Q&a with an astrobiologist

The prospect of life on Mars – Earth’s planetary next-door neighbour, an alien world that betrays tantalising hints of a watery past – has bewitched humanity for centuries. From the ‘canals’ seen by a

Mars once had vast oceans on its surface. Then its magnetic field weakened, its atmosphere thinned, and its water vanished. But the numbers don’t add up. For the Red Planet to have transformed from a

Ten years ago, Pluto emerged from the gloom at the Solar System’s ragged edge – and a new world came in from the cold. Five billion kilometres (3 billion miles) from Earth, on 14 July 2015, NASA’s pia

The high-tech Japanese sake company Asahi Shuzo is taking a bold step forward by attempting to brew its sake off-world for the first time, with the ultimate goal of being able to brew sake on the Moon

The best discoveries, inventions and surprises

An old-fashioned hardback book often still beats the internet, doesn’t it? When you can get hold of one. Right now, there’s one, in a package with my name on it, stuck somewhere between a second-hand