This year, as part of the conference, 12 scientists from various fields coalesced around the theme "Is life rife in the Universe?" in a day-long symposium at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. They offered up the most recent discoveries, analyses, and thoughts emanating from the frontiers of astrobiology, the field that studies—as Nobel laureate Baruch S. Blumberg, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, puts it—"biology elsewhere."
Interdisciplinary by nature, the basic science of astrobiology, Blumberg notes, is collaborative and conducted by widely distributed investigators exploring different approaches with new technologies. Although "biology elsewhere" remains elusive, Blumberg, 1975 winner of the Nobel prize in medicine and member of The Scientist's editorial advisory board, and the other presenters covered a good part of the recent findings and techniques now in use to carry out the search. The knowledge gained in the last decade and the sheer scope of the ...
