Most of my readers know me as someone who writes about deafness, cochlear implants, neuroscience, and neurotechnology. So you might wonder, why have I written a science-fiction novel about contact with alien intelligence? (It’s not published yet; I’m seeking an agent.) In fact, my interest in alien contact has been lifelong. I’ve always read science…

The Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic has terrific examples of bizarre alien technology. There’s a mysterious, bizarre Zone imposed on an quotidian railway yard. An old car tire’s shadow points in a different direction from the rest. There’s weird “empties” (which I figure are 4-D objects stuck in our 3-D space.) Alien tech like that…

I got into science writing in an unusual way. I was trained as an academic, completing my Ph.D. in educational technology in 2000. In 2001 I abruptly lost my hearing and got a cochlear implant. When my audiologist first showed me an implant without its ceramic casing I thought, “Oh my God, it really is…

Here’s a fascinating article:  Thinking like an octopus by Alvin Powell of the Harvard Gazette. Powell writes about the ideas of Peter Godfrey-Smith, a Harvard philosopher who has spent time observing octopi in the wild and in captivity. Godfrey-Smith has noted that when an octopus is in an unfamiliar tank with food in the middle,…

The exoplanet HD 40307g is way bigger than Earth. The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog estimates its mass as 7.1 times that of Earth. Doesn’t that mean it would have a crushing gravity? Wouldn’t a petite 100-pound woman find herself lugging around a weight of 710 pounds? Gravity might make it impossible to get off the planet.…

When I was a kid I read the Tom Swift book The Visitor from Planet X (fulltext on Gutenberg) and even then I thought it was ridiculous. Tom Swift makes freakin’ extraterrestrial contact but then spends most of his time combating the evil Brungarians who are trying to abduct the Visitor. Here’s how it goes: Tom gets a message…

One day a message is received from the sky. It consists of a long string of bits — 400,000 of them, in fact. After some puzzlement, scientists figure out that it consists of 22 pages (the clue is the box around each.) The first page looks like this. Page 1 of Cosmic Call 1999 Can…

If we met an intelligent alien species, in person, to what extent could we communicate? This is obviously a complicated question, but I want to take a stab at it by contrasting the perspectives of two different books on linguistics: Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher. I…

If you want a field where august authorities come to completely different conclusions, try astrobiology. Some people are certain that there is life off the earth (and some even think that we have already found it), while others insist that life is rare and intelligent life even more so. Some years ago, while researching the…