Matt Ransford

What makes a disease deadly in the twenty-first century? Medicine has never been more advanced; our understanding of spread and infection, never more sophisticated. And yet, we may be poised for the largest and most devastating pandemic the human race has ever encountered.

Few would begrudge an environmental impact study in advance of new power plant construction, least of all proponents of alternative energy. But with the Bureau of Land Management's recent decision to put a freeze on any new solar projects on the land it oversees in order to study the potential environmental effects, those same proponents are now looking skeptically at the federal government.

Now that the glitches caused by the Martian soil's clumpy consistency have been shaken out, the Phoenix Lander has been able to cook up a few samples to test the soil composition. The preliminary results are surprising even to the chemists at work on the project: the soil is alkaline, and much more so than anyone expected. The analysis has found trace amounts of magnesium, sodium, potassium, and other elements similar to those in the soil on Earth. On first pass, Martian dirt appears to be non-toxic and laden with the basic nutrients necessary to support life.

When it launches in 2009, NASA's Kepler Mission will include the most sensitive detection system ever put into service for discovering exosolar planets. In the meantime, our toolkit on Earth is getting better with each passing year. Astronomers using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at La Silla Observatory in Chile have discovered three new rocky planets orbiting a single star, all within ten times the size of Earth.

Chimpanzees and humans share many similarities, which isn't surprising considering they're our closest living relatives. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week has added another to the list: third-party consolation. Researchers in England have discovered that chimps will calm each other down after conflicts and that the kissing and embracing help to alleviate the stress caused by the situation. Previous studies had focused on reconciliation between parties in conflict; this new work focuses on bystanders who come in afterward to offer solace.

The human brain is still largely an unsolved mystery. We only marginally understand how it works and are even less able to predict how it will behave in certain situations. One of the most frustrating of those situations is the coma. Anecdotes abound of people in comas who unexpectedly wake from them, much to their doctors' surprise. But what if doctors could get ahead of that surprise with a predictor of whether or not a patient will regain consciousness? A team of Belgian scientists have proposed just such a clue.

For as long as humans have looked to the night sky to divine meaning and a place in the universe, we have let our minds wander to thoughts of distant worlds populated by beings unlike ourselves. The ancient Greeks were the first Western thinkers to consider formally the possibility of an infinite universe housing an infinite number of civilizations.

Although it's only one part of the answer, we have come another step closer to solving the question of how life originated. Two necessary molecular ingredients of DNA and RNA have been confirmed to have originated from outer space. They join the handful of amino acids we have discovered to have been delivered to Earth on the backs of asteroids and comets.

Pluto took a big hit in the eyes of schoolchildren and amateur astronomers two years ago when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) knocked it out of the rank of planets. Deemed too small and irregularly shaped, and with its orbit in the path of another planet, Pluto was relegated to a new class of "dwarf planets." The reclassification came about as the result of discoveries of bodies beyond Pluto's orbit that are the same size or larger than the icy world. And so Pluto was grouped with those far-out solar-system denizens, along with asteroids close to Pluto's size.