As of a few days ago, my blogging activities have moved to the Nature Network, an assemblage of science-related blogs hosted by Nature, the pre-eminent British scientific journal. Needless to say, the Nature blog will be more science-oriented, hopefully with a slightly personal touch. Come and check it out here! Read Full Story

Ok, no real theme here, but time to indulge in a brief slideshow of photographic highlights.The Blue Lagoon - pools of hydrothermally heated water that create a glorious swimming hole no matter what the weather!An unintentionally blurry yet beautiful shot of the Blue Lagoon.A ginormous waterfall fed by glacial meltwater. Surface runoff at Geysir, Iceland's most famous geyser. And yes, those two words are related...Skogafoss from above......and from below.Wind-carved rocks. Very Mars-li... Read Full Story

Alas, the whirlwind month of April is drawing to a close, meaning that I will soon be working 5 days a week again. That will be a bit of an adjustment. The final bit of April travel was to Iceland, the glorious geological wonderland literally split between North America and Europe. There are two types of the Earth's crust - continental crust and oceanic crust. You can probably guess where one might find each type. Oceanic crust is generally heavier, so when it reaches the edge of a c... Read Full Story

Got back from a brief trip to Scotland the other day, during which we had the privilege of visiting the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. It's easy to view countries as permanent entities, set in stone by the lines of a map. Clearly, though, this isn't the case. The lines are both arbitrary and ephemeral; nations are always being born and gobbled up, as shown by the recent creation of East Timor and Kosovo. Scotland has always been a tricky political entity, but these day... Read Full Story

One prolonged break later, I'm back, and fresh off a painful but quite satisfying London Marathon. Unfortunately, I was a couple of minutes off my personal best time, but taking into account the bathroom break and the traffic jam at mile 1, it would have been very close. Oh well, guess that's a reason to do another one...My last few marathons were rather haphazard affairs. I think I did them mostly just to do them, not necessarily to test or improve myself. So even if I was a coup... Read Full Story

Potentially bad news coming out of NASA headquarters today: the Mars Exploration Rovers, those hardy robots that have just celebrated their 4th anniversary on Mars, might fall victim to budget cuts. In the worst case scenario, one or both of the rovers would be shut down, though they could be revived if the funds to operate them become available. So far, this appears to be only a possibility, with NASA now vehemently denying that they would willfully pull the plug, but the fact that this is... Read Full Story

We humans are pretty picky. We complain when our conditions get too hot, too cold, too acidic, too salty...the list of environments we don't like goes on and on. But microbes are different, able to eke out a living just about anywhere: acid mine drainage, deep sea hydrothermal vents, salt lakes, boiling deserts, etc. Scientists have now identified yet another "extreme" environment - an ice-covered alkaline lake in Antarctica ("extreme" is a subjective word meant to ... Read Full Story

One of the biggest stories in the planetary science community continues to be the discovery of water and methane in the atmosphere of a planet far, far away, as detailed in the previous post. But as I read through many of the stories, I'm struck once again by a case of over-simplification (I was guilty of this myself I must admit) and, I think, general misinterpretation of what's really going on.Let's take methane. In article after article, the mention of methane is followed by ... Read Full Story

Say, hypothetically, you want to find life in the universe - you want to try to answer that question we've all wondered about. Great, so what are your options? The way I see it, you've got three options, and by "you" I mean you and millions of dollars of funding.Perhaps the easiest way is to look at stuff that has come directly from space (meteorites), and if they harbor (uncontaminated) life, then it seems pretty likely that there's life out there, shooting around out... Read Full Story

So it turns out that lab work isn't all beakers and lab coats: as with any job, there's plenty of administrative work to wade through as well. An incomplete list for the time being includes arranging for the servicing of some equipment, ordering new equipment, and writing a grant proposal. It's pretty amazing how long some of this can take. For example, you'd think that comparing prices of several different instruments would be easy: go to website, look up item, write down ... Read Full Story