I have also blogged for New Scientist’s ‘Real Scientists, Real Lives’ section Big Wide World. Follow the links below to these posts hosted on their website:
Passionate about hunting for little green men
Simulating Mars on Tenerife
The search for life on Mars thwarted by Hollywood
Dear Lewis, the other day I saw a UFO…
Post-doc: Career uncertainty is wearing us down
The runners and riders hoping to claim a jackpot of £800 million from the European Space Agency
Did life on Earth have its origins in interstellar gas clouds.
Passing on after blasting off by asphyxiation, suffocation and spaghettification
How does a Mars Rover work?
Lewis Dartnell discusses how extremophiles have pushed the survival envelope of terrestrial life – and what this means for the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
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Also available at Astronomy & Geophysics
Our four-limbed, one-headed body is just right for living on Earth. But what changes might the low-gravity, radiation saturated environment of space bring to our species? Lewis Dartnell finds the answers.
We explore the hottest volcanoes and driest deserts to track down the organisms that would be capable of surviving in space.
Gun at the ready, you are picking your way through an alien world, tracking an adversary. Spotting your chance, you launch an attack. It takes your foe by surprise, and you’ve got him cold. It’s the sort of scenario you’ll find in any first-person shooter game, but this one is different.
One of the prime drivers for space exploration, both in terms of scientific return and in firing the interest of the public, is astrobiology and the search for life beyond our homeworld.
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Planets with shells of diamond, others completely covered with water – the latest computer models predict some pretty strange worlds are lurking out there. And we could be on the verge of spotting them thanks to the latest planet hunting technology…
Life on other worlds will develop strange, unfamiliar and novel solutions to common evolutionary problems, writes astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell.
