The Europa Report: Mysteries Under the Ice July 7, 2013 Discovery, by nature, has a ripple effect. When one thing is found to be plausible, testable, or true, a suite of potential other truths and plausibilities tend to follow suit. This is the nature of inductive reasoning, the foundation of the scientific method, and the reason why science–as a human…

Is There Life on Maaaars? March 12, 2013 You certainly didn't hear it here first: today NASA, at a press briefing, announced that minerals analyzed by the Curiosity rover indicate that life might, in the galactic past, have survived on Mars. The rover's been poking around an ancient network of stream channels descending from the rim of…

My New Book: High Frontiers! February 18, 2013 Writing for the Internet is like yelling into the void: freeing, probably more than a little cathartic, but ultimately lonely. That's not to say that I haven't made profound connections out here, but like most writers I long for a little thing with my name on it that fits in the hand, that can be…

What Distance Is February 15, 2013 What is distance? There's the distance between people, who subconsciously space themselves apart, providing a reliable visual matrix of intimacy. It's no coincidence we use the word "close" to describe our most intimate relationships: to whisper and caress, we draw near to one another, less than…

Mona Laser January 20, 2013 The cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in his seminal 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, argued that the "aura" of a work of art, that sense of special awe and reverence we feel, being in its presence, isn't inherent to art itself. Rather, it's a side-effect of its…

On Seeing Jupiter Through a Telescope December 13, 2012 "This one will look like a jellybean," the session director warns us. "Or, you know, when you empty a hole punch? The circles of paper that fall out? One of those." She's talking about Neptune, and I am about to step, carefully, up a ladder painted industrial yellow and wheeled into place in front…

Let's All Hallucinate With Oliver Sacks November 8, 2012 I probably don't need to introduce Oliver Sacks to you. You've undoubtedly already delighted over his wobbly affectation and tales of neurological strangeness on RadioLab or NPR. You might have read his lovely first-person account, in the New Yorker, of his early experiments with hallucinogens of…

Universe Book Club: Incognito November 2, 2012 The history of science can be read as a series of brusque reality checks. Once, we thought the sun revolved around the Earth, but modern astronomy relegated our real estate, incrementally, from the center of everything to a hum-drum corner of an unimportant galaxy in a handful of generations. The…

The Earth is the New Moon October 16, 2012 Stewart Brand, writing about space colonies, observed that "if you live in a satellite, the Earth is something that goes on in your sky." For Felix Baumgartner, the daredevil skydiver who seduced the world with his chiseled jaw and seeming invulnerability to fear (and who broke the sound barrier…

The Canals of Mars September 28, 2012 The space-heads among you have undoubtedly heard about the Curiosity rover's first significant discovery: the remnants of an ancient streambed on Mars, which would seem to indicate the presence of water in the planet's history. This jagged pile of alluvial rock and dust may not look like much, but…

The Best Science Writing Online 2012 September 20, 2012 I've been practicing little idiosyncratic rituals on this corner of the web for years: learn something new, obsessively research, get lost in the idea, scribble, converse endlessly, then write. This blog, Universe, has never been about garnering hits or materializing an audience because, for me,…

Footprints on the Moon August 26, 2012 Yesterday we lost Neil Armstrong, an accidental hero, thrust by fate onto a rock in the sky. Many dreamt of walking on the moon before he did, and a few men did after him. He happened to be the first. Hopefully many more men, and women too, will echo his iconic footsteps in the future. Perhaps even…

On Curiosity and its Shadows August 5, 2012 The NASA Mars rover Curiosity just landed on Mars. Those of us who tuned in vicariously via NASA's live coverage watched as a roomful of tense engineers exploded, and heard their disembodied voices whispering and booming through the control room. Holy shit. We did it. Their headsets fell askew,…

Beautiful Evidence: Science Cinema July 27, 2012 To scientists, "experimental" is a technical word, one with a precise meaning: that which relates to a procedure of methodical trial and error, to a systematic test for determining the nature of reality. I got in trouble on this blog once, with commenters, for using the word "experimental" too…

Tubes: A Journey To the Center of the Internet July 10, 2012 William Gibson, first in his novel Burning Chrome and then later in the seminal Neuromancer, both coined and defined "cyberspace" as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators." His novels predate the universal adoption of the World Wide Web as a…

Interview: Andrew Olney May 7, 2012 Last week, I wrote a piece for Motherboard about an android version of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The story of the android is truly surreal, stranger than even Dick's flipped-out fiction, and I recommend you pop over to Motherboard and mainline it for yourselves. For the piece, I…

I Want To Live In A Bathysphere March 31, 2012 Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography? Read Rimbaud! - Phillipe Diolé I've written many times, although not recently, about the ocean. When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship's log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, the accidental poetics of my hero, Rachel Carson,…

Greetings from the Children of Planet Earth February 29, 2012 ￼In 1977, NASA sent a pair of unmanned probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space. Among the infrared spectrometers and radio receivers included on each probe were identical copies of the same non-scientific object: the Voyager Golden Record. Sheathed in a protective aluminum jacket, the…

NA/SA: New Art/Science Affinities October 28, 2011 "I read this book. It's pretty good even if they made it in a week. Worth the fifty bucks, easy." Bruce Sterling In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon…

Universe Q&A: Frank White September 13, 2011 A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect…

The Book of Exogenesis August 28, 2011 The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite... Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space. As it turns out, DNA components have been found on…

We're OK TO GO! August 12, 2011 As you have undoubtedly heard from sources more overtly journalistic than this one, SETI is back online! After federal and state financial cutbacks forced the institute's shiny new Allen Telescope Array (ATA) into indefinite hibernation earlier this year, cosmically-minded geeks all over the globe…

High, Higher, Highest Frontiers July 31, 2011 In the mid-1970s, the U.S. State Department prohibited the internal use of the term "space colony," due to the global bad reputation of colonialism. Instead, the government opted for "space settlement." Of course, as Stewart Brand pointed out at the time, the last thing you do in space is settle.…

Livin' In A Mycelial World July 17, 2011 Mushrooms and their mycelium are quiet allies that are essential for our healthy existence. They are enigmatic, have a sense of humor, and socially as well as spiritually, bond together all that admire them. They have much to teach us. -Paul Stamets If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly…

On Seeing Further June 13, 2011 "All things move and nothing remains still" -- Heraclitus The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while Ancient astronomers, who relied only on…

Science Communication, Balloons, and Carl Sagan May 27, 2011 Ed: This is an essay I wrote for my friends at the World Science Festival, riffing on the central themes of this years' event. If you prefer, you can also read this piece on the World Science Festival site. And, if you're in New York between the first and fifth of June, you could do much worse…

Moon Arts, Part Two: Fallen Astronaut May 22, 2011 The moon is a rock. But it's also Selene, Artemis, Diana, Isis, the lunar deities; an eldritch clock by which we measure our growth and fertility; home of an old man in the West and a rabbit in the East; the site of countless imaginary voyages; a long-believed trigger of lunacy (luna...see?). It…

SETI, Really? April 30, 2011 As you may have heard, SETI is in trouble. Funding cutbacks on a state and federal level have forced the Allen Telescope Array -- SETI's new homebase, actually just a part of the U.C. Berkeley's Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) -- into indefinite hibernation. With U.C. Berkeley losing ninety…

Moon Arts, Part One: Moon Museum April 11, 2011 This is the first in a series of posts about art, the moon, and art on the moon. You would think this would be a fairly limited subject, but... Art on the moon has been happening for a long time. In 1969, a coterie of American contemporary artists devised a plan to put an art museum on the Moon.…