This year has been a spectacular one for exoplanets. New discoveries and new insights have truly pushed the gateway to other worlds even further open.     In the past 12 months we’ve gained increasingly good statistics on the incredible abundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity. We also finally seem to have [...]

When the interplanetary missions Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in the late 1970s they each carried a metal plaque engraved with a set of pictorial messages from humanity. Eventually these extraordinary probes will traverse interstellar space, carrying these hopeful symbols towards anyone, or anything, that might one day find them. A few years later also [...]

Scientific illustration has a long and noble history, from ancient depictions of celestial forms to Leonardo Da Vinci’s extraordinary drawings of anatomy and invention, to the latest computer-generated animation splashed across CNN or – perhaps with more reflective thought – the cinematic screens of the world’s great science museums. In English the word ‘illustrate’ has [...]

LOS ANGELES—There is probably water on Mars, but you wouldn’t want to drink it. It’s salty, viscous and quite possibly toxic. But astrobiologists are nonetheless excited about the possibility. Just in the past few years, orbiter cameras and Mars landers have gathered evidence that watery liquid does exist on the Red Planet, at least during [...]

Earlier this month, the World Economic Forum published its annual report on global risks, “Global Risks 2013: Eighth Edition.” At the 2013 WEF meeting at Davos, a session focused on emerging threats, called “X Factors: Preparing for the Unknown.” My colleague Philip Campbell, the editor in chief of Nature, and his colleague editors, identified these [...]

The count of exoplanets, those outside the Solar System, now has reached the multi-hundreds, with mucho mas inevitably to be counted. Working through financial troubles, SETI is again searching for intelligent life in the great Out There. So paraphrasing the relevant question posed by Enrico Fermi: If they’re out there, why aren’t they here? The [...]

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, does not harbor alien life as far as anyone knows, but the prospects for extraterrestrial biology there are about as good there as anywhere else in the solar system. Numerous promising compounds based on hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon—some of the key constituents of terrestrial biological molecules such as amino acids—have been [...]