We have a fairly good idea of how life on Earth evolved, whatever the creationists think. But is that the only way it could have possibly worked? The rapidly growing field of synthetic biology is working hard at trying to answer that very question, and to push the envelope of a technology whose ‘only limits…in a sense, were established 3.8 billion years ago when the first one-celled life came into being’. We’re a long way off from creating life from scratch, but the theorists are busy looking at ways we might someday be able to.

I hope you brought your party threads – it’s the Hubble Telescope’s sixteenth birthday! And to celebrate, those lovely people at NASA and the European Space Agency have released a new mosaic image of the M82 galaxy. If you like a bit of that action, they have plenty more great space images from the past sixteen years to download too. These guys have kept me in fresh desktop wallpaper for ages.

If you cut open a nanotube and roll it out flat, you get a sheet of carbon-graphite one molecule thick, referred to as ‘graphene’. Research at the UK’s University of Manchester shows that graphene sheets act like a metal, but a metal with properties governed by quantum physics. For instance, they can be used to filter electrons according to their quantum spin, opening the door on the elusive ‘spintronics’ computation models.

The debate about the amount of water currently on Mars still rages on. But new mineralogical evidence from the Mars Express probe is suggesting it was certainly wet in the past, and went through three successive ‘epochs’, with water presence declining as time passes.

I love listening to great writers expound on the techniques of their art. Charles Stross has posted a short article on his blog discussing the narrative modes used in storytelling, with reference to his attempt to break with convention in his current project. Informative and amusing, much like the man in person.