Comets continue to confound cosmologists, who often assert that the small celestial bodies came from the “Oort Cloud,” a theoretical group of planetary leftovers that supposedly orbits the solar system.

In a recent issue of the journal The Scientist, University of Florida College of Medicine professor Leonid Moroz lamented the current lack of graduate program courses on the supposed basics of evolutionary biology and biosystematics.

If Charles Darwin could see today's best examples of evolution, would he be elated or depressed?

The idea of evolutionary descent with modification holds that all the various kinds of living organisms arose through some natural step-by-step process—a concept that many have believed since Charles Darwin popularized it in 1859. That story has become less believable, however, since scientists discovered molecular machines.

A distant rocky planet was recently discovered orbiting close enough to its red dwarf star that liquid water could exist on its surface. This rare position is called the goldilocks zone (not too hot and not too cold) and is one of thousands of preconditions for life to exist on any planet.¹