Albert Einstein is considered one of the most brilliant minds in history. Not only was he a great physicist who transformed the way we see the universe, but he had profound wisdom about life itself.

Let’s take a fresh look at some of his illuminating philosophies.

Finding the origin of life on Earth has been a goal for scientists for decades. However, like anything, it’s always based on theories and possible evidence, which can often change and evolve as we learn about our world and the universe we are part of.

Here’s a bit of science history that genuinely surprised many of us here at Ars Technica. We all know the famous story of how Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge—and the longstanding debate about whether she should have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to her supervisor, Antony Hewish. But apparently, an Air Force staff sergeant manning an early warning radar station in Alaska arguably beat Bell-Burnell to the punch. He just couldn’t come forward until 2007, after the instrument had been decommissioned. Nature reported the story at the time, but we most definitely missed it—and we probably weren’t the only ones.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that create pulsed emissions as their magnetic fields sweep across the line of sight with Earth. As previously reported, whenever a massive star runs out of fuel, it explodes into a supernova. If it’s above a certain threshold in mass, it becomes a black hole. Below that threshold, it becomes an ultra-dense neutron star. Pulsars are unusual in that they spin rapidly and have very powerful magnetic fields, so they emit very high-energy beams of light. The star’s rotation makes it seem like those beams are flashing on and off like a cosmic lighthouse.

Bell-Burnell was monitoring the new radio telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, sifting through reams and reams of paper records to hunt for any unusual anomalies in the peaks of data representing incoming galactic radio waves. Three weeks in, on August 6, she spotted a faint signal coming from a particular area of the sky that disappeared, then reappeared, in 1.34-second intervals. The team quickly ruled out any known natural sources or other kinds of interference. She and Hewish even joked that it might be a signal from an alien civilization, dubbing the object “LGM-1” for “Little Green Men.”

With unusually powerful magnetic fields, these stars seem to get a boost when their cores start to drift apart. Thus, they may not be the ideal hosts for habitable exoplanets.

The search for alien life has always been hampered by the huge racket that Earth generates, rendering it difficult to tease out alien signals from all the local noise.

But a new method for recognizing radio signals traveling through interstellar space could narrow the search considerably.

“I think it’s one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time,” says astrophysicist Andrew Siemion, a co-author of a paper describing the technique and director of the Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center.