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	<title>Living in the Universe</title>
	<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog</link>
	<description>A blog about astrobiology, the search for life in the universe, by Chris Impey, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.</description>
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		<title>Hanging by a Thread</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ First Week of May 2008 When astrobiologists think about life on Earth or life in the universe, they tend to assume life will persist. It’s lasted for four billion years on the Earth. They also think that intelligence or the advancement of life through evolution is a more or less steady process. But recent studies [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=72</link>
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		<title>An Astrobiology Cornucopia</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Fourth Week of April 2008 Ladies and Gentleman, boys and girls, earthlings and aliens, I just came back from AbSciCon, the astrobiology science conference in Santa Clara, and my head is so full of astrobiology that I think it might explode. Three days, six hundred and fifty papers, two thousand authors total, twenty-eight countries represented. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=71</link>
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		<title>Your Next Vacation?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Third Week of April 2008 The way Will Whitehorn tells it, the story began in 2003 in Mojave California on a visit to Scaled Composites, a company with a reputation for designing futuristic aircraft. Whitehorn is one of the top executives in Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, and Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard’s airline, was sponsoring Global [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=70</link>
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		<title>Living in the Outer Solar System</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Second Week of April 2008 What would it be like to live in the outer solar system? It turns out to be not too bad and so life out there might not be as unlikely as we once thought. Past the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, the Sun is a feeble dot in the sky. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=69</link>
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		<title>RNA World</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ First Week of April 2008 This story for the first week of April 2008 is not a prank. Recent lab results have shed light on an era in the Earth’s history that’s been shrouded in darkness: the time, perhaps four billion years ago, when the motor of life first turned over. There’s essentially no physical [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=68</link>
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		<title>Methane on a Distant World</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Fourth Week of March 2008 Last week saw the exciting detection of the molecule methane for the first time in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. The finding comes from the extrasolar system called HD 189733. It’s a system that’s been in the news before because the star has a gaseous hot [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=67</link>
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		<title>The Passing of a Space Giant</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ Third Week of March 2008 This week saw the passing of a visionary of space and a giant of science fiction.  Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of ninety. The author of almost a hundred books, he was an ardent promoter of humans’ destiny beyond the confines of Earth, most famously in the book [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=66</link>
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		<title>Building life, Brick by Brick</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Second Week March 2008 I want to catch up with a couple of stories that are a couple of months old; they got lost in the crush of the holidays. The stories are from the frontiers of artificial life. You might have heard of a man called Craig Venter. He got exasperated with the slow [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=65</link>
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		<title>The Aerial Biome</title>
		<description><![CDATA[First Week of March 2008 Here’s a scary thought. What if the air we breathe was alive? Well it turns out that it is. There’s a story making the rounds in the news services that I came across on CNN about snowflakes that contain bacteria. Most snow and rain forms in chilly conditions high in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=64</link>
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		<title>Life at the Red Edge</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Last Week of February 2008 My topic this week is a story based on a press release from up the I-10 freeway at Arizona State University. They’re our deadly rivals in sports, but in science we all get along. Researchers from ASU and Washington University are reporting in an online edition of the Proceedings of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://chrisimpey.com/blog/?p=63</link>
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