Author: Michael

Ask Clara Sousa-Silva about her research and she’ll be absolutely clear: Yes, she is looking for aliens. But she is not hunting them. “The idea that I’m hunting anything, I find very distasteful,” she says. “I have spent my life … trying to let go of the notion that I have to go somewhere to know it, that I have to touch it to know it’s real.” Sousa-Silva is a quantum astrochemist at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and an expert in knowing things from afar. Her research team studies how molecules in space interact with light, essential groundwork for…

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