Some Spectacular Images (And Science) From The Year Past

This is a golden era for space and planetary science, a time when discoveries, new understandings, and newly-found mysteries are flooding in.  There are so many reasons to find the drama intriguing:  a desire to understand the physical forces at play, to learn how those forces led to the formation of Earth and ultimately us, …

Curiosity Has Found The Element Boron On Mars. That’s More Important Than You Might Think

For years, noted chemist and synthetic life researcher Steven Benner has talked about the necessary role of the element boron in the origin of life. Without boron, he has found, many of the building blocks needed to form the earliest self-replicating ribonucleic acid (RNA) fall apart when they come into contact with water, which is …

Curiosity Has Found The Element Boron On Mars. That's More Important Than You Might Think

For years, noted chemist and synthetic life researcher Steven Benner has talked about the necessary role of the element boron in the origin of life. Without boron, he has found, many of the building blocks needed to form the earliest self-replicating ribonucleic acid (RNA) fall apart when they come into contact with water, which is …

The Search for Organic Compounds On Mars Is Getting Results

  One of the primary goals of the Curiosity mission to Mars has been to search for and hopefully identify organic compounds -- the carbon-based molecules that on Earth are the building blocks of life. No previous mission had quite the instruments and capacity needed to detect the precious organics, nor did they have the …

SETI Reconceived and Broadened; A Call for Community Proposals

Earlier this summer, Natalie Cabrol, the director of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, described a new direction for her organization in Astrobiology Magazine, and I wrote a Many World column about the changes to come. Cabrol's Alien Mindscapes – Perspective on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" laid out a plan for the new …