A New Place to Look for Alien Life to String Theory is Dead

Weekend Edition

Today's stories include Five Times Scientists Thought They May Have Discovered Aliens to Webb Telescope Finds Evidence of Massive Galaxies That Defy Theories of the Early Universe, and more.

A new place to look for alien life: The photosynthetic habitable zone--A new place to look for alien life: The photosynthetic habitable zone. In the search for life on other Earths, astrobiologists should look for signs of photosynthesis, reports Astronomy.com. " “Life requires energy to remain out of equilibrium with its environment. For almost all the biomass on Earth, this energy source is oxygenic photosynthesis.”

String theory is dead--An exclusive interview with Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit. author of "Not Even Wrong", reports iAi. "Woit argues that String Theory has become a degenerative research project, becoming increasingly complicated and, at the same time, removed from empirical reality. Even the remaining string theorists of the past have given up on the ontology of strings, as well as the original vision of the theory."

The Longest Goodbye review: A poignant documentary on space psychology--Astronaut Cady Coleman playing duets with her Earth-bound son is among the moving and candid moments from The Longest Goodbye, Ido Mizrahy's poignant exploration of the psychology of space travel, reports New Scientist.

Dark Matter: The underground lab unlocking the Universe, reports The BBC. Tucked away in the North East of England is ICL Boulby Mine, a working polyhalite and salt mine and the second deepest in Europe. Over 1km below the surface, in a small corner of the giant mine's network of tunnels is a unique laboratory that could hold the answer to one of the biggest mysteries of the Universe - dark matter.

Five times scientists thought they may have discovered aliens, reports Insider.com. "Scientists have thought they were close to discovering alien life a few times — none of it via UFOs. Alien close-calls include an object flying through our solar system and signals from the distant cosmos."

Webb Telescope Finds Evidence of Massive Galaxies That Defy Theories of the Early Universe, reports The Smithsonian. The six “universe breakers” appear much larger than what scientists thought was possible at that time. “You shouldn’t have had time to make things that have as many stars as the Milky Way that fast,” says Erica Nelson, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and a co-author of the study to Lisa Grossman of Science News. “It’s just crazy that these things seem to exist.”