Your center of mass is a place you cannot visit but you always carry with you. Like memories, it is part of life's baggage.

Where there's water on Earth, you find life as we know it. So if you find water somewhere else, it becomes a remarkable draw to look closer to see if life of any kind is there, even if it's bacterial, which would be extraordinary for the field of biology.

I don't see why there is no intelligent alien life in the universe.

We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.

What do you call those knobby things on doors that help you open them?