In five billion years the sun is going to blow up into a red giant, then collapse back down again into a white dwarf – a dying star roughly the same size as Earth itself. All of the solar system planets up to, and including, Earth will probably be vaporised during this stellar ballooning. We’ll [...]

Another couple of episodes in Bishop Sands’ outstanding Sift podcast series on origins and life are now up. You can catch my verbal contribution on interstellar chemistry at about the 11 minute mark in this one (below) on Origin Stories, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.

What is life? Simple question, thousands of years of human intellectual torture trying to answer it. The truth is that ‘life’ really does seem to defy easy definition. We can say that it’s a natural phenomenon – yes, OK. Actually it might be better thought of as a number of deeply connected natural phenomenae, OK, [...]

Well, ok, perhaps it’s not life really in liquid carbon dioxide, but as you’ll see it’s pretty close. The study of extreme environments on Earth plays a big role in our expanding knowledge about places that support life but are radically different from the sunny, temperate, beer swilling, tea drinking surroundings we find ourselves in. [...]

These are two posts from the Life, Unbounded archives. They were written in April and May 2010. Around that time there was a lot of media noise about aliens – brought on in part by Stephen Hawking’s comments about fearsome “nomadic” lifeforms that might roam the universe. I’ve merged the posts here. As far as [...]

The energetic molecule perchlorate is rocket fuel and, it turns out, food for ancient microbes. Given that deposits of the stuff have been found wherever robots look on Mars, could the chlorine compound—poisonous to the development of humans—be serving as Martian life’s lunch? A team of Dutch researchers show in the April 5 edition of [...]

The U.S. has spent several billion dollars looking for life on other planets. Shouldn’t we spend at least that much finding and identifying life on Earth? That is the argument behind a taxonomy analysis by a trio of scientists in Science, published on January 25. They argue just $500 million to $1 billion a year [...]

My coffee habit is killing the black-handed spider monkey, a cute New World simian (my favorite kind) that thrives in the canopy of Central American forests with tall trees. That’s pretty much the opposite of the kinds of forests that still exist where the spider monkey lives, because for decades we’ve been cutting down those [...]