Vatican Explores Astrobiology
The Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church. “The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration,” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory. (Ariel David, Associated Press)

New Dinosaur Species Found
The new dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae, belongs to the Sauropodomorpha, a group that includes the ancestors of sauropods—gigantic, four-legged herbivores—but not the sauropods themselves. The largest animals that ever walked the earth were sauropodomorphs. The recently documented sauropodomorph, described in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, lived around 200 to 183 million years ago in South Africa and was nearly 30 feet in length. (Discovery News)

Do Culture and Religion—Our New “Environments”—Drive Evolution?
Backed by new data, scientists ask controversial questions like this: Could forcing Jews by law to do little but handle money for many, many generations in Europe have selected for the relatively common independent appearance of Tay-Sachs disease in that population? (Arri Eisen, Religion Dispatches)

Q&A
David Attenborough
Sir David Attenborough, 83, has been the voice of natural history programs for more than 50 years, with series including Life, Planet Earth, and The Blue Planet. He recently retired from on-location broadcasting. His new book, Life Stories, is out now. (Graeme Green, Metro)

BOOKS
Galileo’s Dream
In Galileo’s Dream—on the one hand a scrupulously accurate, joyfully affectionate portrait of the life of the first modern scientist, Galileo Galilei; on the other a wild leap through the solar system to the moons of Jupiter and a future civilization—Kim Stanley Robinson set out to pin down time travel. (Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk)