Cynthia Phillips was mesmerized when she saw the latest pictures of her favorite moon. Here at last was a fresh look at Europa, an icy satellite of Jupiter. The moon resembles a truffle drizzled haphazardly with strips of melted white chocolate, as if the universe had rushed to finish a baking-show challenge. The images gave us a new sense of Europa’s topography, its collection of ridges and troughs appearing more intricate than ever. The lighting was different this time, Phillips told me, and the shadows brought out dramatic shapes in the terrain.
The images were taken by a Jupiter-observing spacecraft as it swept past Europa last week, coming within just 222 miles (358 kilometers) of the frozen surface. Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, immediately reached for the Europa globe on her desk and began comparing the real-world views with the topography stretched over the plastic orb. The last probe to come this close to Europa was disposed of in 2003, when NASA deliberately plunged it into Jupiter’s atmosphere after the mission started running low on fuel. “We haven’t seen Europa’s surface in this level of detail for 20 years,” Phillips said.
Europa might be the best place to search for life elsewhere in the solar system. Scientists are almost certain that beneath the Jovian moon’s frozen surface is a salty ocean with more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. And such a watery subsurface environment could provide a comfortable home for small Europan life forms.
[Read: Jupiter’s frozen moon is studded with 50-foot blades of ice]
Two years from now, another NASA spacecraft will depart for the Jupiter system, specifically designed to study Europa. The probe will swing past the moon dozens of times, sometimes coasting just 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface. Each pass will bring scientists closer to understanding the workings of this celestial truffle and its mysterious interior. Beneath that frosty coating could be the answer to one of our biggest questions: Is there life anywhere else in the universe?
Europa is enveloped in a thick coat of water ice. (Some other moons in our solar system have ice made of methane and nitrogen—the cosmos is a weird place.) The criss-crossing lines visible in the new pictures are actually cracks and fissures in that frozen exterior. Scientists suspect that they’re caused by the stretching and squashing that Europa experiences as it orbits giant Jupiter. The moon’s terrain is sprinkled with chemical compounds such as sodium chloride and magnesium sulfate—more commonly known to Earthlings as table salt and Epsom salt—and they could indicate briny waters below.
A close-up view of Europa’s textured surface (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SWRI / MSSS
Scientists got their best evidence that a Europan ocean might exist two decades ago, when that earlier NASA spacecraft detected a magnetic connection between Europa and Jupiter that could easily be explained by the presence of a salty, global sea. This deep into the solar system, Europa’s underground ocean wouldn’t feel the warmth of the sun; it would stay liquid because of Jupiter’s gravitational tugging. In recent years, telescopes have detected signs of plumes of water vapor spewing out of the cracks and into space. Scientists believe that Europa’s ocean could be as old as the moon itself, about 4 billion years or so, which would give life plenty of time and a stable environment in which to evolve, Phillips said.
[Read: Europa’s mysterious glow]
The data suggest that Europa has a rocky mantle—the layer between the moon’s crust and core—and when rock and water come together, magical things can happen: Chemical interactions between them are known to produce hydrogen-rich materials for tiny creatures to metabolize. “On our own planet, hydrothermal systems at the seafloor provide energy for communities of microorganisms,” Samantha Trumbo, a planetary scientist at Cornell who studies icy ocean worlds like Europa, told me.
The upcoming NASA mission, named Clipper—a nod to the speedy, lightweight vessels favored by 19th-century merchants—will study nearly every bit of the Europan surface. If it gets lucky, the spacecraft could fly through some plume particles, take a sip, and analyze the contents. Alyssa Rhoden, a planetary geophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute who studies Europa, is most excited about a Clipper instrument designed to detect warmer-than-usual spots on the moon’s surface. “When you look at Europa’s surface, you can see a lot of pits where the surface seems to have dropped down a little bit, places where the surface has been disrupted,” Rhoden told me. “We think that that’s happening from heating coming from below.” That signature could simply indicate the presence of melted bits of ice near the frigid crust—or it could mean a roiling sea has floated toward the surface, perhaps bringing any tiny inhabitants with it.
[Read: Exploring the oceans of the outer solar system]
The Clipper mission is not meant to find definitive proof that life exists on Europa, only explore whether the moon has the right conditions and chemistry to make life possible. Evidence of life will require more missions, guided by Clipper’s data, that could land on the Europan surface and drill into the ice. NASA is also searching for life elsewhere in the solar system, notably on Mars, where a rover is collecting samples from a dried-up river delta. But Europa is a more tantalizing target, and so are the other ocean moons sprinkled across the solar system, such as Enceladus and Titan, which orbit Saturn, and Triton, around Neptune. The Mars mission is designed to search for signs of fossilized life that existed several billion years ago, when water once flowed on the planet. “It’s quite possible that Mars could have had life in the past, in a warmer-weather era, and it’s possible that there are subsurface pockets on Mars that could have remnants of this living biosphere,” Phillips said. “But on somewhere like Europa, life could exist there now.”
And what might humanity, by way of carefully engineered machines, find on Europa, once we’ve figured out which melty bits to inspect? “I would love for there to be Europan whales swimming around in that ocean,” Phillips said with a laugh. But alien life, if it exists, is likely to be small and simple. Energy sources are limited in the Europan depths, and scientists don’t think the environment can support the development of more complex organisms, Phillips said. Still, even the discovery of a single microbe would mark an explosive event in human history. It would mean that life had managed to spring up in two different places around the same star—in a universe absolutely brimming with stars. If it happened more than once here, in our own solar system, it’s likely happened elsewhere in the cosmos, around someone else’s sun. This is why scientists are so eager to catch a glimpse of Europa, and prepare as much as they can for the exploration to come. “We all want it to be water,” Rhoden said. “We all want it to be a cool plumbing system in the shell with lots of activity, and someday we’ll get down there and find little Europan sea urchins clinging to the bottom of the ice.”
