Dimitar Sasselov has a book entitled The Life of Super-Earths: How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells Will Revolutionize Life on Our Planet coming out January 2012.
Saul Perlmutter, Harvard Physics undergraduate, and Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess both Harvard Astronomy PhDs were recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prize for "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae."
Before Ed Turner and Avi Loeb tell you about their research, they want to make one thing perfectly clear: they do not claim there's a city on Pluto. But if there were, they say, we could see it. And, as they suggest in a paper they've submitted to the journal Astrobiology, it's worth taking a look, just in case.
By Karen Weintraub Cambridge, Massachusetts November 8, 2011
Hollywood is wrong about aliens. They don't have oddly shaped heads, bulging eyes or even an eery green hue. Dimitar Sasselov is pretty convinced of that.
He's not even sure we'll know them when we see them. Prof Sasselov, an astrophysicist, thinks that if life exists elsewhere - and he believes it does - it will likely be based on different building blocks than ours, and so may not even be recognizable as life.
A project he's heading at Harvard University, called the Origins of ...