Extraterrestrial Life

No life on the moon; safe gas at home

NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected four rock samples from an ancient river delta where organisms might have thrived

Drake’s curiosity and ambition turned the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into the scientific venture it is today

Remembering Frank Drake, who led science in listening for an extraterrestrial “whisper we can’t quite hear”

“Decolonizing” the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could boost its chances of success, says science historian Rebecca Charbonneau

Although modest in scope, a NASA research project reflects shifting attitudes toward the formerly taboo subject of UFOs

The emergence of the human “dataome” is like a sudden invasion of Earth

Organisms on Earth produce a wide array of durable “biofluorescent” materials. If those on other planets do, too, the Compact Color Biofinder should be able to detect them

Planetary scientists are eager to bring Red Planet rocks, soil and even air to Earth, but critics fear the risk of contaminating our world’s biosphere 

We now know that plants survive but fail to thrive in lunar soil

A structure that links amino acids suggests that early organisms could have been based on an RNA-protein mix