Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can't identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely? That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists and other scholars from all over the world gathered to discuss some revolutionary ideas for developing the hitherto obscure field of biosemiotics.