If there is extraterrestrial life out there, it’s certainly done a great job of staying hidden so far (at least as far as the official scientific consensus goes).

International researchers led by a team from the University of Osaka in Japan have now developed a new electrical technique for spotting signs of life outside of Earth’s atmosphere – and it promises to be simpler than current approaches to alien detection.

The method focuses on amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and details have been published in Nature Communications.