Extraterrestrial Life

In 2012, I asked LeVar Burton (who comandeered the Scientific American website as guest editor on Wednesday) if he would join me on a trip across time and space, to another star.

I have a prediction. There is a scientific hypothesis, formulated over 20 years ago, that we will one day look back on, when the evidence is in, and say “Of course that was right!

The release of a long-awaited National Academy of Sciences report on the state and future of the US space program has triggered wide-reaching commentary on what it means to be space-faring.

Waves on Titan indicate bodies of liquid methane may be home to life

Last year I got talking to theoretical physicist Aron Wall about the thermodynamics of quantum gravity. Now that's a deceptively beautiful phrase: in four words, you get three of the deepest areas in modern science.

Live streaming video by Ustream It doesn’t get much better than this (well, of course being in space might be better, albeit colder).

Astronomers hope that one day soon we’ll obtain a spectrum of light that might tell us whether or not an Earth-sized exoplanet harbors life.

In August 1881 the journal “Science” published an article with a letter exchange by two amateur geologist – British Charles R.

NASA's Kepler space telescope has identified a planet that is both similar in size to Earth and within the habitable zone of its sun

The new evidence of liquid water on Enceladus raises hopes that the moon could host extraterrestrial life
 

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the evidence that we are currently within a period of mass extinction, the kind of event that will show up in the fossil record a few million years from now as a clear discontinuity, a radical change in the diversity of life on the planet.

The agency wants to send a robotic mission to Jupiter's enigmatic moon for less than $1 billion. Supporters say that one of the solar system’s most promising places to find life deserves a bigger investment