A new project aims to help prepare humanity for the day — should it ever come — that we make contact with intelligent aliens. At 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) on Wednesday (May 24), Europe's Trace Gas Orbiter ...

One of the most famous messages ever beamed to space was a string of 1,679 bits sent by the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974. But if E.T. sent us such a string, how could we Earthlings even begin to ...

Deep in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mélissa Berthet found bonobos doing something thought to be uniquely human. How to detect consciousness in people, animals and maybe ...

What if aliens in the universe send a message to Earth, and we can’t understand what they’re saying? Communicating with another species is likely to be tricky, given how difficult it already is for ...