Wondrous Worlds of the Imagination

In this last week, we have been shown Pluto’s heart, and have been offered a tantalising hint of a possible ‘sister Earth’ 1400 or so light years distant. The recent announcement of Breakthrough Listen, a massive search initiative from Russian tycoon, Yuri Milner, to detect radio signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence, seems synchronous. Astronomers have now discovered almost […]

What is Out There and the Cosmic Teapot

I haven’t quite  given up on my childhood dream of meeting an alien. The nice sort, a Vulcan like Mr Spock, from Star Trek  – not the nasty kind that Scully and Mulder always encountered in the X-Files, or those featured in lurid accounts of UFO abduction stories that I read as a wide-eyed adolescent. I […]

Curiosity and Oxygen Pills, Microbes and Men

Since I was a little girl I have been interested in space travel. I loved Fireball XL5, but struggled to understand how the cast (giving televisual ‘life’ to puppets) could breathe in space without spacesuits. I now understand that they took ‘oxygen pills’. (Decompression and radiation aside, even for puppets.) I have been reading the NASA posts about […]