The search for life beyond Earth has inspired many strategies, from examining microfossils with elemental analyzers, to sequencing putative genetic material, or studying the composition of distant exoplanets. But a recent paper from Jay Nadeau, a Scientific Researcher at the California Institute of Technology, proposes a surprisingly new approach of looking for life by, well, looking for it.

Nadeau and her colleagues suggest that “rapid and meaningful” cell movement is “an unambiguous bio