The Discovery Children's Museum in Las Vegas is playing host to R2-D2, Iron Man and other cyborgs, androids and robots that hail from Hollywood, all in the name of science. The "Alien Worlds and Androids" exhibit, opened earlier this month, explores the connection between fictional beings and real-time technology. In the exhibit, the extraterrestrial Xenomorph, from the 1979 sci-fi film "Alien," is meant to spark a discussion about whether human beings are alone in the universe. Others subjects touch on artificial intelligence and the use of robots like the Mars Rover in space exploration. "Alien Worlds" takes children beyond their own worlds with content taken from Southern California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other branches of NASA.

MIT boffins reckon they can use old-school artificial intelligence to do much of the grunt work in the tricky task of picking suitable landing spots for spacecraft. The software uses fuzzy logic algorithms, which were introduced in the 1960s and were rather trendy in the 1990s. "Traditionally this idea comes from mathematics, where instead of saying an element belongs to a set, yes or no, fuzzy logic says it belongs with a certain probability, thus reflecting incomplete or imprecise information," Victor Pankratius, coauthor of the paper and a research scientist and principal investigator in NASA and National Science Foundation projects at MIT, explained this week. NASA and other space agencies have slowly amassed troves of geographical data on Mars. The researchers reckon that NASA has over 100 Terabits from all the different orbiters, landers, and rovers sent to the Red Planet, but it's still not enough to completely determine the exact conditions on the ground there.

Nasa has begun a major search for alien worlds. The agency's Tess spacecraft has started its science missions, exploring the universe as it looks for new planets. It engineers hope that it will eventually find thousands of alien worlds, some of which could be habitable. The craft – whose name stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – will look deep in the universe for signs of planets. Any that are found will be explored from afar, as scientists try to work out what it might be like on those planets, and whether life could survive there.

Earlier this year, NASA launched a tool that would allow everyday citizens to join the search for alien worlds. Now, the space agency has confirmed there's already been a discovery. Observations with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii have confirmed that an object spotted by four different users just days after the tool became available is, in fact, a'new cold world' just 100 light-years from the sun. The tool allows users to track moving objects in digital'flipbooks,' using observations from NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE) spacecraft. To search for undiscovered worlds, visit the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website.

NASA has launched a new website that will allow anyone to join the search for alien worlds. The site, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, contains footage from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which produced the most comprehensive survey of the entire sky at mid-infrared wavelengths to date. This means members of the public can participate in the potential discovery of planets and other objects at the edge of our solar system and in neighbouring interstellar space. NASA has launched a new website that will allow anyone to join the search for alien worlds. To search for undiscovered worlds, visit the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website.

Astronomers have detected more than 3000 planets beyond our solar system, and just a couple weeks ago they discovered an Earth-like planet in the solar system next door. Most--if not all--of these worlds are unlikely to harbor life, but what if we put it there? In an essay published last month in Astrophysics and Space Science, theoretical physicist Claudius Gros of Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany suggests we do just that. His proposed Genesis Project would send artificially intelligent probes to lifeless worlds to seed them with microbes. Over millions of years, they might evolve into multicellular organisms, and, perhaps eventually, plants and animals.