Ancient deathblow and carbon-based life forms

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars – Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low mass companion has finally been photographed. The discovery suggests that, due to errors in the models, astronomers have overestimated the number of young "brown dwarfs" and "free floating" extrasolar planets. See article.
g Abodes – A catastrophe 250 million years ago nearly extinguished life on Earth. Did the deathblow come from space, or did the Earth turn from hospitable to poisonous on its own accord? See article.
g Intelligence – Relative to their size, humans have the biggest brains on the planet. Check out the guy sitting next to you on the bus: hunkered beneath a fringe of moussed hair and a few millimeters of skull are three crinkly pounds of brain — the only substantive difference between us and those species we regard as food or pets. But how did this happen? What special circumstance, what unperceived evolutionary force, nudged our hulking, hairy ancestors toward intelligence, and silently trebled the size of their brains in 2 million years or less? This question is seductive not only because it tells us something exquisitely interesting about ourselves, but also because the answer could give us insight into whether other intelligent beings really exist. See article. Note: This article is from 2002.
g Message – An earlier entry noted that New Scientist magazine named the reception of mysterious signals from 1000 light years away as the top science story of the year. Alas, SETI scientists say the story is misleading. See article.
g Cosmicus – More than 20 meteorites from Mars have been discovered in Antarctica, so why shouldn't it be possible to find other chunks of our solar system sitting somewhere on the Red Planet, too? But the Martian surprise of finding an off-world sample while driving has scientists inching towards a closer look. See article.
g Learning – Though so much of our world’s economic activity today involves air travel (and one day hopefully space travel!), most people know surprisingly little about aeronautics. Here’s a Web site to help correct that among our children by offering a variety of activities, experiments and lesson plans to explain some of aeronautics’ basic principles. See article.
g Imagining – Will Star Trek’s carbon-based life forms be the norm for alien chemistry? See article. Note: This article is from 2004.
g Aftermath – Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s Aftermath feature about how SETI is using the social sciences to decipher our thoughts on alien life. See article.

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