Earth & Space

With the successful recovery of the SpaceX Dragon capsule, private space exploration takes a great leap forward. But it's also a reminder of the history of private business in manned spaceflight, both real and imagined.

With NASA's discovery of a new species of arsenic-tolerant bacteria appearing to dissolve in a highly-public storm of professional scrutiny, we're all enrolled a crash course in the rites and rituals of scientific practice.

A new effort of the citizen-science effort Zooniverse, the Milky Way Project brings elements of gaming and social media to astronomy.

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." �James Joyce

We've met the shadow biosphere, and it is us.

An elegant new site presents the radio transcripts of early NASA missions in a textual dramatization.

Perhaps the secret to extraterrestrial life resides here on Earth.

A bacterial colony growing in a petri dish? A close-up of a lizard's iridescent, scaly skin? Answer after the jump.

he Cassini spacecraft has detected atmospheric oxygen on Rhea, a rocky, icy moon orbiting Saturn. 950 miles in diameter (less than half that of our moon), the tiny world is covered with water ice, which likely produces free oxygen as it is bombarded with charged particles from the magnetosphere of its parent planet, Saturn.

A slime mold attacking bacteria in a petri dish? Marbling on the endpapers of a rare first edition of Galileo's Starry Messenger? Methane storms on one of the Jovian moons? Answer after the jump.