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Are Aliens Among Us?
In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms
http://www.sciam.com
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility of all is that alien life-forms inhabit our own bodies. While observing mammalian cells with an electron microscope in 1988, Olavi Kajander and his colleagues at the University of Kuopio in Finland observed ultrasmall particles inside many of the cells. With dimensions as small as 50 nanometers, these particles were about one-tenth the size of conventional small bacteria. Ten years later Kajander and his co-workers proposed that the particles were living organisms that thrive in urine and induce the formation of kidney stones by precipitating calcium and other minerals around themselves.
Artist: ADAM QUESTELL
If, as many scientists believe, life can readily emerge under the right environmental conditions, it is possible that life arose on Earth more than once. Researchers are now seeking evidence of a second genesis by searching for exotic microbes that are biochemically different from all known organisms. In this image, artist Adam Questell has imagined an alien cell that carries its genetic material in twin nuclei.
Artist: Jean-Francois Podevin
Scientists and science-fiction writers have long speculated about what a silicon-based life-form would look like. In an article for the Saturday Review, H. G. Wells wrote: One is startled towards fantastic imaginings by such a suggestion: visions of silicon-aluminium organisms...wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur, let us say, by the shores of a sea of liquid iron some thousand degrees or so above the temperature of a blast furnace.
http://www.sciam.com
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility of all is that alien life-forms inhabit our own bodies. While observing mammalian cells with an electron microscope in 1988, Olavi Kajander and his colleagues at the University of Kuopio in Finland observed ultrasmall particles inside many of the cells. With dimensions as small as 50 nanometers, these particles were about one-tenth the size of conventional small bacteria. Ten years later Kajander and his co-workers proposed that the particles were living organisms that thrive in urine and induce the formation of kidney stones by precipitating calcium and other minerals around themselves.
Artist: ADAM QUESTELL
If, as many scientists believe, life can readily emerge under the right environmental conditions, it is possible that life arose on Earth more than once. Researchers are now seeking evidence of a second genesis by searching for exotic microbes that are biochemically different from all known organisms. In this image, artist Adam Questell has imagined an alien cell that carries its genetic material in twin nuclei.
Artist: Jean-Francois Podevin
Scientists and science-fiction writers have long speculated about what a silicon-based life-form would look like. In an article for the Saturday Review, H. G. Wells wrote: One is startled towards fantastic imaginings by such a suggestion: visions of silicon-aluminium organisms...wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur, let us say, by the shores of a sea of liquid iron some thousand degrees or so above the temperature of a blast furnace.
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