It always makes for a great movie. The lonely scientist in his white coat, working alone in his lab late into the night. There he is, mixing crazy coloured chemicals as part of an insane quest to find some sort of secret elixir. Like Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit, or Spencer…
Spot the difference! Glenelg in Scotland and on Mars. Our close planetary neighbours, the Moon and Mars, have been receiving a bit more coverage in the media lately. Well, OK, perhaps it’s not been an all-out deluge of publicity. Not really the journalistic equivalent of a feeding frenzy, I agree. But nonetheless, the news outlets…
Compared to gases in primitive meteorites, Earth’s present day atmosphere is depleted in xenon. A new model, published in Nature, suggests that the mineral perovskite holds the key to understanding the riddle. Early last week I was contacted by Andy Extance, a journalist working for Chemistry World, who asked if I would be willing to…
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team celebrate the safe arrival of Curiosity on Mars. (image: NASA/ Bill Ingalls) Last Friday I went to a really fascinating talk by Dr Carlton Allen, the Astromaterials Curator at the NASA Johnson Space Centre, Houston, Texas. Dr Allen is in charge of all the extraterrestrial samples collected by…
Meteorites: The Blog from the Final Frontier 