Sarah Rugheimer | The Great Courses | Listen
In this audio popular science lecture series, I walk through the current landscape of finding habitable Earth-like planets, how life might have originated on Earth and how we might find alien life in our own Solar System and on distant exoplanets.
Sarah Rugheimer | Harvard Horizons, 2014 | Watch
In this six-minute talk, I discuss how we can detect signs of life on planets orbiting other stars and the influence of high energy radiation on those signatures.
Robert M. Hazen | The Great Courses | Explore
How did life evolve? This fascinating series by Robert M. Hazen goes through what we know, and don't yet understand, about the scientific quest to find out how the early Earth went from a hellish volcanic world to one teaming with life in only a few hundred million years. This course series, and the related book by Hazen, Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins, are why I became an astrobiologist.
Alexandra Witze | Nature, 2021 | Article
Alexandra Witze discusses the controversies surrounding the claimed detection of phosphine, a potential biosignature, in the atmosphere of Venus. Ultimately, it will be years before science will fully tease out the truth of the Venusian atmosphere.
Stuart Firestein | Oxford, 2016 | Book
Stuart Firestein argues that ignorance and failure drive science. The scientific process is messy, filled with uncertainty. It is our willingness to welcome the ignorance, failure and mistakes that allows us to succeed in understanding our world.