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Secretary of defense must perform a ‘delicate dance’ between the president, Congress and the public

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theconversation.com – Evelyn Farkas, Executive Director, McCain Institute, Arizona State University – 2025-01-11 08:56:00

The U.S. military is a massive group effort serving the nation’s – and the public’s – interests.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Evelyn Farkas, Arizona State University

Senate confirmation hearings are slated to begin on Jan. 14, 2025, for Pete Hegseth, whom President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to serve as the next secretary of defense. It’s a massive job, broadly affecting Americans’ security at home and abroad and overseeing huge numbers of people and immense amounts of money.

The Conversation U.S. asked Evelyn Farkas, a longtime Defense Department leader who is now executive director of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University, to explain what the secretary of defense’s job entails and what makes a person effective at that job. During the Obama administration, Farkas was a deputy assistant secretary of defense with a focus on Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. Prior to that, she was a civilian adviser to the top military officer in NATO, and earlier still she was a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees the military. She also served as a professor at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College.

What does the secretary of defense do?

They’re responsible for about 3.4 million people, including 1.2 million active duty service members and 1.3 million reservists, as well as about 900,000 civilian employees. The secretary is responsible for making sure those people are able to do their jobs – which, collectively, is to defend the United States, the American people and U.S. interests.

They’re responsible for defense policy, spending and operations, which includes the people, property and equipment at about 500 military bases across all 50 states and another 750 or so bases in 80 countries around the world. They’re responsible for budgeting and spending almost US$2 trillion a year in federal funds, which is about 16% of the overall federal budget.

An overview of a large five-sided office building.
The Pentagon is the headquarters for the U.S. Defense Department.
AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

What is the secretary’s role in commanding the nation’s military forces?

The president is the commander in chief and decides when and how to use the military. But the president’s decision to use force relies on advice and recommendations from the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president orders the secretary to carry out military operations, and the orders pass down from the secretary to the relevant commanders from there.

What is an average day or week for the secretary of defense?

The secretary sets the vision and tone for the Department of Defense and helps the president develop his or her defense strategy, and then implements that strategy. The secretary also designs and implements policies to advance the strategy and the overall national security objectives of the president.

The Defense Department’s responsibility is focused on the use of the military, whether it’s to deter attacks or defend American interests. The secretary must make sure the military is equipped and trained – ready – to fight and win the nation’s wars and to conduct any other operations, such as humanitarian, counterterrorism or peace operations.

The secretary sets priorities, which are reflected in the department’s budget. The budget has to be negotiated with Congress, of course. Day to day, the secretary is holding meetings with people who are charged with managing different aspects of the department’s activity. This happens regularly in the Pentagon or when the secretary visits military units and installations in the U.S. or around the world.

There are undersecretaries for policy and the budget and other functions such as personnel and readiness. Then there are service secretaries, who look at all of those issues but only for one specific service – the Army, the Navy, which includes the Marine Corps, and the Air Force, which includes the Space Force.

People stand in rows wearing shirts that say 'Army.'
Prospective soldiers stand in a training formation.
Scott Olson/Getty Images

Does the president talk to the secretary of defense regularly?

It depends on the president. Most presidents have regular meetings with their top officials as a Cabinet, as a group, and then, of course, individually. Some presidents will have a standing lunch with their Cabinet members, or just a formal meeting.

Generally speaking, most presidents would seek to have a meeting at least once a week that involves their secretary of defense. There’s a lot going on in the world, and most of the events or crises involve some decision about the use of military force or some effect on defense capabilities.

How does the secretary of defense affect regular Americans’ lives?

The secretary’s involvement in a decision to use nuclear weapons would certainly affect almost every American. So that’s one way, and any decisions involving war could potentially affect any given American.

Short of that, the economic ripple effects of decisions the secretary makes could be national. The defense budget is large, but not enough to affect everyone all at the same time. But for example, if the secretary of defense decides to close a base, that would have impact on most people in that community, if not all of them, at least indirectly. Businesses would have to adjust or close, and the military personnel and their families would have to move. And the political leadership of the community would be empowered to make decisions about the civilian use of properties previously owned by the Department of Defense.

