Dimitar Sasselov: The Life of Super-Earths

The discovery of a new Earth, or other world, may be in our future, says Sasselov. But a truly "alien" life form is more likely to emerge from our planet's natural environment or in a petri dish at a research lab. In the past year, we have witnessed unprecedented breakthroughs in the seemingly unrelated fields of synthetic biology and exo-planetary astronomy. Just recently, arsenic-based bacteria was discovered in a California lake – both puzzling and electrifying the scientific world. Sasselov aims to highlight these groundbreaking findings and explain how what we learn in the laboratory informs our investigation of the universe, and vice versa.