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Aliens almost certainly do exist. So why haven't we yet met E.T.? It turns out we're only just developing instruments powerful enough to scan for them, and science sophisticated enough to know where to look. As a result, race is on to find the first intelligent aliens. But what would they look like, and how would they interact with us if we met? The answers may come to us sooner than we imagine, for one leading astronomer believes she may already have heard a hint of their first efforts to communicate

What is the universe made of? If you answered stars, planets, gas and dust, you'd be dead wrong. Thirty years ago, scientists first realized that some unknown dark substance was affecting the way galaxies moved. Today, they think there must be five times our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality itself has drastically changed over the last 100 years - and it's on the verge of another seismic shift. In a 17-mile-long tunnel buried 570 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is powering up. Its goal is nothing less than recreating the first instants of creation, when the universe was unimaginably hot and long-extinct forms of matter sizzled and cooled into stars, planets, and ultimately, us. These incredibly small and exotic particles hold the keys to the greatest mysteries of the universe. What we find could validate our long-held theories about how the world works and what we are made of -- or, all of our notions about the essence of what is real will fall apart.

Time is woven into the fabric of the universe as one of the dimensions in which we live our daily lives. But maybe it is only a brain state that we use to piece together events. Could it exist only in our minds? Your sense of time can be totally different than the person next to you. This and other theories illustrate that time is an illusion and does not really exist. The world's top physicists tackle this fundamental question, does time exist, and offer new ways to perceive the physical world.

In the last few years, the Red Planet has yielded up many new clues that life may have once existed there...and may even exist there today. There is now have proof that water once flowed on the surface, that Mars once had lakes, and that the frozen poles are mostly water, not carbon dioxide as previously thought. Mars has snow--an aurora--and lightning generated by dust storms. Most intriguing of all are the seasonal plumes of methane that just may point to bacteria living below the surface.

Take a tour through the Art Gallery of the Galaxy and view what are considered the "crown jewels" of the heavens. Nebulas are mysterious clouds of gas that aren't classified as stars, planets, moons or asteroids. Astronomers use the most sophisticated techniques to view them since they are practically invisible to the naked eye. Nothing less than stunning, nebulas glow, reflect or obscure the galaxy's light with amazing swirls of color. Nebulas mark the regions where the nothingness of space first coalesces, where stars are born and where stars die. Cutting-edge computer graphics are used to bring the universe down to earth.

In space travel there is a saying that the first 50 miles and the last 50 miles are the most dangerous. Explore the controlled explosion of launch, the fiery crucible of re-entry and everything in between. See how a single spark inside a spacecraft or a micrometeoroid less than an inch wide hitting a space station can turn a routine mission into a lethal nightmare. As the missions become longer, venturing to Mars and beyond, the potential disasters will only become bigger. What would happen if a spacecraft ventured too close to a black hole or was hit by a gamma ray burst?