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Michael Gross (3 November 1963, Kirn, Germany) is a British science writer based at Oxford and has been awarded an honorary research fellowship at the School of Crystallography, Birkbeck, University of London. [1] [2]
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Michael Gross (3 November 1963, Kirn, Germany) is a British science writer based at Oxford and has been awarded an honorary research fellowship at the School of Crystallography, Birkbeck, University of London. [1] [2]
Gross studied engineering and chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and he holds a doctorate in physical biochemistry from Regensburg University, both German institutions. [2] During seven years of post-doctoral research in protein biochemistry at the University of Oxford, he wrote science journalism as a hobby. In 2000, he switched to writing full-time. Occasionally he also acts as a translator, editor, and lecturer. As of 2013, Gross was married and had three children. [2]
Gross has been working as a science journalist since 1993, and became a "science writer in residence" at Birkbeck College in 2001. [2] Gross is the author of around 30 research papers, over 700 journalistic pieces, and seven books, including Life on the Edge, [1] Travels to the Nanoworld, and Light and Life. He writes in English and German and parts of his work have been translated into French, Spanish and Italian. He is married with three children and lives in Oxford.
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Astrobiology is a scientific field within the life and environmental sciences that studies the origins, early evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe by investigating its deterministic conditions and contingent events. As a discipline, astrobiology is founded on the premise that life may exist beyond Earth.
Hypothetical types of biochemistry are forms of biochemistry agreed to be scientifically viable but not proven to exist at this time. The kinds of living organisms currently known on Earth all use carbon compounds for basic structural and metabolic functions, water as a solvent, and DNA or RNA to define and control their form. If life exists on other planets or moons it may be chemically similar, though it is also possible that there are organisms with quite different chemistries – for instance, involving other classes of carbon compounds, compounds of another element, or another solvent in place of water.
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes, from matter that does not, and is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. Many philosophical definitions of living systems have been proposed, such as self-organizing systems. Viruses in particular make definition difficult as they replicate only in host cells. Life exists all over the Earth in air, water, and soil, with many ecosystems forming the biosphere. Some of these are harsh environments occupied only by extremophiles.
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins was an English biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929, with Christiaan Eijkman, for the discovery of vitamins. He also discovered the amino acid tryptophan, in 1901. He was President of the Royal Society from 1930 to 1935.
Roderick MacKinnon is an American biophysicist, neuroscientist, and businessman. He is a professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Peter Agre in 2003 for his work on the structure and operation of ion channels.
The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) was established in 1998 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) "to develop the field of astrobiology and provide a scientific framework for flight missions." In December 2019 the institute's activities were suspended.
The New Frontiers program is a series of space exploration missions being conducted by NASA with the purpose of furthering the understanding of the Solar System. The program selects medium-class missions which can provide high science returns.
Steven Albert Benner is an American chemist. He has been a professor at Harvard University, ETH Zurich, and most recently at the University of Florida, where he was the V.T. & Louise Jackson Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. In 2005, he founded The Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology (TWIST) and the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution. Benner has also founded the companies EraGen Biosciences and Firebird BioMolecular Sciences LLC.
In biology, abiogenesis or the origin of life is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. The prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities on Earth was not a single event, but a process of increasing complexity involving the formation of a habitable planet, the prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Many proposals have been made for different stages of the process, but the transition from non-life to life has never been observed experimentally.
Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History is a book by Susan M. Gaines, Geoffrey Eglinton, and Jurgen Rullkotter concerning organic chemistry and, in particular, the links between the living and the material Earth. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2008.
Felisa Wolfe-Simon is an American microbial geobiologist and biogeochemist. In 2010, Wolfe-Simon led a team that discovered GFAJ-1, an extremophile bacterium that they claimed was capable of substituting arsenic for a small percentage of its phosphorus to sustain its growth, thus advancing the remarkable possibility of non-RNA/DNA-based genetics. However, these conclusions were immediately debated and criticized in correspondence to the original journal of publication, and have since come to be widely disbelieved, though they have never been disputed by any legitimate scientific studies. In 2012, two reports refuting the most significant aspects of the original results were published in the same journal in which the original findings had been previously published.
GFAJ-1 is a strain of rod-shaped bacteria in the family Halomonadaceae. It is an extremophile that was isolated from the hypersaline and alkaline Mono Lake in eastern California by geobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA research fellow in residence at the US Geological Survey. In a 2010 Science journal publication, the authors claimed that the microbe, when starved of phosphorus, is capable of substituting arsenic for a small percentage of its phosphorus to sustain its growth. Immediately after publication, other microbiologists and biochemists expressed doubt about this claim, which was robustly criticized in the scientific community. Subsequent independent studies published in 2012 found no detectable arsenate in the DNA of GFAJ-1, refuted the claim, and demonstrated that GFAJ-1 is simply an arsenate-resistant, phosphate-dependent organism.
Laurence Harris Pearl FRS FMedSci is a British biochemist and structural biologist who is currently Professor of Structural Biology in the Genome Damage and Stability Centre and was Head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex.
David M. Sabatini is an American scientist and a former professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2002 to 2021, he was a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2008 to 2021 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. He is known for his contributions in the areas of cell signaling and cancer metabolism, most notably the co-discovery of mTOR.
Ian Andrew Crawford is a British professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London in the United Kingdom.
Elspeth Frances Garman is a retired professor of molecular biophysics at the University of Oxford and a former President of the British Crystallographic Association. Until 2021 she was also Senior Kurti Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford, where she is now an emeritus fellow. The "Garman limit", which is the radiation dose limit of a cryocooled protein crystal, is named after her.
Dragonfly is a planned spacecraft and NASA mission to send a robotic rotorcraft to the surface of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. It is planned to be launched in July 2028 and arrive in 2034. It would be the first aircraft on Titan and is intended to make the first powered and fully controlled atmospheric flight on any moon, with the intention of studying prebiotic chemistry and extraterrestrial habitability. It would then use its vertical takeoffs and landings (VTOL) capability to move between exploration sites.
The Ocean Worlds Exploration Program (OWEP) is a NASA program to explore ocean worlds in the outer Solar System that could possess subsurface oceans to assess their habitability and to seek biosignatures of simple extraterrestrial life.
Neptune Odyssey is an orbiter mission concept to study Neptune and its moons, particularly Triton. The orbiter would enter into a retrograde orbit of Neptune to facilitate simultaneous study of Triton and would launch an atmospheric probe to characterize Neptune's atmosphere. The concept is being developed as a potential large strategic science mission for NASA by a team led by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. The current proposal targets a launch in 2033 using the Space Launch System with arrival at Neptune in 2049, although trajectories using gravity assists at Jupiter have also been considered with launch dates in 2031.
Lunar Trailblazer is a planned small lunar orbiter, part of NASA's SIMPLEx program, that will detect and map water on the lunar surface to determine how its form, abundance, and location relate to geology. Its mission is to aid in the understanding of lunar water and the Moon's water cycle. Lunar Trailblazer is currently slated to launch in 2024 as a secondary payload on the IM-2 mission. The Principal Investigator (PI) of the mission is Bethany Ehlmann, a professor at Caltech.
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