November 2020
The alien hunter’s field manual
The past few decades have seen remarkable advances in our knowledge of exoplanets (planets orbiting stars outside the solar system). The first, found in the 1990s, were extreme worlds known as hot Jupiters – gas giants with a mass and radius similar...
February 2022
Extremophiles as a blueprint for universal life
... it is that some organisms can tolerate extreme conditions not found on Earth. Could these organisms have contributed as alien life to our rich biological diversity? Could they have applications for humankind and might they perhaps...
29 July 2015
Greetings to aliens: NASA shares 1977 Voyager Golden Record on SoundCloud
... omission is disco music, of course. Then again, perhaps NASA was being prudent and didn’t want to provoke aliens into destroying human civilisation.
21 September 2015
New pictures of ‘surprisingly Earth-like’ Pluto by New Horizons
We’re used to thinking of Pluto as a distinctly alien world. But the latest photos of the dwarf planet make it seem pretty familiar. The pictures have ...
08 January 2020
New technique on finding oxygen could help find alien life
The search for life on far-flung planets might just have got a little easier to spot thanks to a new technique that allows scientists to detect oxygen more clearly. Oxygen is essential for life as we know it. On Earth organisms such as algae, plants...
October 2021
Space in the movies – lessons for spacefarers
... to present a faster-than-light human spacecraft, this movie considers the ‘Monster in the Id’ and the capacity of alien civilisations, and perhaps humanity, to play a dangerous game through the naïve use of technology. I find this film fascinating...
