Picture this - an astronaut has just found life on Mars. How do you think it happens? I expect most of us will answer "Found a fossil" as in the painting by Pat Rawlings used as the cover for my new…

If Humans Touch Mars Will It Be Another Tale Of Human Missteps Like Lascaux? Copyright © Robert Walker (UK). All rights reserved. Cover picture shows First published on December 2016. You can…

Vera Rubin who helped to discover one of the greatest mysteries of nature has died.    She was the mother of astronomical dark matter investigation.  I won't write about her…

We love to touch things. If you put a sculpture in an art gallery and say "please touch" you can guarantee that both children and adults will touch it. So it's natural that we want to touch other…

This is something you hear said so often - that we risk being hit by an asteroid that could make humans extinct. But do we really? This is the article I’m commenting on, a recently breaking news…

I had previously discussed the amplitude of the ~0.88-day signal of Boyajian's star (or KIC 8462852.) If you look at the amplitude series alongside gradual dimming of the star throughout the…

Data visualization is a key tool in Data Science. You should always look at your data. Invariably, you will discover aspects of the data you might not notice if you just blindly run algorithms on it…

The giant planets in our solar system have very diverse rings. Observations show that Saturn’s rings are made of more than 95% icy particles, while the rings of Uranus and Neptune are darker and may…

If Elon Musk and Robert Zubrin have their way, we may get migrations of hopefuls setting off from Earth to Mars to colonize what they believe to be a "New World". If so, what they find there will be…

[Update 11/12/2016: Is it all an optical illusion? Read the follow-up.] [Update 11/7/2016: Visually, fast drops in a time series, like those of D140 and D260, will tend to appear to squash any noise…