The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 23: Waterbear page 322 A greater and more durable [human] presence in space . John Fallows looks at a future mining the Moon an...

Petroglyphs etched into desert varnish, Utah I've written about Weird Life by David Toomey for the May edition of The Literary Rev...

Brinicles, filmed forming in situ for the first time in 2011, were presented as fingers of death . But Julyan Cartwright and others observ...

...[The] microbes were isolated from Deep Lake, a very salty lake in Antarctica. The changes found in proteins from these organisms allow...

  In his True History , the rhetorician and satirist Lucian of Samosata imagined the sun itself might be inhabited. About 1700 years late...

Ideas of cloud-borne Venusians are not new. As far back as 1967, when there was evidence for substantial amounts of water vapor in the plan...

Lichens and algae could be the first life forms we find on Earth-like exoplanets, by looking for their light signatures in a planet...

The recognition of these hazards may help us understand deeper mysteries about Life in the Universe. Many explanations have been offered ...

Speculative, but fun: A handful of rocks [from Earth] could even have made it to planets around other stars. Once such could be Gliese 58...

Another strange discovery is a previously unknown Deinococcus — a group of bacteria known as the world's toughest — capable of toleratin...

Dirk Schulze-Makuch suggests that a top predator in the oceans of Europa could be fearsome creature with mass of 1 gram. And the surface lak...

A sustainability solution to the Fermi paradox?

If other intelligent beings exist, it's not certain that they need redemption. -- Father Jose Gabriel Funes, the chief papal astronome...

I would say the strategy in looking for life in the universe [should be] to look for what's detectable, not what's probable. We hav...

"You have no idea what life would be like in a universe with different constants," [says Fred Adams]...[He] reckons his results, w...