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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Chris ReinhardFor much of its existence, Earth has been inhabited. But if researchers remotely analyzed the atmosphere of that young Earth, they might have missed the evidence for life....In a 2017 paper led by Chris Reinhard at Georgia Tech, the Alternative Earths team flagged the danger of false negatives in the hunt for habitable planets. The presence of both methane and oxygen in an atmosphere has been viewed as a gold standard in the search for distant life. These two gases should not coexist in appreciable amounts, as they react rapidly with each other, but living organisms can constantly replenish them in the atmosphere, allowing this disequilibrium to persist.