Almost every kind of company does business with the Department of Defense, either directly or indirectly. The commissaries stock food and medicine and all sorts of regular items that the military buys, in addition to equipment for fighting.

And then there’s research and development. Historically, the Defense Department has put a lot of money into those efforts, which has had a lot of effect on consumers’ lives. It’s not just the internet, although that’s one example of something that was invented for military purposes and then translated into civilian use. A lot of smaller developments happen, too, because when a lot of money is being poured into innovation, they discover things along the way that can be commercialized.

Nowadays the civilian sector has outpaced the Defense Department in terms of research and development and innovation, but the defense dollars still make a big difference.

What personal or professional attributes make for an effective defense secretary?

I worked for four of them, three directly. Robert Gates had a high sense of empathy and lots of prior government experience. Leon Panetta had an acute sense of humor and a direct but funny way of interacting. He also had the advantage of having held multiple high-level jobs in other parts of the government. Chuck Hagel had a direct line to the Senate, and Ashton Carter was a hard-driven expert.

The most useful attributes include honesty, empathy, a sense of humor, a sharp intellect, the ability to learn quickly and the skill to determine what is important quickly. Of course, prior government experience working with the department is invaluable. It’s helpful to have an understanding of how the Defense Department works, with all its components, and its strengths and weaknesses, before you get into the job. The department has a military and civilian bureaucracy, and it takes some savvy work to get it to move quickly to implement the president’s strategy.

During the confirmation process, like all nominees, the secretary is required to attest in writing and sometimes verbally that they will provide truthful answers to Congress and that they will be responsive when Congress has questions.

Different secretaries do a better job at that than others. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often would annoy members of Congress because he knew there was a time limit on his ability to speak and on each senator’s ability to speak. So he would just speak until the clock ran out, and that made them mad. He wouldn’t always answer questions directly and sometimes came off as arrogant.

The interactions with Congress are this delicate dance, because a secretary wants to protect the prerogatives of the president and the executive branch. But Congress pays the bills, provides any new authorities the secretary might be seeking and can curtail both the authority and the budget. A secretary wants to defend the policies, the budget and the actions of the Department of Defense. But they also want to be respectful of Congress’ role and responsibilities and the individual members of Congress.

Sometimes that balance is hard to strike. They’re in a really demanding job, and they get called to testify in front of Congress, usually with the TV cameras on. Members of Congress aren’t always polite, so it takes a lot of patience and self control on the part of the secretary of defense to successfully maintain good relations, public and private, with members of Congress.

What do the American people deserve from a defense secretary?

The secretary should be someone who will stand up for the military and civilians in the department and demand from the president and Congress the resources needed to execute their mission and to provide for the well-being of the personnel, who are, after all, Americans.

I would also say a secretary should interact with the media in a way that strikes the right balance between informing the American public about what the department and the military are doing in the name of the American people and protecting national security secrets. At the end of the day, the secretary of defense is working for the American people in their interest and that of the nation.

This story is part of a series of profiles of Cabinet and high-level administration positions.The Conversation

Evelyn Farkas, Executive Director, McCain Institute, Arizona State University

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Perfect brownies baked at high altitude are possible thanks to Colorado’s home economics pioneer Inga Allison

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theconversation.com – Tobi Jacobi, Professor of English, Colorado State University – 2025-04-22 07:47:00

Students work in the high-altitude baking laboratory.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University and Caitlin Clark, Colorado State University

Many bakers working at high altitudes have carefully followed a standard recipe only to reach into the oven to find a sunken cake, flat cookies or dry muffins.

Experienced mountain bakers know they need a few tricks to achieve the same results as their fellow artisans working at sea level.

These tricks are more than family lore, however. They originated in the early 20th century thanks to research on high-altitude baking done by Inga Allison, then a professor at Colorado State University. It was Allison’s scientific prowess and experimentation that brought us the possibility of perfect high-altitude brownies and other baked goods.

A recipe for brownies at high altitude.
Inga Allison’s high-altitude brownie recipe.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

We are two current academics at CSU whose work has been touched by Allison’s legacy.