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Is it AI | Elon Musk and Donald Trump Danceathon | Video: 36 Seconds
Haters will say this is AI 🕺🕺 pic.twitter.com/vqWVxiYXeD
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 14, 2024
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About 3 weeks ago, the media told you that Biden was “sharp as a tack” 🙄
2 days ago, the poor guy was basically forced at gunpoint to resign as Dem nominee. His staff weren’t even informed.
Now they say Kamala is the best thing ever 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/E58MlrQZqI
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2024
Stop It!!! She’s Here To Save Democracy! | Il Donaldo Trumpo | X | Video: 9 Seconds
STOP IT!!!🤣🤣🤣 SHE’S HERE TO “SAVE DEMOCRACY”!!! pic.twitter.com/ImcXoiBZQw
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Dominion Voting Machines Are Connected To The Internet | X
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Now that the FBI is charge of the investigation, we’ll never know the truth. | X
Now that the FBI is charge of the investigation, we’ll never know the truth. pic.twitter.com/LK4MzxnDxI
— Paul Hookem 🇺🇸 (@PaulHook_em) July 18, 2024
Seems Normal | Secret Service Lookout | X
STOP IT!!!😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/ncPwXuQonU
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Pure Evil | Jack Prosobiec | X
Pure evil pic.twitter.com/YDIN4kWU6o
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 17, 2024
The Greatest Donald Trump Impersonator Is Voting For The ‘Outlaw’ President | Video: 1 Minutes 10 Seconds
The world’s greatest Trump impersonator, Shawn Farash.
Shawn is voting for the Outlaw President.pic.twitter.com/SiC52qlqJ0
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It’s All An Effort To “Get” Donald Trump | Governor Ron DeSantis
Today’s verdict represents the culmination of a legal process that has been bent to the political will of the actors involved: a leftist prosecutor, a partisan judge and a jury reflective of one of the most liberal enclaves in America—all in an effort to “get” Donald Trump.
That…
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At Starbase, @ElonMusk provided an update on the company’s plans to send humanity to Mars, the best destination to begin making life multiplanetary pic.twitter.com/PiX8XOgQs5
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PD-1 Blockade in Mismatch Repair–Deficient, Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer | The NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL Of MEDICINE
Authors: Andrea Cercek, M.D., Melissa Lumish, M.D. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4173-5567, Jenna Sinopoli, N.P., Jill Weiss, B.A., Jinru Shia, M.D., MichelleLamendola-Essel, D.H.Sc., Imane H. El Dika, M.D. , and Luis A. Diaz, Jr., M.D.
BACKGROUND
METHODS

RESULTS
CONCLUSIONS
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Ga. Secretary of State Refusing To Testify In Dominion Voting Machine Case | Phil Kent | James Magazine Online
Last month U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg ruled that a lawsuit against Georgia’s use of electronic voting machines must go to a non-jury trial in January. She ordered Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to defend the state’s utilization of electronic voting prior to the upcoming presidential primary election because the lawsuit questions whether Georgia’s current system of computerized voting is safe or whether it is vulnerable to potential hacking.
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Says one lawyer to James Magazine Online familiar with the case: “Raffensperger selected the system, repeatedly defends the system as secure, but now can’t take an hour or so in federal court to defend it.”
Ga. Secretary of State Refusing To Testify | Phil Kent | James Magazine Online
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TC Shorts: Julian Assange pic.twitter.com/usckyGH9B2
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Ep. 46 The Alex Jones Interview
TIMESTAMPS:
2:46 Alex Jones predictions
15:07 Deplatforming
21:59 Dividing us on race
25:37 The border
28:09 Austin
32:12 New World Order
42:09 Brian Stelter demon video
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The presidents of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today’s congressional hearing on antisemitism:
Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment?
The… pic.twitter.com/eVlPCHMcVZ
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Okay, now this is hilarious 😂 pic.twitter.com/foY6zQ4NYY
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Vince Ricci was coming back to his LA home on a quiet evening when two robbers jumped his wall and pointed guns at his chest.
But they weren’t ready for what was about to happen. He had a gun of his own and defended himself.
Now, California is suspending his Second Amendment. pic.twitter.com/sF0O76eO1M
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Here is the perfect modern example of why so many of us have left the Democrat Party. It is the party of the Ku Klux Klan, the party of Jim Crow Laws, the party of Tammany Hall, seditious infiltration of a corrupt FBI, race baiting, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Here is a rare clip of Howard Stern in Black Face using the term ‘smelly nigga’ in 1993. pic.twitter.com/2dEzwhkb4J
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) November 10, 2023
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Wow…
Vivek Ramaswamy just went absolute savage mode on the RNC, calling out Ronna by name, and then NBC, flipping the moderator question back onto the moderator. Has this ever been done? pic.twitter.com/Hmdo7o5oY5— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 9, 2023
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The paper in question reportedly was a disclaimer clause… pic.twitter.com/iIAZkoFdBK
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Might be a good time to watch this interview from a year ago with @TuckerCarlson… https://t.co/wDd5ygMKVM
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Epic exchange between @benshapiro and an anti-Israel activist at Oxford University today. This “highly educated” student doesn’t know basic history pic.twitter.com/vbpfDnetgu
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@RandPaul’s new book, “Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up,” charges Anthony Fauci and others with funding dangerous research in China, and then covering it up. pic.twitter.com/1c6elBFCwP
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