The science of extra-solar planets is one of the most rapidly changing areas of astrophysics and since 1995 the number of planets known has increased by almost two orders of magnitude. A combination of ground-based surveys and dedicated space missions has resulted in 560-plus planets being detected, and over 1200 that await confirmation. NASA's Kepler mission has opened up the possibility of discovering Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around some of the 100,000 stars it is surveying during its 3 to 4-year lifetime. The new ESA's Gaia mission is expected to discover thousands of new planets around stars within 200 parsecs of the Sun. The key challenge now is moving on from discovery, important though that remains, to characterisation: what are these planets actually like, and why are they as they are?

In the past ten years, we have learned how to obtain the first spectra of exoplanets using transit transmission and emission spectroscopy. With the high stability of Spitzer, Hubble, and large ground-based telescopes the spectra of bright close-in massive planets can be obtained and species like water vapour, methane, carbon monoxide and dioxide have been detected. With transit science came the first tangible remote sensing of these planetary bodies and so one can start to extrapolate from what has been learnt from Solar System probes to what one might plan to learn about their faraway siblings. As we learn more about the atmospheres, surfaces and near-surfaces of these remote bodies, we will begin to build up a clearer picture of their construction, history and suitability for life.

The Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory, EChO, will be the first dedicated mission to investigate the physics and chemistry of Exoplanetary Atmospheres. By characterising spectroscopically more bodies in different environments we will take detailed planetology out of the Solar System and into the Galaxy as a whole.

EChO has now been selected by the European Space Agency to be assessed as one of four M3 mission candidates.

This article answers, in part, questions raised by new rural and agricultural historians concerning how farmers interacted with the rise of large-scale organizational society in the era after the 1896 Presidential election. It argues that California citrus growers reacted by bringing the revolution of corporate capitalism to Southern California, 1893–1920. The article tests the activities of California orange growers against the theoretical models of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Martin J. Sklar. It concludes that a pro-corporate group of orange growers embraced corporate managerial capitalism at a time when most other American farmers were in open revolt against industrialization. In 1912, these growers appointed G. Harold Powell, pomologist with the USDA's Bureau of Plant Industry, as General manager of their mammoth California Fruit Growers Exchange. By 1920, Powell and the Exchange board of directors completed the corporate consolidation of the citrus enterprise, and by example the reconstruction of California's potent agricultural empire.