One of us – Caitlin Clark – still relies on Allison’s lessons a century later in her work as a food scientist in Colorado. The other – Tobi Jacobi – is a scholar of women’s rhetoric and community writing, and an enthusiastic home baker in the Rocky Mountains, who learned about Allison while conducting archival research on women’s work and leadership at CSU.

That research developed into “Knowing Her,” an exhibition Jacobi developed with Suzanne Faris, a CSU sculpture professor. The exhibit highlights dozens of women across 100 years of women’s work and leadership at CSU and will be on display through mid-August 2025 in the CSU Fort Collins campus Morgan Library.

A pioneer in home economics

Inga Allison is one of the fascinating and accomplished women who is part of the exhibit.

Allison was born in 1876 in Illinois and attended the University of Chicago, where she completed the prestigious “science course” work that heavily influenced her career trajectory. Her studies and research also set the stage for her belief that women’s education was more than preparation for domestic life.

In 1908, Allison was hired as a faculty member in home economics at Colorado Agricultural College, which is now CSU. She joined a group of faculty who were beginning to study the effects of altitude on baking and crop growth. The department was located inside Guggenheim Hall, a building that was constructed for home economics education but lacked lab equipment or serious research materials.

A sepia-toned photograph of Inga Allison, a white woman in dark clothes with her hair pulled back.
Inga Allison was a professor of home economics at Colorado Agricultural College, where she developed recipes that worked in high altitudes.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

Allison took both the land grant mission of the university with its focus on teaching, research and extension and her particular charge to prepare women for the future seriously. She urged her students to move beyond simple conceptions of home economics as mere preparation for domestic life. She wanted them to engage with the physical, biological and social sciences to understand the larger context for home economics work.

Such thinking, according to CSU historian James E. Hansen, pushed women college students in the early 20th century to expand the reach of home economics to include “extension and welfare work, dietetics, institutional management, laboratory research work, child development and teaching.”

News articles from the early 1900s track Allison giving lectures like “The Economic Side of Natural Living” to the Colorado Health Club and talks on domestic science to ladies clubs and at schools across Colorado. One of her talks in 1910 focused on the art of dishwashing.

Allison became the home economics department chair in 1910 and eventually dean. In this leadership role, she urged then-CSU President Charles Lory to fund lab materials for the home economics department. It took 19 years for this dream to come to fruition.

In the meantime, Allison collaborated with Lory, who gave her access to lab equipment in the physics department. She pieced together equipment to conduct research on the relationship between cooking foods in water and atmospheric pressure, but systematic control of heat, temperature and pressure was difficult to achieve.

She sought other ways to conduct high-altitude experiments and traveled across Colorado where she worked with students to test baking recipes in varied conditions, including at 11,797 feet in a shelter house on Fall River Road near Estes Park.

Early 1900s car traveling in the Rocky Mountains.
Inga Allison tested her high-altitude baking recipes at 11,797 feet at the shelter house on Fall River Road, near Estes Park, Colorado.
Archives and Special Collections, Colorado State University

But Allison realized that recipes baked at 5,000 feet in Fort Collins and Denver simply didn’t work in higher altitudes. Little advancement in baking methods occurred until 1927, when the first altitude baking lab in the nation was constructed at CSU thanks to Allison’s research. The results were tangible — and tasty — as public dissemination of altitude-specific baking practices began.

A 1932 bulletin on baking at altitude offers hundreds of formulas for success at heights ranging from 4,000 feet to over 11,000 feet. Its author, Marjorie Peterson, a home economics staff person at the Colorado Experiment Station, credits Allison for her constructive suggestions and support in the development of the booklet.

Science of high-altitude baking

As a senior food scientist in a mountain state, one of us – Caitlin Clark – advises bakers on how to adjust their recipes to compensate for altitude. Thanks to Allison’s research, bakers at high altitude today can anticipate how the lower air pressure will affect their recipes and compensate by making small adjustments.

The first thing you have to understand before heading into the kitchen is that the higher the altitude, the lower the air pressure. This lower pressure has chemical and physical effects on baking.

Air pressure is a force that pushes back on all of the molecules in a system and prevents them from venturing off into the environment. Heat plays the opposite role – it adds energy and pushes molecules to escape.

