This is a talk I gave last summer to a small conference "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life - Europa&Enceladus" in Oxford, summer 2015. It's about the idea that when searching for life in our…

Back in January, Bradley Schaefer published a finding that promised to be a bombshell: KIC 8462852 had been dimming at a rate of nearly 20% per century since 1890 (Schaefer, 2016). The finding was…

Mars is Earth like in some ways, but in other ways it's very different with its global dust storms every two years, its thick sheets of dry ice at its ice caps in winter. Any fresh water is close to…

Yes, a thousand of them indeed. The asteroid belt, and Near Earth Asteroids. I don't mean living on them like the little prince: The Little Prince That's not very practical without an atmosphere.…

Yes, a thousand of them indeed. The asteroid belt, and Near Earth Asteroids. I don't mean living on them like the little prince: The Little Prince That's not very practical without an atmosphere.…

NASA currently has Mars sample return as their priority flagship mission not just for this decade but for the next one as well. They were recommended to do this in the 2012 decadal review. It is good…

The longest time anyone has spent in space is just over fourteen months. So far, astronauts have recovered surprisingly quickly, even after the longest duration spaceflights. Within a few weeks they…

On February 15th, 2013, as the approach of asteroid (367943) Duende was being closely monitored,  something far more alarming happened. Duende approached the Earth was expected to pass nearly 27…

The Ordnance Survey (national mapping agency for the UK) has just released their first map of a region on another planet. It's a high resolution relief shaded contour map, and includes the area of…

September 14th 2015, 09:50 GMT. A far spread out distortion of space crossed earth's path. The distortion had traveled at the speed of light for more than a billion years, all along the way spreading…