Air & Space
Who are you calling bird-brained? Crows and other corvids display self-awareness and consciousness
The corvid family of birds, which includes crows, ravens, jays and magpies, had been observed previously to use tools, as ...
How can we detect alien organisms that don’t look like life on Earth?
Nearly all previous life detection instruments have looked for volatile organic compounds using a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer, or GC-MS. The Viking ...
‘Game-changer’: Europe’s ExoMars rover armed with new life-testing tool
In a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology, Jacob Heinz, my colleague at the Technical University of Berlin, and I discuss ...
Have we already discovered life on Mars? And did we accidentally kill it?
In a recent opinion piece in Scientific American, former Viking Mars investigator Gil Levin fired up anew the argument over whether that ...
Water world: Does the evolution of intelligent life require land?
Exoplanets come in a variety of types, and so-called “water worlds”—planets with at least ten percent of their total mass ...
What are the odds that aliens might actually look similar to us?
In his new book, Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution, Charles Cockell from the University of Edinburgh makes the argument ...
