For those who don’t know the background, NASA’s Perseverance rover is gathering rock samples in Jezero crater on Mars where there used to be a delta long ago. It is a very interesting place for past life. The samples are in tubes on Mars. They want to return them some time around 2033.

Sadly Perseverance can’t drill and the surface deposits have been sterilized by ionizing radiation for billions of years. Though Mars used to have oceans it’s been dry now for billions of years but sometimes with occasional flooding and even lakes for a while.

I am trying to find out what has happened as NASA are normally so careful. The analogy of the smoke detector I think is the best way to think of it.

Open letter to Space Colonization Enthusiasts. It is natural for enthusiasts who are keen on space colonization to think we need no protection for Earth. After all settlers on Mars in science fiction stories rarely run into issues. Even when they find life on Mars, somehow it is never hazardous for Earth. However science fiction is a product of the author’s imagination and is never predictive. Even hard sci. fi. gets some things right and some things wrong. But we are in a world now where what used to be science fiction is becoming reality and it may not be quite as the visionaries saw it.

NASA are planning to return its Mars samples of rock and some dust / soil to biosafety level 4 facilities. That was fine in 2009. But the problem is that it doesn’t contain the very small microbes we now know exist called ultramicrobacteria which can get through a very tiny 0.1 micron nanopore and still be viable.

The samples are in tubes on Mars. They want to return them some time around 2033. The chance of returning life on those mainly geological samples is low. The chance it is dangerous if returned is also likely low. To give an idea of the order of risk I use Margaret Race's analogy of a smoke alarm. The risk of a fire in your house is so low most people don't panic about it. But you still install smoke alarms just in case.

First for anyone who doesn't know about it, NASA are planning to return its Mars samples of rock and some dust / soil to biosafety level 4 facilities (BSL-4). The samples are in tubes on Mars. They want to return them some time around 2033.

This week, scientists from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California,

Policies of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) have increasingly led to the exclusion of individuals who do not share a radical 'woke' ideology on identity politics and to the suppression of the academic freedom to discuss such dogmas. Here we put together some particularly illustrative cases of such repression, many of them in scientific environments.

Ask a hunting guide about what your first experience as a novice hunter should be and they will say a turkey. No one ever cried over eating turkey whereas a rabbit would be a bad idea for many.

A new survey in Human-Animal Interactions attempted to assess social perceptions in Singapore about ‘food animals’ versus 'friends' and 'worth fighting for', broken down as ‘Love’, ‘Save’, ‘Indifferent’ and ‘Dislike.’

In the waning hours of the year’s biggest climate change conference – COP27 – we learned of a deal to create a loss and damage fund. This is essentially a source of finance to compensate poor countries for the pain they are incurring because of climate change. An often-cited example of such suffering is the ongoing drought in the Horn of Africa region, which has put some 22 million people at risk of severe hunger.

I was astonished when I read NASA’s draft Environment Impact Statement for their mission to return samples from Mars. NASA are normally so reliable. Normally their work is well grounded in the best and most recent science, and they are also very open with the public, for instance sharing their images from Mars as soon as they receive them themselves.

But this was far from NASA’s usual standard, and full of mistakes.

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Over 200 years ago, the age of modern agriculture began with fertilizer that wouldn't give you food poisoning if traces of it remained, like manure will.

A new paper found what you would expect, and a key reason why legacy pesticides used in the organic process require nearly 600 percent more chemicals per calorie;  pests evolve as the science does.