A team of 9 researchers, including Atmospheric Sciences’ David Catling, has published a paper in the December issue of Astrobiology that enumerates two ways of narrowing down the growing number of known exoplanets and exomoons to those that might harbor life – an Earth Similarity Index (ESI) for categorizing a planet’s more earth-like features and a Planetary Habitability Index (PHI) for describing a variety of chemical and physical parameters that are theoretically conducive to life in more extreme, less-earthlike conditions.  Read more here.