NASA has announced today the discovery of Kepler 16b, an exoplanet with some interesting characteristics. The Saturn-sized gas giant orbits around the outside of two stars in a binary system, at a distance closer to the two stars than the Earth to our own sun. Although it is close to its twin suns, the temperature of the exoplanet is estimated to be...

Enrico Fermi was a physicist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s. Following a discussion about extraterrestrial intelligence with colleagues, he apocryphally posed the question, ‘Where are they?’. By which he meant that it seemed impossible, if life existed elsewhere in the universe, that we had not yet seen evidence of it given...