College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

NEWS ATLAS - Finding alien life won’t be as dramatic as a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn – it’ll be NASA scientists holding a press conference to excitedly show off a chart that’s incomprehensible to most people. Now, we’re a step closer to that boring but groundbreaking day. Astronomers from the University...

SPACE.COM - Hycean worlds, which are a possible kind of exoplanet with deep oceans surrounded by a thick envelope of hydrogen, could provide the best chance for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect biosignatures, according to a new study. Those potential signs of life are a group of chemicals called methyl halides, which...

GB NEWS - Scientists have discovered that alien existence could be hiding in gases on distant planets. New research suggests extraterrestrial beings might exist in gases called methyl halides on faraway worlds. Researchers believe this approach could provide a relatively quick and easy way to examine potential signs of life beyond Earth. On Earth, methyl...

MASHABLE - Considering humans don't have a spacecraft capable of traveling to planets beyond the solar system, scientists have to get creative if they want to find clues of life existing light-years away. Now a group of scientists is proposing a new way for astronomers to look for signs of aliens using the James Webb...

EARTH.COM - Scientists have searched for alien life for years, but space is huge, and technology has limits, making it hard to find answers. Traditionally, researchers have focused on finding planets similar to Earth, believing that conditions mirroring our own would be the best place to look for life. However, a new study suggests that...

EARTH.COM - Strange as it sounds, some scientists think the earliest life forms on Earth may have painted our planet in shades of purple rather than the green we see today. This idea, known as the Purple Earth hypothesis, suggests that single-celled organisms depended on a less complex molecule than chlorophyll to harness sunlight. NASA-supported...

Mary Droser, Distinguished Professor of Geology in the UC Riverside Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, likes to say that she is the luckiest and most privileged person she knows. To anyone considering her prodigious list of professional accomplishments, the eponymous head of the Droser Paleoecology Lab on campus certainly seems to have had a...

THE DEBRIEF - On New Year’s Eve 2023, amid appearances by Joss Stone and Rod Steward on Jools Holland’s holiday ‘Musical Hootenanny’, a major 2024 revelation was alluded to: soon, we might learn that we aren’t alone in the universe. The insinuations that the discovery of alien life could be imminent all followed news from...

FORBES - Mars remains a true puzzle, but not for the reasons most people would think. Sure, there's debate over whether it ever had surface water, oceans and life. But Mars’ small mass relative to earth and Venus have been a major conundrum that has plagued planetary scientists for decades. Because the red planet’s mass...

STUDY FINDS - For the millions of people living in earthquake-prone regions, from New Zealand to California, a few minutes of warning could mean the difference between life and death. Now, by studying ancient curved scratches left behind on fault surfaces from past seismic events, scientists have discovered a way to better predict how earthquakes...