Marc Kaufman
Marc Kaufman writes about NASA and space issues for the Washington Post, where he has been a reporter on the national staff for ten years. He has also worked as a foreign correspondent at the Post, reporting from Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and as New Delhi bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday, and New York magazines, as well as Smithsonian and Condé Nast Traveler.
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The Washington Post
Search for Alien Life Gains New ImpetusWhen Paul Butler began hunting for planets beyond our solar system, few people took him seriously, and some, he says, questioned his credentials as a scientist. That was a decade ago, before Butler helped find some of the first extra-solar planets, and before he and his team identified about half of the 300 discovered since. Biogeologist Lisa M. Pratt of Indiana University had a similar experience with her early research on “extremophiles”, bizarre microbes found in very harsh Earth environments. She and colleagues explored the depths of South African gold mines and, to their great surprise, found bacteria sustained only by the radioactive decay of nearby rocks. |
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washingtonpost.com
Searching for Extraterrestrial LifeWashington Post staff writer Marc Kaufman and planet-hunter Paul Butler were online Monday, July 21 at 11 a.m. ET to discuss the search for alien life. Butler, who discovered some of the first extra-solar planets, will be joining the discussion from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii after a night of sky gazing. Kaufman notes in his story, Search for Alien Life Gains New Impetus, that there is an explosion taking place in astrobiology, in part because of NASA’s Phoenix landing on Mars.
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