Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, 40 light-years away from the Earth [1]. This makes TRAPPIST-1 the planetary system with the largest number of Earth-sized planets discovered so far. These planets are also relatively temperate, making them a tantalizing place to search for signs of life beyond our Solar System. Now, an international team […]
Read More TRAPPIST-1 Planetary Atmospheres May Be HabitableScience fiction and fantasy, in my experience, are rarely all one thing. Sometimes – often! – SFF blends elements of other genres of fiction into it. For instance, I think just about every Philip K. Dick novel I’ve read is either transgressive fiction or a detective/crime novel. Sometimes those elements seem so weird that not […]
Read More Science Fiction & Fantasy MashupsFrom the December 2013 issue of Locus Magazine Telling people who don’t read science fiction and fantasy that I write it is still awkward. My mom used to tell people I wrote ‘‘novels like Stephen King,’’ even though I can’t watch a movie more supernaturally terrifying than Ghostbusters without enduring fierce nightmares, insomnia, and night sweats. I prefer corporeal, knife-wielding villains […]
Read More Kameron Hurley: Making Excuses for Science FictionA student at the University of Oxford is being celebrated in the world of science photography for capturing a single, floating atom with an ordinary camera. Using long exposure, PhD candidate David Nadlinger took a photo of a glowing atom in an intricate web of laboratory machinery. In it, the single strontium atom is illuminated […]
Read More Photo of a Single Atom with an Ordinary CameraHoly actual sh*t! This changes everything! A protein involved in cognition and storing long-term memories looks and acts like a protein from viruses. The protein, called Arc, has properties similar to those that viruses use for infecting host cells, and originated from a chance evolutionary event that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago. The […]
Read More SURPRISE! A Viruslike Protein is Important for Cognition and MemoryBy Derek Haines Why are Amazon ebook reviews from US readers more important than reviews from international readers? Have you noticed that reviews from Amazon.com are aggregated across all other international Amazon sites, but that the reverse is not true? If someone kindly posts a review of a book on Amazon.co.uk, it is stuck there, and […]
Read More Amazon Ebook Reviews Are US BiasedBy James Davis Nicoll Once more into the past, this time armed with a more comprehensive list of women who debuted in the 1970s¹. In fact, my list has become long enough that I am going have to tackle the authors letter by letter, moving forward. In this case, I am looking at women authors […]
Read More Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers of the 1970s, Part IIBy Kristi Shinfuku The Earth can be a truly magnificent place. It’s power and its strength draw our attention and it’s power is always a reminder that this planet is not just ours. Despite all of that, sometimes, its beauty can mean something downright dangerous ahead. In the popular tourist destination of Isle of Rhe in […]
Read More Man Spots Dangerous ‘Square Waves’ In OceanBy Brendan Myers Luke Skywalker was my childhood hero. Back then, I admired him for his adventurousness, bravery, and victory. Now as an adult, I admire him for his philosophical integrity. Here’s why. Read the full article at BrendanMyers.net.
Read More Luke Skywalker: A Hero of Peace and Purpose
