Aliens

Thursday

Gus Carter

Keir Starmer’s plan to soften Brexit

42 min listen

This week: Keir Starmer’s plan to soften Brexit Katy Balls writes this week’s cover piece on Labour’s plans to establish close ties with the EU. Every member of Starmer’s cabinet voted Remain, and the government is trying to ‘reset EU relations through a charm offensive’. Brussels figures are hopeful: ‘There was no real goodwill for the Conservative government.’ There are tests coming: the first deal, Katy writes, could be harmonisation on veterinary standards. But will the UK have to abide by the European Court of Justice? Then there’s the issue of Chinese electric cars: will Starmer accept cheap imports, or follow the EU in raising tariffs on them? For now,

David Whitehouse

Aliens exist? Prove it

At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio there is, it is rumoured, a secret underground room where a crashed alien spacecraft is kept. It’s warm to the touch, buzzing with a strange energy, an indication of technology light years ahead of ours. Meanwhile, over at Groom Lake Air Force Base in Nevada, otherwise known as Area 51, there are apparently more alien spaceships, some intact, as well as the preserved bodies of alien pilots. Is it true? Well, a recent survey indicated that half of the US population believed their government was covering up evidence of aliens. As someone involved in the scientific search for life in space, however, I

Thursday

Adam Frank

Under pressure: what might life look like on another planet?

Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting Sun-like stars throughout the universe. This discovery ended 2,500 years of debate about whether worlds existed beyond our solar system, but it came with a shock. The most common kind of planet in the universe is the type of world that doesn’t exist in our small corner of the cosmos: what astronomers call ‘Super-Earths’ and ‘Sub-Neptunes’, planets with much greater masses than ours and which could, in theory, sustain life. Astronomers concluded a little over a decade ago that every star in the night sky hosts a family of worlds. Importantly for the search for life, one in five of