Extraterrestrial Life

After an alarming failure, the rover is set to continue its mission to retrieve specimens for eventual return to Earth

Mycologist Paul Stamets discusses the potential extraterrestrial uses of fungi, including terraforming planets, building human habitats—and providing psilocybin therapy to astronauts

If any of them represent advanced technology, high-resolution photographs might tell us whether they’re metaphorically labeled “Made in China” or “Made on Exoplanet X”

Meteorites reveal that so long as groundwater is present, the Martian subsurface is habitable

As a SETI scientist, I’m grateful that he has the freedom—and the guts—to go where few would dare to go

The newly organized Galileo Project will use a three-pronged approach to replace unreliable eyewitness reports with reproducible scientific observations

In conversation, the Harvard University professor explains his shocking hypothesis—and calls out what he sees as a crisis in science

Even a galaxy teeming with star-hopping alien civilizations should still harbor isolated, unvisited worlds—and Earth might be among them

The first interstellar object ever found provides an excellent test of the scientific process

Untangling the origins of organisms will require experiments at the tiniest scales and observations at the vastest

For most life in the universe, oxygen might be a deadly poison. Surprisingly, that might make such creatures easier for astrobiologists to find

More than 30 worlds have new names drawn from world mythology, literature and history