College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

IFLSCIENCE - There may come a point (perhaps for humans, perhaps not) where a civilization may wish to terraform a planet in their Solar System or beyond. Perhaps an environmental disaster was looming on their planet, or they spotted a nearby neighbor planet that looked like – with a few finishing touches – it could...

EARTH.COM - The search for extraterrestrial life has captivated our imaginations for centuries. Now, a study from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) suggests a tantalizing possibility: we may be able to detect alien activity and civilizations by identifying artificial greenhouse gases they use to terraform planets. What is terraforming? Terraforming, a concept popular in...

THE DAILY MAIL - Alien life has yet to be found in space, but a new study has uncovered 'telltale' signs of an inhabited planet. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) discovered that greenhouse gases, like those emitted on Earth, would mean a distant world had been terraformed - or artificially altered. Signatures...

THE INDEPENDENT UK - Scientists have identified a set of greenhouse gasses which could be used as a marker to look for advanced alien civilizations with the potential to transform entire planets to make them habitable. While greenhouse gasses cause global warming and must be controlled on Earth, they may be used intentionally to make...

EXTREME TECH - Until someone invents warp drive, the only way we can inspect distant exoplanets is with a powerful telescope. However, even the most capable telescopes can only catch faint glimmers from exoplanets. In a new study, scientists from the University of California, Riverside, lay out a method of detecting potential alien activity, and...

BBC SCIENCE FOCUS - Our search for extraterrestrial life might have just got a whole lot easier. Now, if aliens so much as modify a planet in their solar system to make it warmer, we would be able to tell. That's thanks to a new study from The University of California, Riverside, which has identified...

STUDYFINDS - Could aliens be changing their planet’s climate in the same way we are? If so, scientists believe it could make finding intelligent life much easier than we thought. A groundbreaking new study suggests that greenhouse gases could be a telltale sign that aliens are hard at work changing their world’s climate — for...

FORBES - Man-made greenhouse gases have long been a hot button topic here on earth since as pollutants, they are largely responsible for anthropogenic climate change. But what about alien civilizations that intentionally use greenhouse gases to save their planet from the onset of a snowball earth type situation; that is, a completely ice-covered planet...

COSMOS MAGAZINE: In 2023, an exoplanet made international headlines because James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations suggested that the planet has a “biosignature” – signs of gas in its atmosphere produced by “life.” A new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters pricks a hole in this hypothesis. K2-18b is a planet orbiting a star...

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - When inspecting the cosmos for potentially habitable worlds, scientists have long looked for the color green. Green is the fundamental color of life on Earth, after all. But what if life on faraway planets wasn’t green at all? In fact, what if it were purple? Signatures of habitable worlds Astronomers look for...