In a paper published October 10 in Nature, researchers guided by data from NASA’s Curiosity rover confirmed that an ancient saltwater lake existed on the surface of Mars, some 3.5 billion years ago. This roughly overlaps with the time when multicellular life first began to evolve on Earth. Scientists are hopeful that there is evidence to discover on Mars that points to primitive life on the Red Planet.

But whether or not life ever existed on Mars, it may still be a safe harbor for life in the future — a life that comes to it from Earth.

Why Mars?

Mars is…

In the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center in Moffet Field located in Silicon Valley, the dilution refrigerator pictured above cools a Vesuvius (TM) processor to just above absolute zero, a temperature over 100x colder than the space between stars.

The Vesuvius (TM) is the 512-cubit quantum processor in the D-Wave Two — the second commercially available quantum computer after the (you guessed it) D-Wave One. This processor was designed to use quantum annealing to solve a specific problem type: quadratic unconstrained binary optimization. These take traditional supercomputers years to solve. …

Using the newest data from the European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, the ESA created the above map of our galaxy that pinpoints the brightness and positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars.

Our Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light years across. To cross our galaxy end-to-end would take 100K years moving at light speed. Ridiculous. That’s just to cross it in a straight line. Covering the actual volume of space enclosed by the Milky Way in our fictional “U.S.S. Enterprise” would require hundreds of millions of years.

And yet, despite our galaxy’s immense scale, the future of life on Earth ultimately…

As consumers, we crave the new, the better, the improved.

When it comes to new products, we have a number of ways to let their creators know what we think of them: snail-mailing their company HQ (gone the way of the dodo bird), posting on Twitter or Facebook, emailing customer service, and uploading a scathing or praising YouTube video.

But what companies really care about is how we vote with our dollars. That determines the value of a product to the company that makes it. …

Interest in prolonging human life goes back to the very beginnings of history. In legends and folklore, people have projected their curiosity and imagination regarding human lifespans onto a vast array of mythical characters, from figures like Methuselah to gods and their spawn, such as Odin and Thor.

These tales held even greater significance in previous millennia, when human lives normally lasted between 30–50 years at most, with a vast swathe of the population wiped out by disease before reaching adulthood. As advances in sanitation, nutrition and medicine were steadily introduced over the last few centuries, average human lifespans have…

Octopus genes are more advanced than any other order of animals on Earth. One of the groups of genes that they exhibit codes for the development of their amazing distributed nervous system. On top of this, octopods possess regenerative and camouflage capabilities, and are among the smartest animals on the planet.

There are species of single-celled organisms called Archaea that survive in environments so harsh they would melt the flesh from your bones in seconds. They live in super-alkaline lakes, in the ultra-high pressure of the Mariana trench, alongside nearly deep-fryer temperature hydrothermal vents, and can even survive high doses…

2:27 P.M. — Tomorrow — Here…

You are about to run out on a break to grab an afternoon coffee. Your day has been hectic so far, and you still have a few hours to go. You’re going to need a serious caffeine boost to keep from strangling someone.

Just as you are leaving, your phone vibrates like crazy and you pluck it out of a pocket to take a look. You think it’s going to be an AMBER Alert, which you receive occasionally.

Instead, you see the familiar gray alert box on your phone’s screen, with the exclamation point in a triangle, and the text:

…

Our future in space depends upon many factors: our continued ability to pay for research, development, and missions; discovering new and innovative ways to reach orbit that are more efficient; and ensuring educational opportunities in STEM subjects to foster the upcoming generations of space and rocket scientists to name just a few.

Being able to take mass from the surface of Earth, out of our gravity well and into zero-G orbit has always been one of the most expensive pieces of the puzzle. It takes enormous sums of energy, and therefore fuel and money, to get even a few pounds…