The mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is a magnificent and historically important event.  The images coming to us from space as the astronauts work on repairing the telescope are beautiful, up close and personal and once again instill awe in those of us that watch.

For most of my life the increasingly incredible pictures and videos that have come back from space have taken we humans out of our planetary realm and realities and lifted up into the cosmos.  The world literally stopped and listened on transistor radios when John Glenn orbited earth in the early 1960s.  The whole …

Amidst all the chatter and news stories about who said what in the Presidential race and how SUVs have become undesirable, there was a story last week that will be one that 2008 will be remembered for, at least in the scientific community.  NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander found ice on Mars!!

As long as humanity has known about the solar system there has been conjecture as to whether there was life anywhere else.  Mars has always been the prime suspect and has led to many books, movies and one famous radio event about Martians.  Most of the time such life forms …

All my life I have believed that there must be other intelligent life in the Universe.  When you gaze upon the endless starry night it seems statistically impossible that there isn’t some form of intelligent life out there.  It may not be human-like but life there must be.  In a prior column, I wrote about the fact that scientists looking for life elsewhere have redefined the definition of life as it was concluded that perhaps our earth bound definition  needs to be greatly expanded.

Last week there was an announcement that astronomers had discovered that there were five planets circling …

It was 50 years ago this week that the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man made satellite to orbit the earth. It changed the world.  In fact, there are few, if any events of the last 50 years that had such a global impact on just about every aspect of humanity. I can still remember the night that, as a …