How to recognize extraterrestrial life if space chemistry produces the same building blocks as biology? This fundamental ...

Alien life could exist on hot, rocky planets, sustained not by water but by a type of salty fluid, new research suggests. Reading time 3 minutes The search for alien life usually hinges on finding the ...

For more than a century, from George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon to Stephen Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters to this summer’s blockbuster sequel to Independence Day, mass media, and the general ...

New research announced by NASA on Tuesday details a bevy of exciting discoveries from asteroid dust that could provide clues to how life developed in our neck of the cosmos, including the sugars ...

And, while we have no solid evidence of life outside our own planet—despite a large number of unexplained "UFO"-type observations —the sheer size of the known universe, and our knowledge of how ...

As a child, astronomer Jill Tarter would walk along the beaches of western Florida with her father and look up at the stars. "I assumed, at that time, that along some beach on some planet, there would ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...