There are more than a hundred of these geometric symbols. At first I tap at them like a monkey at a typewriter. Eventually I learn how to piece a few together to ask a question. Made by Grant Kuning, a developer based in Washington, DC, Sethian is a game in which you learn a language to solve a mystery. It gives you the keyboard of an alien computer and leaves you to work out what happened to the inhabitants of a planet that seems to have been abandoned for centuries.

Large-scale Hollywood films employ a wide range of consultants, from ER doctors to military experts to veteran constitutional lawyers. Rare is the big-budget adventure, however, that retains a linguist specializing in syntax, morphology, ergativity and nominalization. As moviegoers have turned out to see "Arrival" -- Denis Villeneuve's cerebral alien-invader adventure has grossed $50 million in two weeks of release -- many have been struck by the language symbols at its center. Those ornate, hollowed-out inkblots -- like Rorschach tests by way of "E.T." -- have distinguished the film from many science-fiction movies that came before. Very few nonhuman languages have ever been shown on screen in their written form -- let alone been made the center of sophisticated in-movie linguistic study.

In the sci-fi film Arrival, alien spaceships suddenly appear above twelve locations on Earth. The aliens--seven-limbed creatures called heptapods--are willing to let a few humans come aboard for quick chats, but there's no universal translator gizmo to help the two species parley. Instead, each country calls upon its top linguists, including Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams. Banks is whisked away to the nearest spaceship in Montana, tasked with untangling the heptapods' languages and figuring out why they have come to Earth. To find out how linguists might react when faced with an extraterrestrial language, the filmmakers consulted Jessica Coon, a professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal.

One of the coolest bits from from Arrival isn't the sci-fi movie's Lovecraftian aliens or its stunning cinematography (although, to be fair, those are both great), it's the Heptapods' language. Figuring out a way to communicate with beings without provoking a war is central to the first-contact story's plot. While their spoken language is basically a series of low-frequency grunts and groans, the inky "written" version of it resembles an ouroboros that's written and read from left to right and right to left, simultaneously. Throughout a series of tweets recently, writer/producer Eric Heisserer explained not only how the circular speech symbols came to be, but also the "bespoke logogram analytic code" that translated the language when the cameras were rolling. "In several shots in the film, the analytics you see are working in real-time to dissect a logogram," Heisserer writes.

Aliens may look like giant jellyfish with orange bottoms, a leading space scientist has claimed. Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a satellite expert and government adviser, said it is likely that there is extra-terrestrial life - it is just more alien than you'd imagine. Rather than being the little green men so beloved of Hollywood directors, they may look like football-field sized jellyfish, complete with onion-shaped appendages and an orange underbelly or bottom. Generated from silicon, rather than the carbon that is the basis of life as we know it, the creatures are able to live off light absorbed through their'skin' and chemicals sucked in through their giant mouths. In physical terms, for example, wings and eyes have independently emerged among animals through evolution at several different times over, and birds in ecologically isolated New Zealand have evolved behaviours typically seen in mammals elsewhere.