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TODAY’S BIG TOPIC:

EVIDENCE GROWS OF ALIEN LIFE, BUT WE'VE BEEN FOOLED BEFORE

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

In today’s newsletter, will new missions find evidence of alien life? Plus, advances against a deadly disease; Tonga under lockdown; take a look at Jupiter tonight ... and 99-million-year-old flowers, found perfectly preserved in amber.

NASA/CALTECH-JPL/MSSS

By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE Executive Editor

Known to humans for generations as the “wandering star” with the angry red hue, it’s not surprising that the planet Mars was named for the Roman god of war. But for scientists who have been searching for signs of life beyond Earth, the red planet probably seems more like a mythological trickster.

In the 1800s Mars enthusiasts using telescopes became convinced that alien canals were splayed across the landscape. (They were not, photos soon showed.) As late as 1967, no one less than famed astronomer Carl Sagan imagined Mars populated by tentacled herbivores. (The first Mars landers and orbiters sadly proved him wrong in the 1970s.) And then came the time in 1996 when President Bill Clinton walked onto the White House lawn and announced to the world that scientists had found fossilized traces of Martian microbes in a meteorite.

It did not take long for other scientists to debunk that interpretation of Allan Hills 84001, as the now infamous meteorite is known, though plenty of researchers have revisited it over the years trying to figure out its secrets. But as our Nadia Drake reports this week, one upside of the Allan Hills controversy is that it made scientists consider how much we still don’t know about the way Mars geology works. “I feel so grateful to that rock, because it’s made us really, really think about what we know about life,” says astrobiologist Kennda Lynch of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.

NASA/CALTECH-JPL/MSSS

Even today’s high-tech rovers are sending back tantalizing but as-yet inconclusive hints of life on Mars, from bursts of methane to odd carbon ratios to mysterious purple coatings on its rocks. After all this time being tricked, hunting for aliens on Mars may seem like a fool’s errand. But it’s about so much more than satisfying our curiosity—as Drake says, if we can finally answer the question definitively, either outcome “will tell us something profound about the origins of life on our own planet.”

(Images: At top, NASA’s Curiosity rover took samples from Gale crater on Mars that were enriched in a light isotope of carbon—something that is associated with life on Earth. Pictured above, Curiosity snagged three drilled rock samples from the Glen Torridon region, where scientists believe ancient conditions could have been favorable to life.)

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IN THE SPOTLIGHT

PHOTOGRAPH BY SCIENCE SOURCE

Finding a scourge’s weak link: How do you beat some of the world’s most stubborn viruses? In the image above, a scanning electron micrograph shows hemorrhagic fever viruses (in green) emerging from infected cells. Other types of advanced imagery, used in an emerging field called structural virology, can isolate weak spots of tricky diseases at the atomic scale. It’s raising hope for an elusive vaccine to HIV and, pictured above, the deadly Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, which kills up to 40 percent of the people it infects, Jillian Kramer reports.

FOLLOW THE MYSTERY

STORIES WE'RE TRACKING

Volcano-stricken Tonga goes into COVID-19 lockdown (Washington Post)

Archaeologists seek out mystery behind 500-year-old ‘spines on sticks’ (Nat Geo)

99-million-year-old flowers found perfectly preserved in amber (CNN)

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow. So what? (Nat Geo)

THE NIGHT SKIES

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS

Hello, Jupiter: Have you seen the largest planet in the solar system in our evening skies? Get your views of Jupiter in now before it sinks too close to the western horizon—and the glare of the sun—next week. This evening, Jupiter will pair up with a superthin crescent moon. They will appear less than five degrees apart—about the width of your three middle fingers held at arm’s length. With a small telescope, you can see all four of the Jovian moons Galileo observed more than four centuries ago. Ganymede will appear on one side of the planet, while Io, Europa, and Callisto will appear lined up on its opposite side (illustrated above, at left). On Monday, the near-quarter moon will be less than two degrees away from another planet, Uranus. (Catch this feature from National Geographic’s September issue on new secrets of the solar system.) — Andrew Fazekas

SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

PHOTO OF THE DAY

PHOTOGRAPH BY @LAUREDUTRUY

Making it through: The pandemic has ravaged all levels of society. Imagine how a family with three kids with Down syndrome are getting through. Photographer Laure d'Utruy made this image of Nathanaël, 13, at his weekly visit to a physiotherapist, who supports children with Down syndrome in their neuromotor development, motor skills, and social integration. The photographer’s work has been supported by the National Geographic Society’s COVID-19 Emergency Fund for Journalists. Learn more about the Society’s efforts.

IN A FEW WORDS

QUOTE

Strong youth leaders embrace going against the grain, and in doing so, create new openings to pathways...

Ahmed Muhammad

Nat Geo Young Explorer; founder of Kits Cubed, which distributes hands-on science kits for elementary school students

Meet the 2021 Young Explorers

THE LAST GLIMPSE

COMPOSITE BY SCOTT CHIMILESKI, MICROBEPHOTOGRAPHY.COM, AND ROBERTO KOLTER, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

These darn superbugs: Public health experts fear that overuse of antibiotics during the pandemic may have spurred antibiotic-resistant infections, which already kill 750,000 people annually and are expected to reach 10 million deaths a year by 2050. What’s happening? When they are overexposed to antibiotics, pathogens such as bacteria and fungi can evolve to evade the powerful drugs designed to destroy them, Nat Geo’s Priyanka Runwal reports. (Illustrated above are colonies of eight dangerous bacteria. Top row, from left to right: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Enterobacter cloacae. Center row: Salmonella enterica and Serratia marcescens. Bottom row: Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Staphylococcus aureus.)

This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Monica Williams. Have an idea or a link? We'd love to hear from you at [email protected].

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