Constance Bertka

Science and Society Resources

Humanity's toolkit for altering the world we live in now includes CRISPR. Through an evolutionary process, bacteria acquired a way to protect themselves from an invading virus, making their immediate future more secure. In human hands, this powerful genome‐editing tool offers the potential to impact, at a breathtaking rate, not only our own evoluti...

Life science educators seek pedagogical approaches to help students better understand natural selection, but students’ understanding is impeded by cognitive biases, misconceptions, and resistance to learning about the content due to perceived cultural and religious conflicts. In this chapter, we review the impact of implementing constructivist, gui...

Background The religious or cultural objections by many people to the teaching of evolution in high school biology classrooms can impact both students’ willingness to explore a scientific understanding of evolutionary theory and teachers’ willingness to provide sound instruction on the topic. Pedagogical approaches designed to address this tension...

Background: While recent research indicates that using human examples can be an engaging way to teach core evolutionary concepts such as natural selection and phylogenetic thinking, teachers still face potential conflicts and challenges that arise from cultural barriers to teaching and learning about evolution. The “Teaching Evolution through Human...

The question of whether or not extraterrestrial life exists and its potential impact for religions, especially Christianity, is an ancient one addressed in numerous historical publications. The contemporary discussion has been dominated by a few notable scientists from the SETI and astrobiology communities, and by a few Christian theologians active...

Abstract This paper reports recent efforts to gather experts from the humanities and social sciences along with astrobiologists to consider the cultural, societal, and psychological implications of astrobiology research and exploration. We began by convening a workshop to draft a research roadmap on astrobiology's societal implications and later fo...

The workshop on “Reaching the Mantle Frontier: Moho and Beyond” was held at the Broad Branch Road Campus of the Carnegie Institution of Washington on 9–11 September 2010. The workshop attracted seventy-four scientists and engineers from academia and industry in North America, Asia, and Europe.Reaching and sampling the mantle through penetration of...

It is unavoidable that the science of astrobiology will intersect with, and inevitably challenge, many deeply held beliefs. Exploration possibilities, particularly those that may include the discovery of extraterrestrial life, will continue to challenge us to reconsider our views of nature and our connection to the rest of the universe. As a scient...

Where did we come from? Are we alone? Where are we going? These are the questions that define the field of astrobiology. New discoveries about life on Earth, the increasing numbers of extrasolar planets being identified, and the technologies being developed to locate and characterize Earth-like planets around other stars are continually challenging...

1. Astrobiology in societal context Constance Bertka; Part I. Origin of Life: 2. Emergence and the experimental pursuit of the origin of life Robert Hazen; 3. From Aristotle to Darwin, to Freeman Dyson: changing definitions of life viewed in historical context James Strick; 4. Philosophical aspects of the origin-of-life problem: the emergence of li...

Recent missions have provided important insights into the martian interior, even though all of them aimed to elucidate the planet's surface. In their Perspective, Fei and Bertka argue that the available evidence points to a liquid Martian core and a solid iron-rich silicate mantle. However, the size of the core is poorly constrained. Because better...

The solidus for the mantle of Mars is an important geophysical parameter in modeling the thermal history and evolution of the planet. This study provides solidus data for a simplified model Martian mantle composition from the midmantle (8 GPa) to the core–mantle boundary (25 GPa) using multianvil experiments. Combining this work with previous studi...

An iron-sulfur compound (Fe3S2) was synthesized at pressures greater than 14 gigapascals in the system Fe-FeS. The formation of Fe3S2 changed the melting relations from a simple binary eutectic system to a binary system with an intermediate compound that melted incongruently. The eutectic temperature in the system at 14 gigapascals was about 400°C...

A combination of experimental and topological constraints indicates that critical equi- libria play an important role in determining the pyroxene-liquid phase relations along the Mg2Si206-CaMgSi206 (enstatite-diopside) join and in naturallherzolites. Topological con- straints do not permit the three-pyroxene equilibrium, orthopyroxene + diopside =...