Alien Life Hunt: A Hidden Molecular Pattern May Reveal It

For more than half a century, the search for alien life has rested on a simple-sounding idea: find a molecule that life makes, and you've found life.

The paper, titled "Molecular Diversity as a Biosignature," was led by Gideon Yoffe, a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, working with Fabian Kl

The trouble with hunting for one telltale molecule is that nature is a relentless mimic.

This is the false-positive problem that has haunted astrobiology for decades.

What Yoffe and his team did was step back and ask a different question.