For more than a century, popular culture has trained us to picture extraterrestrials as bug-eyed, bipedal “little green men” who look suspiciously like us in rubber suits. The scientists who actually ...

For generations, science fiction has imagined what life might look like on other worlds. Novelist H.G. Wells described nightmarish squid-like Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds, while the ...

For a long time, aliens in movies had something reassuringly familiar about them. Even when they arrived from distant galaxies, they tended to stand upright, speak (or at least gesture) like us, and ...

Scientists are listening in on sperm whale conversations and studying Earth's strangest microbes to prepare humanity for first contact with extraterrestrial life. Tardigrades—a type of invertebrate ...