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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are set to welcome a most unusual guest, as “the Blob” blasts off into orbit on Tuesday.

An alien on its own planet, the Blob is an unclassifiable organism – neither fish nor fowl. Nor is it plant, animal, or fungus.

As such, Physarum polycephalum – a type of slime mold – has long fascinated scientists and will now be part of a unique experiment carried out simultaneously by astronauts hundreds of kilometers above the Earth and by hundreds of thousands of French school students.

The skies of Venus may contain signatures of alien life, according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the search for alien life, the second planet from our Sun has long been ignored. It’s easy to see why: the Venusian surface reaches temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Fahrenheit; its dense atmosphere applies nearly 100 times more pressure to objects than Earth’s atmosphere; and the planet rains sulfuric acid, a corrosive chemical that causes severe burns to humans.

As such, most scientists have focused on finding signs of ancient alien life on Mars, or current life on moons like Europa or Enceladus. But Earth’s closest neighbor might have been the place to look all along.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb launches new project to search for extraterrestrial life.


An effort announced Monday called the Galileo Project aims to search for and investigate physical objects that could be the result of an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.

It’s helmed by Avi Loeb, a professor at Harvard University’s department of astronomy, who was recently the subject of scrutiny for claiming that interstellar comet ‘Oumuamua was in fact a piece of annihilated alien technology.

The project will continue Loeb’s efforts to pin down the origin of ‘Oumuamua, as well as look for other similar objects that Loeb believes are indicative of alien life. It was founded in light of the recently released UAP government report.

Yesterday, LHCb presented results consistent with the presence of charm content in the proton.

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Fourteen billion years ago, the Universe began with a bang. Crammed within an infinitely small space, energy coalesced to form equal quantities of matter and antimatter. But as the Universe cooled and expanded, its composition changed. Just one second after the Big Bang, antimatter had all but disappeared, leaving matter to form everything that we see around us — from the stars and galaxies, to the Earth and all life that it supports.

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A team of scientists will embark on a new international research project led by Harvard University to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life by looking for advanced technology it may leave behind.

The Galileo Project is led by the Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb co-founded the project with Frank Laukien, CEO of Bruker Corporation, a Massachusetts-based manufacturer of scientific equipment.

A new tool that enables thousands of tiny experiments to run simultaneously on a single polymer chip will let scientists study enzymes faster and more comprehensively than ever before.

For much of human history, animals and plants were perceived to follow a different set of rules than rest of the universe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this culminated in a belief that living organisms were infused by a non-physical energy or “life force” that allowed them to perform remarkable transformations that couldn’t be explained by conventional chemistry or physics alone.

Scientists now understand that these transformations are powered by enzymes – protein molecules comprised of chains of amino acids that act to speed up, or catalyze, the conversion of one kind of molecule (substrates) into another (products). In so doing, they enable reactions such as digestion and fermentation – and all of the chemical events that happen in every one of our cells – that, left alone, would happen extraordinarily slowly.

When a star is born, the leftover dust and gas in the cloud from which it formed doesn’t just sit there. It clumps together, forming other cosmic objects — asteroids and comets and meteors and, yes, exoplanets. We’ve detected many of these exoplanets in orbit around alien stars in the Milky Way.

But not all exoplanets stay put. Some get gravitationally kicked away from their parent star, to wander the galaxy, cold and alone. These are less easy to detect — but, after careful combing through data from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, astronomers think they’ve found some.

In data from a two-month observing period, they counted 27 signals hinting that a rogue exoplanet was moving past the telescope’s eye. Most of them were known, detected by other instruments — but five were completely new.