February 17, 2023
There are lots of ways to make a living as a clam, but probably one of the strangest is to be a “living drill bit.” Some species of clams are able to bore into solid rock or concrete—creating a burrow in a substance that is harder than their own shells.
For years, Jablonski’s lab has studied bivalves – the category that includes all clams, such as scallops, mussels, and cockles -- as a way to understand the evolution of species over time, uncovering clues about the forces that shape bodies and lifestyles over time.
The scientists also noticed something odd about the patterns of evolution. The borer lifestyle occurs throughout nearly the entire span of bivalve history—the first borers appeared nearly 450 million years ago—but no species has ever taken off afterward.
“Instead, they tend to originate and then peter out, or at least never do anything special in terms of diversity, each time,” said Jablonski.
Normally, explained Jablonski, when an organism evolves some new advantage, the number of species tends to rise dramatically, sometimes explosively. “Birds evolve flight, and they take off, so to speak,” he said. “We think this process results in much of the evolutionary diversity we see around us.”
February 01, 2023
Those worlds, like Earth, are both rocky and found in their stars' habitable zones—where life as we know it could plausibly evolve and might produce atmospheric gasses that could be detected using space telescopes.
"As the research community has come up with models for abiotic origins of gases that could mimic biosignatures, we've really focused on source processes that could operate on Earth-like worlds," says Kite. "However, habitable-zone rocky exoplanets could have compositions and processes dramatically different from Earth. We want to consider a wider range of possible abiotic methane sources to make sure we don't get fooled by 'trickster' planets that emit false positive biosignatures."
"We don’t know much about the origin of life nor about how life is distributed in the universe," says Kite. "If the scientific community is to make a claim that alien life has been discovered through biosignature detection, it is our responsibility to ensure that we've thought long and hard about all the ways biosignatures could in fact be abiotic geosignatures."
Get some extra (terrestrial) credit and read the whole article here!
January 26, 2023
Alya Al-Kibbi, a first-year graduate student in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, has been awarded a graduate fellowship from The Illinois Space Grant Consortium (ISGC). The award supports outstanding graduate students pursuing aerospace, astrophysics, astronomy, cosmology, Earth system science and other interdisciplinary space-related science, engineering, or mathematics fields.
Al-Kibbi was born in Washington, DC, and raised between there and Lebanon. She attended Caltech for undergraduate. As a planetary science student, she plans to research the role that comets play in the formation of planets in the solar system, and how comets can influence the current day compositions of these planets.
She will receive $10,000 towards research that contributes to furthering NASA’s science goals. “I intend to use the award to fund travel to conferences and expand my scientific perspective, and hopefully to help with the cost of publication of my research down the line,” she said.
According to Alya’s advisor, Prof. Fred Ciesla from the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, this is a unique and well-deserved opportunity. “I am very happy for Alya; she is very deserving!” he said. “This gives her a bit of extra flexibility to explore the field as she narrows down the focus of her research. To get this opportunity right at the start of graduate school is fantastic.”
For Al-Kibbi, this fellowship represents a first and strong step towards the development of her scientific career: “I was so excited to have been selected. As a first-year graduate student, I had very little confidence in my application compared to more experienced scientists. I am extremely grateful to have this opportunity to jump start my scientific career.”