Now that I’ve got my website revamped, I thought I’d introduce myself and talk about how I write science. I got into science writing in an unusual way. I was trained as an academic, completing my Ph.D. in educational technology in 2000. In the summer of 2001 my life came to a halt when I…

Here’s a fascinating article:  Thinking like an octopus by Alvin Powell of the Harvard Gazette. Powell writes about the ideas of Peter Godfrey-Smith, a Harvard philosopher who has spent time observing octopi in the wild and in captivity. Godfrey-Smith has noted that when an octopus is in an unfamiliar tank with food in the middle,…

We already found seven super-Earths in habitable zones. It may not be long before we find one that has a gravity like ours and a tolerable orbital velocity…Read more.

I’ve put up three new blog entries, all of them about SETI: The Uncanny Valley of Alien Technology How Incomprehensible Could Extraterrestrials Be? Will Extraterrestrials Understand A Message We Send?  

Most of my readers know me as someone who writes about deafness, cochlear implants,neuroscience, and neurotechnology. So you might wonder, what am I up to in writing about astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? Let me explain…Read on.

Why not send the code of an AI to extraterrestrials? Now that would be a real visitor, able to converse with its hosts and share details of Earthly life and thought, and return with its new knowledge. For it the trip would be instantaneous both ways. Decades or centuries would pass on Earth, of course,…

In this blog entry I discuss a message transmitted from the Evapatoria Deep Space Antenna in Evapatoria, Ukraine to four target stars between May and July 1999. It’s called the Cosmic Call. Can we assume that this message will be understood by any intelligent alien mind? What hidden assumptions of ours might not be shared?…

May 21, 2011. My newest blog entry: Communicating with Intelligent Aliens. I consider the prospect of communicating with aliens from the perspectives afforded by linguists: Mark Johnson and George Lakoff on the one hand, and Guy Deutscher on the other. Are our bodies and histories likely to be so different as to make communication impossible? Or can…

If you want a field where august authorities come to completely different conclusions, try astrobiology. Some people are certain that there is life off the earth (and some even think that we have already found it), while others insist that life is rare and intelligent life even more so. I’ve been reading a slew of…

I’ve put up a new Psychology Today blog posting, Is There a Logic to History? Here’s how it starts: “I have been pondering this question: When, if ever, is it meaningful and fair to say that one culture is “more advanced” than another?” Read more.