Astrobiology on Display
In this interview, David Grinspoon talks about his job as the first-ever curator of astrobiology for a museum. While there are no alien artifacts yet available for display, there are many ways a museum can feature the various facets of astrobiology.

Survival in Space
In this interview, Charles Cockell talks about studying microbes in the harsh conditions of outer space. He also explains why in the future, humans must expand our horizons outwards into that final frontier.

This Easter Island Earth
In an ongoing tour of literature related to astrobiology, Linda Sauter reviews "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. While not overtly about astrobiology, "Collapse" can provide insights about the likely development of life and civilizations in the universe.

Handful of Habstars
In the search for life on other worlds, scientists can listen for radio transmissions from stellar neighborhoods where intelligent civilizations might lurk or they can try to actually spot planets like our own in habitable zones around nearby stars. Either approach is tricky and relies on choosing the right targets for scrutiny out of the many thousands of nearby stars in our galactic neighborhood.

Defining Life
For scientists eying distant planets and solar systems for signs of alien activity, University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Carol Cleland suggests the first order of business is to keep an open mind.

SETI Sets its Sights on M Dwarfs
More than half the stars in our galaxy are small, dim M dwarfs. Until recently, scientists believed these stars put out too little light to support life on any planets that orbited them. But at a recent workshop held at the SETI Institute, a multidisciplinary group of researchers concluded not only that M dwarfs might host habitable planets, but that they might also be good targets in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

ET Cell-Phone Home
Recent advances in wireless computing technology could improve deep-space missions like asteroid research and remote spacecraft operations by changing the way signals are sent from Earth. A new method designed to effectively deliver commands and instructions using hundreds of millions of tiny transmitters linked together could also free the giant satellite dishes currently used to send and receive the long-range information for other applications. A research paper describing the scheme for relatively simple high-power transmitters will be published in the October issue of Radio Science, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

SETI and the Cosmic Quarantine Hypothesis
How many technically advanced civilizations exist in our galaxy? With this essay by Steven Soter, Scientist-in-Residence in the Center for Ancient Studies at New York University, Astrobiology Magazine initiates the first in a series of 'Gedanken', or thought, experiments - musings by noted scientists on scientific mysteries in a series of "what if" scenarios.

M Dwarfs: The Search for Life is On
M-dwarf stars, much smaller, dimmer and cooler than stars like our sun, are by far the most common type of star in our galaxy. Yet scientists searching for life on other worlds have not shown much interest in M dwarfs. That's about to change.

Radio Free Earth
In Part Three in the series on stellar and terrestrial evolution, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of the PBS/NOVA Series "Origins", discusses the limits of radio searches for extraterrestrial life.