Word: lifeness
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...that precision, plus the fact that Kepler is staring, unblinking and unceasingly, at 150,000 mostly sunlike stars in the Milky Way, that makes astronomers confident that Earths are in Kepler's future. As for any signs of life on those Earths, their detection will undoubtedly have to wait for future telescopes that can image the planets directly, probing their atmospheres for gases that hint at biological activity. (See the top 50 space moments since Sputnik...
...Kepler has had some tantalizing news on the biology front too. While looking for planets, the probe has been taking note of the behavior of the stars themselves. Our sun is remarkably steady, without dramatic changes in warmth and brightness that might have prevented the emergence and evolution of life - and Kepler now reports that two-thirds of the sunlike stars it's monitoring are no more active than the sun at its most turbulent. Lots of stable suns could mean at least a handful of promising Earths - and those, in turn, could mean living company for our own still...
...remote, snow-swept expanses of northern Sweden are an unlikely place to begin a story about cutting-edge genetic science. The kingdom's northernmost county, Norrbotten, is nearly free of human life; an average of just six people live in each square mile. And yet this tiny population can reveal a lot about how genes work in our everyday lives...
...died an average of six years earlier than the grandsons of those who had endured a poor harvest. Once Bygren and his team controlled for certain socioeconomic variations, the difference in longevity jumped to an astonishing 32 years. Later papers using different Norrbotten cohorts also found significant drops in life span and discovered that they applied along the female line as well, meaning that the daughters and granddaughters of girls who had gone from normal to gluttonous diets also lived shorter lives. To put it simply, the data suggested that a single winter of overeating as a youngster could initiate...
...that lifestyle choices like smoking and eating too much can change the epigenetic marks atop your DNA in ways that cause the genes for obesity to express themselves too strongly and the genes for longevity to express themselves too weakly. We all know that you can truncate your own life if you smoke or overeat, but it's becoming clear that those same bad behaviors can also predispose your kids - before they are even conceived - to disease and early death...