Michael Schirber

Climate modelers go back in time to simulate past Snowball Earth conditions and find that complete freeze-over is hard to achieve.

Seven thousand year-old rock paintings in the Sahara desert have, somewhat serendipitously, helped uncover evidence of ancient lake beds.

The environment can produce sudden shocks to the life of our planet through impacting space rocks, erupting volcanoes and other events.

Astrobiologists use Earth as an analogue for other planets.

Earth's stratosphere and the Martian surface are similar in key ways, researchers say.

A new technique could make planetary rovers more autonomous.

Volcanism on other planets could nurture microbes as well.

Big impacts could create new habitats for subterranean microbes.

The sun may have started out 2 to 5 percent more massive than it is now.

Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument will analyze organic material.

Several Uranus missions are in development, but none have been approved and funded yet.

Missions like Mars MAVEN will look for signs that the Red Planet used to be wet.

Does our magnetic field really shield Earth from the solar wind?

The claim of a microbe that swaps arsenic for phosphorus may be questionable, but its implications are far-reaching.

Snowball Earths, eras in which our planet was locked in a global winter, have perplexed researchers studying how our planet unfroze itself.

Scientists are still arguing about whether the Martian meteorite ALH84001 contains fossils.

The search for life on other planets focuses on water, but researchers argue that — judging from our own planet — a large fraction of water conditions may be inhospitable to life.

The film "Avatar" takes viewers to a fictional moon, where the alien plants glow, shoot poison leaf tips and communicate.

The possibility that life was shared between Earth and Mars could be tested with a DNA analyzer. One research team has built a prototype and plans field tests on a South American volcano.

Scientists are cooking up a replica of the surface of Saturn's moon Titan to learn more about the lakes recently discovered there.

Water vapor in planet-forming disks may block ultraviolet radiation from destroying water and other important molecules for life, according to new calculations.

Sinuous channels on the Martian surface may be evidence of more recent rainfall than expected. Researchers plan to test this hypothesis by studying sinuous streams on Earth.

A proposed space mission that aims to measure dark energy could also detect planets that current surveys are unable to find.