Recent content by Joe Brooks

Thanks for that great article, Dr. Sutter. I enjoyed that and learned something at the same time. The research that you reported on goes beyond the usual simplistic understanding of habitable zones and helps clarify our ideas on the habitability of Super Earths, which would now seem to be quite...

This article sounds like the author is totally unaware that NASA had built and used a separate facility to train astronauts for EVAs underwater, called the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, from 1968 to 1997. Underwater training for EVAs is not new and, contrary to what the article says, was available...

This not new. This part of the Artemis program, which was started long before we ever heard of Covid-19. Programs like this can't stop and start every time something happens. They continue as best they can under the new circumstances. NASA is certainly not tone deaf regarding the epidemic...

This has been a long time coming. The X Prize was started in 1996, it was won in 2004 using SpaceShipOne, and it's now been almost 16 years since then. The development pace has been mind-numbingly glacial, but also very persistent. It really does look like paying customers will finally fly this...

"Totani's model uses the most conservative method of RNA polymerization, where each monomer is attached randomly one-by-one until a chain of monomers is formed. Scientists have suggested that polymers (each made up of multiple monomers) could attach to each other to speed up the process, but...

One thing I've always thought about regarding our SETI searches and looking at ourselves regards our reactions to one-off signals like the WOW! signal detected in 1977 or the Russian signal detected in 2015. Both of these are likely to have been false alarms, the WOW! signal likely being from...

It would be more likely to find the latter (microbial fossils). In fact, scientists initially believed they had found microbial fossils in a meteorite called ALH8004. That rock was blasted off Mars and landed on Earth in Antarctica, but some asteroids are likely similar rocks that are still...