Speculative Nonfiction

Highly recommended; spoilers follow. Science fiction which only recycles the surface trappings of the genre without using them as a vehic...

H/T Chris. Who know that the folk metal genre was rich enough to be sub-sub-divided into eastern and western folk metal? Also check o...

Another biomolecule, the pentose sugar that serves as the backbone of DNA, quickly produced in un-directed synthesis under conditions that o...

Settling colonies in the age of exploration was easy. Jamestown in particular seemed like a breeze . There was air, water, food, and even ...

Active colonization time estimates for the galaxy are invariably much shorter than the lifespan of the galaxy . Passive diffusion would ta...

Extraterrestrial replicators (be they naturally-evolved, or von Neumann probes or the mutant descendants thereof) are at least as likely to ...

And sometimes you need a lot, so please watch this awesome video by Infant Annihilator, for their #1 hit Decapitation Fornication. ...

I always think those "Everything wrong with X science fiction or superhero movie" videos are the saddest things in the world. If ...

To help rule out Oumuamua as an interstellar probe, it was investigated and found to have no detectable transmissions within 1-10 GHz down t...

Summary here. At 5.5 K in Interstellar ice you get aromatic ring precursors. Note - the materials from the original experiment remain at...

Reminds me of the interesting factoid: on a power-per-mass basis, our sun produces less Wattage than reptile metabolism. (Reptiles! Doesn...

Nematodes were frozen in Siberian permafrost 42,000 years ago, and were thawed in a lab , showing behaviors like feeding. This has implicat...

Schulze-Makuch and Crawford show in Astrobiology that that the Moon may have briefly been habitable - either (two options) about 4.5 billion...

tl;dr Lots of scientists are on record saying that broadcasting messages to nearby stars is dangerous . If you take other low-probability h...

The work is driven by a chemical species that is hard to explain as other than the result of the reaction of these other complex molecules, ...

A Nature paper by Micheli et al demonstrates that outgassing is one plausible explanation for the subtle changes being measured in Oamuamu...

Asteroid BZ interested astronomers right away, because it is retrograde, in a 1:-1 resonance with Jupiter - suggesting that it was captured ...

I'd always wanted to do a blog post on this really solid series from the 80s , which I just learned on going back to read about, was nom...

There's a fan theory that Get Out is actually the sequel to Being John Malgovich , and that Katherine Keener is playing the same charac...