How Do We Find Aliens? Maybe Unlearn What We Know About 'Life' First

How Do We Find Aliens? Maybe Unlearn What We ...

Up next

Disclosure Day and the science of alien language

In the new movie Disclosure Day, aliens communicate through a series of strange clicks and pops. But what could an alien language actually be like? In this episode of Science Quickly, host Rachel Feltman puts that question to linguist Jeffrey Punske. We explore why fictional alie ...  Show more

The science of World Cup grass

In this episode of Science Quickly, we explore the science behind preparing natural grass for the 2026 International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup, a project in which researchers have worked to transform stadiums that typically use artificial turf into sites ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

What Is Life?
The Joy of Why

<span style="font-weight: 400">Scientists don’t really agree on a definition for life. We may recognize life instinctively most of the time, but any time we try to nail it down with set criteria, some stubborn counterexample spoils the effort. Still, can we really search for l ...

  Show more

Joshua Schimel, "Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded" (Oxford UP, 2011)
New Books in Science

Listen to this interview of Joshua Schimel, Professor of soil ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded (Oxford UP, 2011). We talk about how writing is research, and about ...  Show more

Shot de philo #14 : la science
Shots de Philo

Bienvenue dans notre quatorzième shot de philo. En moins de 5 minutes, nous allons te donner les clés d'une notion centrale du programme : la science. Qu’est-ce qui définit exactement un discours scientifique ? Est-ce qu'une théorie scientifique est absolue ? Et à quoi sert la sc ...  Show more

Chiara Marletto, "The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals" (Viking, 2021)
New Books in Science

There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossib ...  Show more