EUROPEAN researchers said they have devised the first tiny motion detector that could eventually help find microscopic life forms on distant planets.

    Until now, scientists have tried to find signs of extraterrestrial life by listening for sounds that might be emitted from an alien world, by scanning the skies with potent telescopes and by sending robotic probes and rovers to analyze the chemical fingerprint of samples from comets and planets.

    But researchers in Switzerland and Belgium were interested in a new method. Taking advantage of movement, which they call “a universal signature of life” they would aim to sense on a nanolevel the tiny motions that all life forms make.

    The researchers had started to explore the possibility of searching for life with a sensor attuned to those nanoscale vibrations in microscopic organisms such as bacteria and yeast.

    “The nanomotion detector allows studying life from a new perspective: life is movement,” said Giovanni Longo, lead author of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed U.S. journal.

    “This means that the nanomotion detector can detect any small movement of living systems and deliver a complementary point of view in the search for life,” he said. Longo, a scientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, and colleagues at Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie in Belgium devised an instrument that is smaller than a millimeter — just a few hundred microns in length — that can sense the smallest nanoscale movements.

    They tested it on a variety of living things, including E coli, yeast, as well as human, plant and mice cells in the lab.

    In all cases, when living organisms were placed near the sensor, they “produced an increase in the amplitude of the measured fluctuations,” said the study. Longo and colleagues also scooped up soil and water from the grounds near their Swiss lab and found that the sensor could detect tiny life there, too.

    (SD-Agencies)