Stars

How to listen for alien life

For more than 60 years, scientists have been on the stealthiest stakeout in history. Using state-of-the-art listening devices, they’ve tapped into thousands of homes, waiting patiently for their targets to reveal their presence, and ultimately been rewarded with silence. If this covert activity were occurring in our own country, one might have become impatient and simply walked up and knocked down the door. But the targets are not living in our country, or even on our planet or in our solar system. Our persons of interest are aliens. This is Seti: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, focused on life on planets orbiting other suns. So far, we’ve found no sign

My battle of the bulb

The streetlighting engineer walked up and down outside my house trying to work out who was right: me, or my neighbour, the vegan. On the one hand, I was claiming this LED light was lighting nothing of importance on a deserted village green at night while shining through my bedroom window driving me insane, and therefore should be fitted with a shield. On the other hand, my neighbour the vegan was claiming that if the bright white bulb was slightly dimmed on one side, women would be attacked, old people would trip over bins and it would be ‘scary’ to encounter fairground people and travellers in the dark when they