What Really Makes Us Tick - SpaceDaily  From sleep patterns to health conditions, biological clocks get down to what makes us tick. The University of Houston is home to one of the world's leading centers for biological rhythms research. With five laboratories and a team of more than 30 scholars led by five tenured faculty members, the UH Biological Clocks Program studies an array of issues with far-reaching human implications.  

Methane on Mars could signal life  - BBC  Left:  Is there life beneath the soil?  Methane is not a stable molecule in the Martian atmosphere. If it was not replenished in some way, it would only last a few hundred years before it vanished.There are two possible sources: either active volcanoes, or microbes. So far, no active volcanic hotspots have been detected on the planet by the many spacecraft currently in orbit. On Earth, there are organisms called methanogens - microbes that produce methane from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. These organisms do not need oxygen to thrive, and they are thought to be the type of microbes that could possibly live on Mars.

Transforming Other Planets for Humanity - SpaceDaily    A group of students at the Laboratory on Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder has been engaged in a broad-based and high quality program to investigate problems of terraforming Mars and Venus. Terraforming other worlds may take decades to accomplish, and the go-ahead may still be centuries away. We now know just enough hard facts about other planets so that our speculations can be grounded in practicality and reality. Enough hard data is right now becoming available to allow us to construct the first tentative scenarios of planetary engi- neering.