From surveys of the pre-Sputnik skies to analysis of interstellar visitors, scientists are rethinking how and where to look for physical traces of alien technology. Science fiction is awash in the material remnants of extraterrestrial civilizations, which surface in everything from the classic books of Arthur C. Clarke to game franchises like and . The discovery of the first interstellar objects in the solar system within the past decade has sparked speculation that they could be alien artifacts or spaceships, though the scientific consensus remains that all three of these visitors have natural explanations. That said, scientists have been anticipating the possibility of encountering alien artifacts since the dawn of the space age. "In the history of technosignatures, the possibility that there could be artifacts in the solar system has been around for a long time," says Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester.

Time flows ever onwards with reassuring uniformity - at least, that's how it feels to mere mortals unplugged from the weirder parts of physics. But everyone knows that the exception to this rule is the period between Christmas and New Year, in which time behaves strangely, moving like molasses until it lurches forwards as you near your return to work. If you usually misspend the twilight days of the year sitting idly in a fog of libations, you might be wondering how to occupy yourself. Fear not: staff and contributors have crafted a bucket list of all-time cultural greats to fill the long hours of the holiday season. It is an eclectic mix of books, films, television, music, video games, board games and more, designed to highlight some overlooked classics that you simply must try. The only thing they all have in common is their celebration of science, technology, the environment or any other topic you might find in . We hope you enjoy our favourites - if you choose to give one a go, your time will pass in the blink of an eye. Released in 2019, it broke from a stale formula of largely linear plotlines and choreographed cutscenes in the middle of gameplay, instead opting for narrative experimentation. You begin as a spacefaring alien in a solar system moments from destruction, stuck in a 22-minute time loop that ends with a supernova. It is also a physics lover's paradise: the game wrestles with quantum entanglement, entropy and non-Euclidean spaces. Its simulation of light bending around black holes is among the most accurate ever rendered in media.

Audio descriptions (ADs) narrate important visual details in movies, enabling Blind and Low Vision (BLV) users to understand narratives and appreciate visual details. Existing works in automatic AD generation mostly focus on few-second trimmed clips, and evaluate them by comparing against a single ground-truth reference AD. However, writing ADs is inherently subjective. Through alignment and analysis of two independent AD tracks for the same movies, we quantify the subjectivity in when and whether to describe, and what and how to highlight. Thus, we show that working with trimmed clips is inadequate. We propose ADQA, a QA benchmark that evaluates ADs at the level of few-minute long, coherent video segments, testing whether they would help BLV users understand the story and appreciate visual details. ADQA features visual appreciation (VA) questions about visual facts and narrative understanding (NU) questions based on the plot. Through ADQA, we show that current AD generation methods lag far behind human-authored ADs. We conclude with several recommendations for future work and introduce a public leaderboard for benchmarking.

After fifty years of books, games and movies, what more could the Aliens franchise deliver? The description "genre-defying" gets thrown around a lot these days - it is a convenient sticking plaster for any film or series that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to be. That said, it is an apt term for the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien, in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is part of a crew trapped on a spaceship with a salivating, scorpion-like "xenomorph", had such blood-curdling visuals that it made an indelible impact on both science fiction and horror films. But while the deadly parasite and its psychosexual torment were ever present, subsequent instalments tried their hand at being everything from a blockbuster to a prison flick to a philosophical drama.

A new drug usually starts with a tragedy. Born in what is now Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a radiology technician, Ray fled with his family to South Africa during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. As the sun blazed down, a soldier taught 8-year-old Ray how to fire a machine gun. But his mother kept having to stop.

The last time someone groped Robert Pattinson aboard a spaceship, to the best of my knowledge, was in Claire Denis's 2018 movie, "High Life." The groper was a lowlife--a deranged doctor, bent on harvesting astronaut semen for pernicious procreative ends. Pattinson's character, a self-declared celibate, was unconscious and unconsenting. The assault took place on the grottiest of vessels, manned by violent criminals who had been banished into deep space. The movie was a hell of a dark trip, but Pattinson, among the most consistently adventurous actors of his generation, kept you tethered to the story with an almost gravitational force.

PS4/5, Xbox, PC, Nintendo Switch Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games broke through in 2019 with the first-person horror game, Devotion. Its follow-up, Nine Sols, is less grungy but no less distinct, a robust 2D action-platformer with an exquisite "taopunk" aesthetic. This vivid sci-fi world feels as if it is constructed as much from bamboo and jade as steel and microchips. Alongside absorbing exploration and blistering combat, you study and grow various strains of alien flora found aboard a labyrinthine spaceship. The ultimate goal is escape, but you may never actually want to leave the strange, bioluminescent garden you come to cultivate.

Though additive manufacturing wouldn't exist for another 40 years, the prolific American sci-fi author Murray Leinster penned a 1945 short story featuring a spookily prescient description of what we now know as 3D printing. As Leinster's hero, Dirk Braddick, races to face an alien invader, he instructs a robotic arm to form, layer by iterative layer, a workshop spaceship. "The plastic constructor worked tirelessly," describes Braddick. "It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells. But plastic comes out of the end of the drawing arm and hardens as it comes. This thing will start at one end of a ship and build it complete to the other end."