Could there be another planet in the universe with a society at the same stage of technological advancement as ours? To find out, EPFL scientist Claudio Grimaldi, working in association with the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a statistical model that gives researchers a new tool in the search for the kind of signals that an extraterrestrial society might emit. His method, described in an article appearing today in PNAS, could also make the search cheaper and more efficient.