Are viruses alive or are they lifeless packages of protein and nucleic acid?
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/-LUQTjdHYNo.
Carl’s book “Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive” is available now — https://geni.us/zimmer.

Countless scientists around the world study life, and yet they can’t really agree on what it is. Join New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer as he explores the boundaries of life, encountering viruses and other strange residents of the borderlands.

Carl Zimmer is the author of fourteen books about science. Zimmer’s column “Matter” appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. His book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award. The Guardian named it the best science book of 2018.

Zimmer is a familiar voice on radio programs such as Radiolab and professor adjunct at Yale University. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom both a species of tapeworm and an asteroid have been named.

Imagine, if you will, that future humans manage to travel to other worlds and find… more humans.

According to one University of Cambridge astrobiologist, that scenario may be more likely than you’d think.

In a new interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the institution’s Department of Earth Sciences named Simon Conway Morris declared that researchers can “say with reasonable confidence” that human-like evolution has occurred in other locations around the universe.

Using spacecraft and ground-based facilities, Russian astronomers have inspected the Orion Bar photodissociation region, focusing on the mid-infrared emission from this source. Results of the study could help astronomers to better understand the evolution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in space. The research was published November 10 on arXiv.org.

At a distance of about 1,300 light years away, the Orion Nebula is the nearest region of massive star formation to Earth, with a complex and extensive gas structure. It hosts the so-called “Orion Bar”—a ridge-like feature of gas and dust formed by the intense radiation from nearby, hot, young stars, which appears to be shaped like a bar.

The Orion Bar is a photodissociation region or photon-dominated region (PDR). In general, PDRs are regions in the interstellar medium (ISM) at the interface between hot ionized gas and cool molecular gas that are energetically dominated by non-ionizing ultraviolet photons.