Day 83: Kepler and ‘Blood Falls;’ lookin’ for life in all the wild places

What does Antarctica have to do with a mission to search for Earth-like planets around other stars? Maybe not much, usually. But yesterday, NASA’s Kepler mission sent back its first images of the patch of the Milky Way where it will stare for the next three-plus years, hunting for planets in the habitable zones around [...]

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Day 33: East Antarctica’s lost mountains

There’s a whole new world buried under more than two miles (4.5 km) of ice in East Antarctica — or at least a whole new mountain range.  An international team of researchers, braving insanely bone-chilling conditions, has used twin-engine light aircraft, along with a network of seismic instruments that would span Texas, to map the mammoth [...]

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