Speculative Nonfiction

Terraforming Venus would require taking almost all of the CO2 out of its atmosphere, so it becomes breathable, doesn't crush us (current...

It's the best of the three new ones, and I think the second best in the entire franchise after Empire. I'm lazy, so some of these t...

It has been estimated that a manned Mars mission would cost $100 billion. Compare this to the most recent unmanned lander, Insight, at $830...

Bruce Dickinson with flamethrowers. From Rolling Stone. I went to see Maiden in September in Sacramento (and thanks to Mr. Black for...

After the very cool news showing pretty solid evidence that an asteroid breakup and bolide shower was likely responsible for the mid-Ordovic...

This is not good news. We should expect that humans undergoing a Mars trip, with selectively vulnerable hippocampi and dependent on complex...

Imagine that due to some breakthrough in computer science, we can determine (with certainty) that for a certain architecture, there are some...

Wrll, it made me think of Motorhead, for a second, but no actual connection. The same cannot be said for this .

I noted before that the "20 Things Wrong With [Amazingly Successful Franchise Film]" articles are sad, then wrote just such an art...

Hey, I don't want to hear your whining about me posting this song. Why am I making you listen to this? You know what you did. And no...

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...