New to me: Furahan Biology and Allied Matters

This is a blog I found via Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology.  It discusses and even does a great job of designing and even animating an alien ecosystem.

link.

An Essay on Creating Life on a Gas Giant for the Cosmos Series

link.

These images, especially the last one, really captivated me as a teen.  They are gorgeous.  They are fascinating.  They are utterly alien.

Brown Dwarf with Jets

Jets of matter have been discovered around a very low mass 'failed star', mimicking a process seen in young stars. This suggests that these 'brown dwarfs' form in a similar manner to normal stars but also that outflows are driven out by objects as massive as hundreds of millions of solar masses down to Jupiter-sized objects.

The brown dwarf with the name 2MASS1207-3932 is full of surprises [1]. Its companion, a 5 Jupiter-mass giant, was the first confirmed exoplanet for which astronomers could obtain an image (see ESO 23/04 and 12/05), thereby opening a new field of research - the direct detection of alien worlds. It was then later found (see ESO 19/06) that the brown dwarf has a disc surrounding it, not unlike very young stars.

Now, astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have found that the young brown dwarf is also spewing jets, a behaviour again quite similar to young stars.

This ought to have some interesting implications for anyone looking to place a habitable world around a BD.

Forests of Other Worlds

NASA scientists believe they have found a way to predict the color of plants on planets in other solar systems.

Green, yellow or even red-dominant plants may live on extra-solar planets, according to scientists whose two scientific papers appear in the March issue of the journal, Astrobiology. The scientists studied light absorbed and reflected by organisms on Earth, and determined that if astronomers were to look at the light given off by planets circling distant stars, they might predict that some planets have mostly non-green plants.

Suz's Purple Planet might STILL exist!!! ;)

A Purple World?!

Ancient microbes might have used a molecule other than chlorophyll to harness the Sun’s rays, one that gave the organisms a violet hue.

Chlorophyll, the main photosynthetic pigment of plants, absorbs mainly blue and red wavelengths from the Sun and reflects green ones, and it is this reflected light that gives plants their leafy color. This fact puzzles some biologists because the sun transmits most of its energy in the green part of the visible spectrum.

[...]

DasSarma thinks it is because chlorophyll appeared after another light-sensitive molecule called retinal was already present on early Earth. Retinal, today found in the plum-colored membrane of a photosynthetic microbe called halobacteria, absorbs green light and reflects back red and violet light, the combination of which appears purple.

Primitive microbes that used retinal to harness the sun’s energy might have dominated early Earth, DasSarma said, thus tinting some of the first biological hotspots on the planet a distinctive purple color.

Being latecomers, microbes that used chlorophyll could not compete directly with those utilizing retinal, but they survived by evolving the ability to absorb the very wavelengths retinal did not use, DasSarma said.

Interesting. I think that Suzanne would have preferred that the world would have stayed that way. Thank the all that's good and light that it didn't!

Ocean Worlds

Imagine a world with no land at all, merely the impenetrable depths of a seething ocean. Models of planet formation predict the existence of such worlds, even though our own solar system has none. Indeed, their formation should actually be rather common — and new satellites may soon detect them around other stars.

So, Drake question now has another type of world to consider. Not only could hot jupiters disrupt their way across the habitable region, a large portion of the water baring worlds are ice apped like Europa, and a large portion of the planets that form, period, are gas giants, if this guy is right, then there is yet another kind of world that's not so friendly to spacefaring civilizations out there that negatively impacts the equation: waterworlds. They may even be common.

An Extremophile Post for Carlos

Long-Term Sustainability of a High-Energy, Low-Diversity Crustal Biome

Li-Hung Lin,1,2* Pei-Ling Wang,3 Douglas Rumble,4 Johanna Lippmann-Pipke,5 Erik Boice,6 Lisa M. Pratt,6 Barbara Sherwood Lollar,7 Eoin L. Brodie,8 Terry C. Hazen,8 Gary L. Andersen,8 Todd Z. DeSantis,8 Duane P. Moser,9 Dave Kershaw,10 T. C. Onstott1

Geochemical, microbiological, and molecular analyses of alkaline saline groundwater at 2.8 kilometers depth in Archaean metabasalt revealed a microbial biome dominated by a single phylotype affiliated with thermophilic sulfate reducers belonging to Firmicutes. These sulfate reducers were sustained by geologically produced sulfate and hydrogen at concentrations sufficient to maintain activities for millions of years with no apparent reliance on photosynthetically derived substrates.

1 Department of Geosciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
2 Department of Geosciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
3 Institute of Oceanography, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
4 Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC, USA.
5 GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Telegrafenberg, Potsdam, Germany.
6 Department of Geological Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
7 Department of Geology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
8 Ecology Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA.
9 Division of Earth and Ecosystems Sciences, Desert Research Institute, Las Vegas, NV, USA.
10 Mponeng Mine, Anglo Gold, Johannesburg, South Africa.

One critter apparently uses uranium to get useful energy from water. From the newsletter at work:

In their paper, the researchers and their collaborators describe a community of bacteria from the species known as Firmicutes that lives in a South African mine 2.8 kilometers below the earth’s surface and uses radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy. The discovery expanded the realm of Earth's biosphere, the three-dimensional shell that encompasses all planetary life.

I wonder what sort of SFnal ecology you could use if this is scalable to larger organisms with enough uranium around and water around.