College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

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...

POPULAR SCIENCE - We’re used to thunder and lightning here on Earth. But what might they be like on another planet? We know other worlds in the solar system have lightning strikes, for example, high in the clouds of Jupiter or during dust storms on Mars. Now, astronomers are thinking about lightning on planets beyond...