The search for life beyond Earth has always been full of surprises. Strange radio signals have sparked excitement. Odd gases on distant worlds have raised questions. Even ordinary objects have been ...

When it comes to the search for life elsewhere in the universe, methane and other chemical compounds are seen as signs of ...

Some of these approaches may show promise, but new research indicates much of today’s AI is even more easily duped by false ...

With new technologies come new opportunities. And that is especially true in astronomy—with every new advanced telescope, we ...

The idea that octopuses might be aliens emerged from the theory of panspermia (Stelele 2018), according to which life on Earth is not entirely of terrestrial ...

A common brain protein may be giving Alzheimer’s disease an unexpected way to spread, carrying toxic Tau proteins from ...

On July 1, 2025, a NASA-funded sky survey spotted an object racing through the solar system on a path no gravitationally bound body could follow. Designated 3I/ATLAS, it became only the third ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. [CLIP: The spaceship Hail Mary’s operating system (played by Priya Kansara) speaks in ...

The spectrum of alien appearances across popular culture is vast, limited only by human imagination. From the sharp, angular features of Captain Spock to the dinosaur-like neck and big, expressive ...

On November 28, 1967, astronomy graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell at Cambridge spotted a tiny repeating mark on miles of radio data. That odd signal turned out to be from the first known pulsar, ...

NEIL deGRASSE TYSON (Astrophysicist): A hellish, fiery wasteland, a molten planet hostile to life, yet somehow, amazingly, this is where we got our start. How? How did the universe, our planet, how ...