The TESS telescope is a shiny little thinking metal tube, drinking the light of 20 million stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It launched last year on a voyage to identify planets that look like this one—a miraculous feat, if it succeeds. Among the panoply of planets found so far, there is positively no place like […]
astrobiology
This post (published in May 2018) seemed worth resurfacing after the astonishing recent news that the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library had flown to our celestial neighbor with Earth life aboard. For the record, I love the Lunar Library concept (cf., below). But I think the tardigrades were a bad idea. After several thousand years […]
David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own new book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. Grinspoon’s book uses insight from the study of the other planets in our solar system […]
We here at LWON have been all over this and we (ok, I) agree completely with AG: astrobiologists out-compete evolutionary psychologists for getting the most publicity out of the least evidence. Also I just ran across an interesting but illogical argument: if the principles of physics, chemistry, and geology “work beyond our planet,” why not […]
As we near the end of 2010, everybody’s talking about the biggest science stories of the year. I’ve been thinking about these four: May 20: Craig Venter’s team synthesizes a bacterial genome in the lab, sticks it into an empty bacterial cell, and watches it replicate. Venter calls it the “first synthetic cell“; many headlines prefer […]