When water is boiled, molecules escape by turning into steam. The less air pressure is pushing back, the less energy is required to make this happen. That’s why water boils at lower temperatures at higher altitudes – around 200 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver compared with 212 F at sea level.

So, when baking is done at high altitude, steam is produced at a lower temperature and earlier in the baking time. Carbon dioxide produced by leavening agents also expands more rapidly in the thinner air. This causes high-altitude baked goods to rise too early, before their structure has fully set, leading to collapsed cakes and flat muffins. Finally, the rapid evaporation of water leads to over-concentration of sugars and fats in the recipe, which can cause pastries to have a gummy, undesirable texture.

Allison learned that high-altitude bakers could adjust to their environment by reducing the amount of sugar or increasing liquids to prevent over-concentration, and using less of leavening agents like baking soda or baking powder to prevent dough from rising too quickly.

Allison was one of many groundbreaking women in the early 20th century who actively supported higher education for women and advanced research in science, politics, humanities and education in Colorado.

Others included Grace Espy-Patton, a professor of English and sociology at CSU from 1885 to 1896 who founded an early feminist journal and was the first woman to register to vote in Fort Collins. Miriam Palmer was an aphid specialist and master illustrator whose work crafting hyper-realistic wax apples in the early 1900s allowed farmers to confirm rediscovery of the lost Colorado Orange apple, a fruit that has been successfully propagated in recent years.

In 1945, Allison retired as both an emerita professor and emerita dean at CSU. She immediately stepped into the role of student and took classes in Russian and biochemistry.

In the fall of 1958, CSU opened a new dormitory for women that was named Allison Hall in her honor.

“I had supposed that such a thing happened only to the very rich or the very dead,” Allison told reporters at the dedication ceremony.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.The Conversation

Tobi Jacobi, Professor of English, Colorado State University and Caitlin Clark, Senior Food Scientist at the CSU Spur Food Innovation Center, Colorado State University

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Why don’t humans have hair all over their bodies? A biologist explains our lack of fur

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theconversation.com – Maria Chikina, Assistant Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh – 2025-04-21 07:33:00

Some mammals are super hairy, some are not.
Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

Maria Chikina, University of Pittsburgh

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.


Why don’t humans have hair all over their bodies like other animals? – Murilo, age 5, Brazil


Have you ever wondered why you don’t have thick hair covering your whole body like a dog, cat or gorilla does?

Humans aren’t the only mammals with sparse hair. Elephants, rhinos and naked mole rats also have very little hair. It’s true for some marine mammals, such as whales and dolphins, too.

Scientists think the earliest mammals, which lived at the time of the dinosaurs, were quite hairy. But over hundreds of millions of years, a small handful of mammals, including humans, evolved to have less hair. What’s the advantage of not growing your own fur coat?

I’m a biologist who studies the genes that control hairiness in mammals. Why humans and a small number of other mammals are relatively hairless is an interesting question. It all comes down to whether certain genes are turned on or off.

Hair benefits

Hair and fur have many important jobs. They keep animals warm, protect their skin from the sun and injuries and help them blend into their surroundings.

They even assist animals in sensing their environment. Ever felt a tickle when something almost touches you? That’s your hair helping you detect things nearby.

Humans do have hair all over their bodies, but it is generally sparser and finer than that of our hairier relatives. A notable exception is the hair on our heads, which likely serves to protect the scalp from the sun. In human adults, the thicker hair that develops under the arms and between the legs likely reduces skin friction and aids in cooling by dispersing sweat.

So hair can be pretty beneficial. There must have been a strong evolutionary reason for people to lose so much of it.

Why humans lost their hair

The story begins about 7 million years ago, when humans and chimpanzees took different evolutionary paths. Although scientists can’t be sure why humans became less hairy, we have some strong theories that involve sweat.

Humans have far more sweat glands than chimps and other mammals do. Sweating keeps you cool. As sweat evaporates from your skin, heat energy is carried away from your body. This cooling system was likely crucial for early human ancestors, who lived in the hot African savanna.

Of course, there are plenty of mammals living in hot climates right now that are covered with fur. Early humans were able to hunt those kinds of animals by tiring them out over long chases in the heat – a strategy known as persistence hunting.

