How could the ingredients necessary for life reach the ocean hidden beneath the ice of Europa, this moon of Jupiter? This ...

The search for extraterrestrial life is one of the most exciting frontiers of modern science. Thanks to recent discoveries of exoplanets like Gliese 581 g, Kepler-22 b, Kepler-186 f, and Kepler-452 b, ...

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 ...

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, ...