Considered a leader in the search for planets outside our solar system, Alan Boss says we are at a turning point in our search for extraterrestrial life. He expects we are on the verge of finding many different Earth-like planets across the universe, and he expects it will be common to find life on those planets. [...]

This is some truly amazing footage of James May riding in a U-2 spy plane to the edge of earth. Found at Break from bigband.

What NASA calls its ‘Heliophysics Observatory’ is an impressive fleet of spacecraft designed (often with international partnership) to study the relationship between the Sun, Earth, and Solar System. Flying in an array of trajectories and orbits, many of these satellites do not take images in the conventional sense but record fields, particle energies and fluxes [...]

NASA’s been tracking the thinning of the ozone layer the south pole for nearly 20 years. In this slowed-down animation, you can watch the ozone hole’s average size each October. Found at YouTube from Wired.