Speculative Nonfiction

Important paper for detecting biosignatures elsewhere in the solar system. Truong et al measure the decomposition rate of amino acids in co...

Image credit space.com Current explanations for this warm plume (in fact, authors refer to it as a hotspot) are thermal inertia (basic...

I've always thought that both of these uncharacteristically intense (for eighties "adult contemporary") and well-written songs...

That's bigger than all amino acids and nucleobases. (Note, 9 months old, I had missed this before.) Press release here , paper here . ...

In a simulation, Worth Sigurdsson and House (2013) (WSH) retrodict that Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus have received 1,900, 370, 51...

One solution to the Fermi paradox is that there's evidence around us and we just haven't noticed it yet. An estimate of 20 MA for c...

This is certainly the most practical post in the history of this blog, but it involves the hazards of relying on modern technology; specific...

When I was a molecular biology undergrad in the mid 90s, the Big Question in biochemistry was protein folding - how to predict the 3D struct...

tl;dr if you worry about the singularity or bio-terrorism as an existential threat, you should help the effort to stop efforts to announce o...

Living roundworms made it intact to the ground after the Columbia crash , as noted multiple times before ( here and here .) There is more ...

Until recently my knowledge about the Cleveland Wrecking Yard had come from a couple of friends who’d bought things there. One of them bough...

The C-index is this : how close would we have to be to an identical twin Earth to detect them with our SETI searches, given our current det...

Bonus - Rebel Yell by Billy Idol, covered by Children of Bodom (Skeletons in the Closet, 2009): Double bonus - Disposable Heroes (...

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...