickpea. Chickpeas come from the Middle…
-
Part 3: Primitive and Complex (and crème brûlée)
By Dr Valerie Jeffries FLS. Exploration of the Solar System looking for evidence of habitability is about ‘primitive life’, with no expectation of anything beyond tiny bacterial-style cells, possibly with viruses. Single-celled life forms ruled Earth for 1.5 billion years before the evolution of bigger modern cells, and in terms of total biomass they still…
-
Part 2: Promising planets, Dry worlds, and Water-bears
By Dr Valerie Jeffries FLS Language of Life The term ‘Earthlife’ acknowledges that all life we know uses the same universal coding system to read its DNA. The way it translates DNA into bodies is amazingly neat, but uses a ‘language’ that’s arisen by chance. When humans first made words with meanings, two tribes on opposite continents would…
