Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov and his colleagues search for Earth-like planets that may, someday, help us answer centuries-old questions about the origin and existence of biological life elsewhere (and on Earth). How many such planets have they found already? Several hundreds.
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After years of painstaking research and experimentation, genomic pioneer J. Craig Venter has accomplished a long-awaited goal: he and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute have introduced a synthetic genome into bacterial cells that can grow and replicate itself.
I just had to repost my review of Lifecode because the author, Stuart Pivar, is pushing the book again.
They're discussing Venter's nifty new toy on Edge, and I've tossed my own contribution into the mix. It's a response to the doomsday fears I keep seeing expressed in response to the success of this project.
Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.
Now we only need to identify oxygen and water vapor in their atmospheres and we'll know it's fairly likely that it's a planet with life on it. There's the humdinger.
There's a bit of a controversy about this talk on astronomy blogs & forums. An example (a bit on the extreme end) is the coverage at NASAWatch.
The important thing to remember is that the planets found by Kepler so far are "Earth-sized", outside the habitable zone (their transit time is too short - and that's why Kepler found them for such a short time).
See the follow-up on Kepler's blog:
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/kepler/posts/post_1280268721769.html
"Now we only need to identify oxygen and water vapor in their atmospheres and we'll know it's fairly likely that it's a planet with life on it."
Water vapor is rather common even in non biotic ambients, I think that what would be telling is oxygen and methane, since they're reactive they can be together only is there is a source for one of them, and life is a strong candidate.