Early Sun cooks up soup of life, space exploration debate and ‘Memoirs of a Spacewoman’

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 - Before the Sun was the Sun, it glowed brightly and began cooking up the soup of life, according to a new study. See article.
g Abodes - A researcher at Southwest Research Institute, working with scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center on data from the NASA Cassini Saturn orbiter, has found heat leaking out of the south polar region of Saturn's tiny icy moon, Enceladus. This find makes Enceladus only the third place in the solar system, after Earth and Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, where "hot spots" associated with ongoing geological activity have been detected. See article.
g Life - Many of them are tiny, all of them are tough, and they could be your most distant ancestors. See article.
g Intelligence - The figure is famous: a deceptively simple line drawing that at first glance resembles a vase and, at the next, a pair of human faces in profile. When you look at this figure, your brain must rapidly decide what the various lines denote. Are they the outlines of the vase or the borders of two faces? How does your brain decide? See article.
g Message - A new study suggests it is more energy efficient to communicate across interstellar space by sending physical material — a sort of message in a bottle — than beams of electromagnetic radiation. Solid matter can hold more information and journey farther than radio waves, which disperse as they travel. See article.
g Cosmicus - The big debate among those interested in outer space centers on a couple things: One, do we need humans in space when robots don't need air, water, or food; and secondly, the value of the multibillions of dollars we've spent on the International Space Station and the antique Space Shuttle. See article.
g Learning - After months of debate over science and religion, the Kansas Board of Education has tentatively approved new state science standards that weaken the role evolution plays in teaching about the origin of life. See article.
g Imagining - Like stories about communicating with aliens? Be sure to scour your favorite used bookstores for Naomi Mitchinson’s “Memoirs of a Spacewoman” (1979) about a human’s attempts to contact various aliens through empathetic means (for example, radiates think with a five-based system of logic BET).

Read this blogger’s books