This is part 3 of my series on Mars, planet of surprises, great to explore, not so great to colonize. In "Is it as good a place to live as a desert? we saw that Mars is a more inhospitable place…

This is part 2 of my series on Mars, planet of surprises, great to explore, not so great to colonize  We saw so far that Mars is less hospitable than the coldest driest deserts on Earth.…

 An old star, IRAS 15445-5449, is "blooming" in the southern sky — it has begun to push out a jet of charged particles that glow with radio waves. And astronomers are on the hunt to determine…

In "Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand Earths" I looked at a possible future where humans could colonize space and build habitats using materials from…

This is part 3 of my series on Mars, planet of surprises, great to explore, not so great to colonize. So this might be a good time to take a breather and review what we've found out so far. Mars…

Mars looks quite hospitable in the photos, but all is not quite as it seems. Our Earth based intuitions lead us astray, and the planet is full of surprises. Though great to explore, it might not be…

 IGR J18245-2452, located about 18,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius in a cluster of stars known as M28, is a neutron star with the peculiar ability to transform…

If you began to travel to the star nearest to us after ol' Sol, named Alpha Centauri, it takes about four light years.   Now imagine there were instead 10,000 other stars crammed into that 25…

In my last article, "Does Earth Share Microbes With Mars Via Meteorites - Or Are They Interestingly Different For Life?" I talked about the NRC study, which looked at the same meteorite data as…

Robert Zubrin says that there are no contamination issues involved in colonizing Mars, because microbes get transferred between the planets all the time on meteorites. His ideas get a lot of…