Super-Earths around red dwarfs and ‘The Crowded Universe’

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. You may notice that this and future entries are shorter than usual; career, family and book deal commitments have forced me to cut back some of my projects. Now, here's today's news:
g Stars - Will the first “super-Earth” in the habitable zone of its star be found around a red dwarf? See article.
g Abodes - You wouldn’t think the thickness of ice on a distant moon of Jupiter could emerge as something of a political hot-button, but that seems to be what has happened in the ongoing investigation of Europa. Thick ice or thin? The question is more complicated than it looks, because by ‘thin’ ice we don’t mean just a few inches, but perhaps ten kilometers, perhaps five. The key question is not a specific measurement, but whether the ice is thin enough to allow the surface and the global ocean beneath to be connected, in the form of occasional cracks, melt-throughs or other events. See article.
g Life - Cores retrieved from layers of deep-sea rocks show that oxygen-producing organisms may have existed on Earth much earlier than previously thought. The chemical properties of the rocks indicate that the oceans and atmosphere of Earth were rich in oxygen 3.46 billion years ago. See article.
g Cosmicus - What if Kepler pulls in dozens, even hundreds, of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their respective stars? See article.
g Learning - Book alert: In “The Crowded Universe”, Alan Boss, a theoretical astrophysicist who has studied models of planet formation, provides a broad, general review of the recent history of exoplanet discovery. See review.
g Imagining - What is the possibility of life and potential ecologies on a hulking gas giant like Jupiter? See article.

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