As the film Disclosure Day rolls out in cinemas, director Steven Spielberg is once again pushing audiences to imagine what ...

Valley’s role | Compete respectfully | Stunted potential. Mercury News reader letters to the editor for June 17, 2026.

Our search for technosignatures—clear signs of advanced civilizations beyond Earth—takes many forms. Many are driven by the famous Drake equation, which attempts to estimate how many technological ...

It’s impossible to separate UFO legends and lore from the Cold War, which led to a culture of secrecy in the military and public paranoia that the truth was being concealed. According to the ...

For generations, the search for life beyond Earth has focused on avoiding one of science’s biggest mistakes: claiming a ...

Steven Spielberg returns to one of his favorite subjects in "Disclosure Day," but there are lot of things in the sci-fi ...

A new Keck Observatory study indicates that giant planets can spin faster than more massive brown dwarfs, revealing important ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An artist's impression of a hot Jupiter's magnetic field. (International Gemini Observatory ...

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

For many years, scientists searching for life beyond Earth have focused on one main question: what kinds of molecules should they look for on other planets? Molecules such as amino acids and fatty ...

The search for life beyond Earth has a new approach that relies more heavily on statistical patterns of molecules than on any one molecule's presence. Credit: NASA. For decades, scientists searching ...

What methods can scientists use to correctly identify biosignatures, aka signs of life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of researchers from the ...