Humans didn’t need to be faster than the animals they hunted. They just needed to keep going until their prey got too hot and tired to flee. Being able to sweat a lot, without a thick coat of hair, made this endurance possible.

Genes that control hairiness

To better understand hairiness in mammals, my research team compared the genetic information of 62 different mammals, from humans to armadillos to dogs and squirrels. By lining up the DNA of all these different species, we were able to zero in on the genes linked to keeping or losing body hair.

Among the many discoveries we made, we learned humans still carry all the genes needed for a full coat of hair – they are just muted or switched off.

In the story of “Beauty and the Beast,” the Beast is covered in thick fur, which might seem like pure fantasy. But in real life some rare conditions can cause people to grow a lot of hair all over their bodies. This condition, called hypertrichosis, is very unusual and has been called “werewolf syndrome” because of how people who have it look.

A detailed painting of a man and a woman standing next to one another in historical looking clothes. The man's face is covered in hair, while the woman's is not.
Petrus Gonsalvus and his wife, Catherine, painted by Joris Hoefnagel, circa 1575.
National Gallery of Art

In the 1500s, a Spanish man named Petrus Gonsalvus was born with hypertrichosis. As a child he was sent in an iron cage like an animal to Henry II of France as a gift. It wasn’t long before the king realized Petrus was like any other person and could be educated. In time, he married a lady, forming the inspiration for the “Beauty and the Beast” story.

While you will probably never meet someone with this rare trait, it shows how genes can lead to unique and surprising changes in hair growth.


Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.The Conversation

Maria Chikina, Assistant Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh

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Scientists found a potential sign of life on a distant planet – an astronomer explains why many are still skeptical

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theconversation.com – Daniel Apai, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona – 2025-04-18 17:44:00

An illustration of the exoplanet K2-18b, which some research suggests may be covered by deep oceans.
NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Daniel Apai, University of Arizona

A team of astronomers announced on April 16, 2025, that in the process of studying a planet around another star, they had found evidence for an unexpected atmospheric gas. On Earth, that gas – called dimethyl sulfide – is mostly produced by living organisms.

In April 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope stared at the host star of the planet K2-18b for nearly six hours. During that time, the orbiting planet passed in front of the star. Starlight filtered through its atmosphere, carrying the fingerprints of atmospheric molecules to the telescope.

A diagram showing planets and stars emitting light, which goes through JWST detectors, where it's split into different wavelengths to make a spectrum. Each spectrum suggests the presence of a different element.
JWST’s cameras can detect molecules in the atmosphere of a planet by looking at light that passed through that atmosphere.
European Space Agency

By comparing those fingerprints to 20 different molecules that they would potentially expect to observe in the atmosphere, the astronomers concluded that the most probable match was a gas that, on Earth, is a good indicator of life.

I am an astronomer and astrobiologist who studies planets around other stars and their atmospheres. In my work, I try to understand which nearby planets may be suitable for life.

K2-18b, a mysterious world

To understand what this discovery means, let’s start with the bizarre world it was found in. The planet’s name is K2-18b, meaning it is the first planet in the 18th planetary system found by the extended NASA Kepler mission, K2. Astronomers assign the “b” label to the first planet in the system, not “a,” to avoid possible confusion with the star.

K2-18b is a little over 120 light-years from Earth – on a galactic scale, this world is practically in our backyard.

Although astronomers know very little about K2-18b, we do know that it is very unlike Earth. To start, it is about eight times more massive than Earth, and it has a volume that’s about 18 times larger. This means that it’s only about half as dense as Earth. In other words, it must have a lot of water, which isn’t very dense, or a very big atmosphere, which is even less dense.

Astronomers think that this world could either be a smaller version of our solar system’s ice giant Neptune, called a mini-Neptune, or perhaps a rocky planet with no water but a massive hydrogen atmosphere, called a gas dwarf.

Another option, as University of Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan recently proposed, is that the planet is a “hycean world”.

That term means hydrogen-over-ocean, since astronomers predict that hycean worlds are planets with global oceans many times deeper than Earth’s oceans, and without any continents. These oceans are covered by massive hydrogen atmospheres that are thousands of miles high.

