The Fiji Platform developed as an island arc in the Tertiary. Extensional and transpressional tectonics have deformed the fill of extensive sedimentary basins within the Platform. These basins commonly contain over 3 km of stratified deposits. Five deep petroleum-exploration wells were drilled between 1980 and 1982, but all were dry. There remain reasonable prospects, however, because none of t...

* A fuller report of the effects of ergotamine on the several chromatophores in this species is in preparation for publication elsewhere. Butcher, E. O., Biol. Bull., 77, 258-267 (1939). Cunningham, J. T., and MacMunn, C. A., Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. (London), B184, 765-612 (1893). Foster, K. W., Jour. Exp. Zool., 77, 169-213 (1937). Ginsburg, J., Zool. Jahrb., Abt. Anat., 51, 227-260 (1929). Kel...

The nature of the surface of Venus is one of the keys to answering fundamental questions about the origin and evolution of the terrestrial planets and is of critical significance to comparative planetology. The last 25 years of solar system exploration have provided unprecedented views of the Earth, Moon, Mars, and Mercury. These views have shown that the smaller terrestrial planetary bodies (t...

Background: The Fermi Paradox According to a simple but powerful inference introduced by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, we should expect to observe numerous extraterrestrial civilizations throughout our galaxy. Given the old age of our galaxy, Fermi postulated that if the evolution of life and subsequent development of intelligence is common, then extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) could have...

A key open question in the study of life is the origin of biomolecular homochirality: almost every life-form on Earth has exclusively levorotary amino acids and dextrorotary sugars. Will the same handedness be preferred if life is found elsewhere? We review some of the pertinent literature and discuss recent results suggesting that life’s homochirality resulted from sequential chiral symmetry b...

Extremophiles thrive in ice, boiling water, acid, the water core of nuclear reactors, salt crystals, and toxic waste and in a range of other extreme habitats that were previously thought to be inhospitable for life. Extremophiles include representatives of all three domains (Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya); however, the majority are microorganisms, and a high proportion of these are Archaea. Kn...

Background: Extraterrestrial Encounter To date, humanity has not made any form of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). But we cannot rule out the possibility that one or more ETI exist in our galaxy, or that we could detect, communicate with, or in other ways have contact with them in the future. There have been many analyses of how contact would proceed, but these tend to focus na...

A new strategy by which to defeat Carter's "anthropic" argument against extraterrestrial life and intelligence is presented. Our approach is based on relaxing hidden uniformitarian assumptions and considering instead a dynamical succession of evolutionary regimes governed by both global (Galaxy-wide) and local (planet- or planetary system-limited) regulation mechanisms. Notably, our increased u...