Curiosity rover detects long-chain carbon molecules on Mars

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By Paul Voosen, Science. 

Excerpt: NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic of long-ago life on Mars: long-chain organic molecules. Found after painstaking reanalysis of data on a sample drilled from a lake that dried up billions of years ago, the molecules likely derived from fatty acids, a common building block of cell membranes on Earth. The finding, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not a definite detection of past life; the fatty acids could also have formed without life. But it’s another in a series of tantalizing hints.... 

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Early universe’s ‘little red dots’ may be black hole stars

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By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: It’s as if the baby universe had caught a case of measles. Since NASA’s JWST observatory began peering into the distant universe in 2022, it has discovered a rash of “little red dots”—hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation. Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole. ...JWST couldn’t resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny—less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/early-universe-s-little-red-dots-may-be-black-hole-stars . 
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Titan might not have an ocean after all

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By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: In the late 2000s, planetary scientists scoured data gathered by NASA’s Cassini mission, a Saturn orbiter, about the planet’s mysterious icy moon Titan. Their exciting conclusion: The frozen world harbored an ocean sloshing around tens of kilometers beneath a thick ice shell. The ocean, hundreds of kilometers deep itself, might even be a cauldron for the “prebiotic” organic chemistry that led to life on Earth, they proposed. Now, nearly 2 decades later, researchers think they may have gotten the story all wrong. Research  presented today  here at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting and  published in  Nature  claims that although Titan may have once harbored a liquid ocean, today it is frozen, except for smaller melted zones deep beneath the surface. If true, the discovery will upend the long-standing assumption that Saturn’s biggest moon is a water world, like other moons in the outer Solar System,  in...
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The Moon Was an Inside Job

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By Robin George Andrews , The New York Times.  Excerpt: New research suggests that Theia, the object whose collision with Earth is theorized to have caused the formation of the moon, came from closer to the sun. ...A study published Thursday in the journal  Science  ...looking at chemical clues hidden in Earth’s rocks, meteorites and moon matter, scientists have found ghostly remnants of Theia. And they show that Theia and the early Earth were built from the same construction materials....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/science/moon-collision-earth-theia.html . 
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