Astronomers do not know yet for certain that hycean worlds exist, but models for what those would look like match the limited data JWST and other telescopes have collected on K2-18b.

This is where the story becomes exciting. Mini-Neptunes and gas dwarfs are unlikely to be hospitable for life, because they probably don’t have liquid water, and their interior surfaces have enormous pressures. But a hycean planet would have a large and likely temperate ocean. So could the oceans of hycean worlds be habitable – or even inhabited?

Detecting DMS

In 2023, Madhusudhan and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope’s short-wavelength infrared camera to inspect starlight that filtered through K2-18b’s atmosphere for the first time.

They found evidence for the presence of two simple carbon-bearing molecules – carbon monoxide and methane – and showed that the planet’s upper atmosphere lacked water vapor. This atmospheric composition supported, but did not prove, the idea that K2-18b could be a hycean world. In a hycean world, water would be trapped in the deeper and warmer atmosphere, closer to the oceans than the upper atmosphere probed by JWST observations.

Intriguingly, the data also showed an additional, very weak signal. The team found that this weak signal matched a gas called dimethyl sulfide, or DMS. On Earth, DMS is produced in large quantities by marine algae. It has very few, if any, nonbiological sources.

This signal made the initial detection exciting: on a planet that may have a massive ocean, there is likely a gas that is, on Earth, emitted by biological organisms.

An illustration of what scientists imagine K2-18b to look like, which looks a little like Earth, with clouds and a translucent surface.
K2-18b could have a deep ocean spanning the planet, and a hydrogen atmosphere.
Amanda Smith, Nikku Madhusudhan (University of Cambridge), CC BY-SA

Scientists had a mixed response to this initial announcement. While the findings were exciting, some astronomers pointed out that the DMS signal seen was weak and that the hycean nature of K2-18b is very uncertain.

To address these concerns, Mashusudhan’s team turned JWST back to K2-18b a year later. This time, they used another camera on JWST that looks for another range of wavelengths of light. The new results – announced on April 16, 2025 – supported their initial findings.

These new data show a stronger – but still relatively weak – signal that the team attributes to DMS or a very similar molecule. The fact that the DMS signal showed up on another camera during another set of observations made the interpretation of DMS in the atmosphere stronger.

Madhusudhan’s team also presented a very detailed analysis of the uncertainties in the data and interpretation. In real-life measurements, there are always some uncertainties. They found that these uncertainties are unlikely to account for the signal in the data, further supporting the DMS interpretation. As an astronomer, I find that analysis exciting.

Is life out there?

Does this mean that scientists have found life on another world? Perhaps – but we still cannot be sure.

First, does K2-18b really have an ocean deep beneath its thick atmosphere? Astronomers should test this.

Second, is the signal seen in two cameras two years apart really from dimethyl sulfide? Scientists will need more sensitive measurements and more observations of the planet’s atmosphere to be sure.

Third, if it is indeed DMS, does this mean that there is life? This may be the most difficult question to answer. Life itself is not detectable with existing technology. Astronomers will need to evaluate and exclude all other potential options to build their confidence in this possibility.

The new measurements may lead researchers toward a historic discovery. However, important uncertainties remain. Astrobiologists will need a much deeper understanding of K2-18b and similar worlds before they can be confident in the presence of DMS and its interpretation as a signature of life.

Scientists around the world are already scrutinizing the published study and will work on new tests of the findings, since independent verification is at the heart of science.

Moving forward, K2-18b is going to be an important target for JWST, the world’s most sensitive telescope. JWST may soon observe other potential hycean worlds to see if the signal appears in the atmospheres of those planets, too.

With more data, these tentative conclusions may not stand the test of time. But for now, just the prospect that astronomers may have detected gasses emitted by an alien ecosystem that bubbled up in a dark, blue-hued alien ocean is an incredibly fascinating possibility.

Regardless of the true nature of K2-18b, the new results show how using the JWST to survey other worlds for clues of alien life will guarantee that the next years will be thrilling for astrobiologists.The Conversation

Daniel Apai, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona

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