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Cosmic rays pour down on Earth like a constant rain. We don't much notice these high-energy particles, but they may have played a role in the evolution of life on our planet.

A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality. DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and...

People should not be afraid of dark energy. Remember that the problem with the cosmological constant isn't that it's mysterious and ill-motivated - it's that it's too small! The naive theoretical prediction is larger than what's required by observation by a factor of 10^120. That's a puzzle, no doubt, but setting it equal to zero doesn't make the puzzle go away - then it's smaller than the theoretical prediction by a factor of infinity.