Wax works and first kiss

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 – NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered two huge intergalactic clouds of diffuse hot gas. These clouds are the best evidence yet that a vast cosmic web of hot gas contains the long-sought missing matter —about half of the atoms and ions in the universe. See article.
g Abodes – Wax works: Physicists in the US have proven that wax is an excellent model of the ocean floors. Using a tub of wax, geophysicists at Cornell and Columbia have produced a predictive model of tectonic microplates — one of the most important and poorly understood features of plate tectonics — for the first time. See article.
g Life – In a new study, researchers have uncovered striking parallels in the details of sex chromosome evolution between mammals and a far more distant group: plants. See article.
g Intelligence – First kiss: Puberty, that awkward phase when boys and girls are primed for their sexual reproductive years as men and women, appears to be triggered by the brain's own version of "It takes two to tango," whereby a signal literally gets turned on by a molecule that is produced by a gene aptly named KiSS-1. See article.
g Learning – Here’s a frightening story: In districts around the United States, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue. See article.
g Imagining – A few days ago, I noted a neat science fiction alien reading list from Prof. Joan Slonczewski, who taught “Biology 103: Biology in Science Fiction” at Kenyon College in 2003. Her students, using astrobiological principles, attempted to create a number of plausible alien civilizations and worlds as a class project. Here’s another one, the seaswallower.

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