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Today, in the remote northeast corner of California, technology innovator and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will hit the big red button. No, he won't be throwing heavy-duty machinery into an emergency shutdown, nor will he be sending ICBMs screaming from their silos (traditional functions for ruddy buttons). Instead, he'll be christening a new telescope that, in its significance, could eventually outpace the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. The famous technologist will be inaugurating the initial 42 antennas of his namesake, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) – the first major radio telescope designed from the pedestal up to efficiently (which is...

Nasa this week unveils a new emissary in the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which launches next month, marks just the latest instalment in a quest that has exercised the imaginations of writers and scientists since long before the adventures of Jules Verne. In the 17th century Johannes Kepler, the architect of our modern understanding of the solar system, imagined a journey to a moon inhabited by serpent-like creatures called Prevlovans who endured the lunar night "bristling with ice and snow under the raging, icy winds". Regrettably, however, here is no reliable account of a...

NEW YORK: A panel of scientists convened by America's leading scientific advisory group says the hunt for extraterrestrial life should be greatly expanded to include what they call "weird life": organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life as we know it. "The committee's investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth," the scientists conclude in their report. Starfish, sequoias, salamanders and the rest of Earth's residents may seem very diverse, but they are surprisingly similar on the molecular scale. All species that scientists have studied need liquid water to survive, for...

PALMDALE - The world's newest flying telescope will be in focus on Saturday, June 30, at NASA's Aerospace Exploration Gallery in the Palmdale Civic Center. Dr. Dana Backman will give presentations regarding NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronom beginning at 9 a.m., then repeating at 10:30, noon and 1:30 p.m. Dr. Backman is with the SETI Institute and the Universities Space Research Association and manages SOFIA's education and public outreach program. An infrared astronomer, Backman received his doctoral degree in astrophysics from the University of Hawaii. While Backman was a post-doctoral student at NASA's Ames Research Center, he flew on...

OK, don't make a mistake: this isn't really a movie about space. The Astronaut Farmer is the quintessential American Story. That's right; it's the classic, archetypical, consummate, perfected American myth, served up in packaging so homespun, you'll wonder that the actors aren't dressed in quilts. When it comes to this movie's theme, you already know the drill, because during your childhood, Hollywood saut?ed your tender brain with the potboiler genre known as the Western. And what was the icon of the Western? A rugged individual, hard as tool steel on the outside, and soft as warm Jell-O within; a slouch-hatted...

Is there anybody out there? Give the question some thought before you answer, because it’s more perilous than it seems. Deny the possibility of a universe populated with intelligent extraterrestrials that can speak and mate and battle with humanity, and the science-fiction canon collapses; more than a century’s worth of novels, from “The War of the Worlds” to “Old Man’s War,” would find their speculative foundations swept out from underneath them. But admit to a sincere belief in the remotest potential for alien life, and prepare to be fitted for a straitjacket; a recent survey conducted by Baylor University found...

People interested in Mars exploration, like many of the scientists at the Carl Sagan Center (CSC) in Mountain View California, often start by exploring cold, dry, thin aired Mars-like “analogue” sites on earth. Most of these places are isolated and hard to reach. Antarctica, the Arctic, the Peruvian Andes, Kamchatka and other exotic locales offer scientists glimpses into the kinds of environments that may hold clues to understanding Mars and the processes that have shaped it. Of key interest is the extreme or unusual conditions under which life persists. We know that everywhere on earth where we find liquid water,...

Presently, 200-plus known extrasolar planets have been found -- mostly huge gas giants like Jupiter within our own solar system of Sun-orbiting planets. Given these discoveries -- just within the last 10 years or so -- under what conditions can we expect terrestrial planets to crop up? Moreover, just how common are habitable planets in the universe? Planet scouting scientists met here January 26-28 at a media workshop sponsored by the University of Colorado's Center for Astrobiology to share theories as well as new observational information... What's now taking place is that extrasolar planet researchers are shifting into high gear...

“At what point would you abandon the search?” That’s a question I get relatively frequently from folks who think that SETI may be a quixotic quest, as futile as searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. After all, modern efforts to find signals from extraterrestrial transmitters are now in their fifth decade. Could it be that those of us who still hope to tune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with a simple, if disappointing message: “There are no aliens”? The question seems fair, since SETI’s obvious analogs–the historical voyages of...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Remember studying the (heavy chords) Scientific Method in middle school? According to your dour-faced science teacher, this was the secret formula by which legions of clipboard-carrying, lab coat-attired researchers pushed back the frontiers of knowledge. The scheme was simple: Scientists sat around dreaming up hypotheses—possible new truths—which they torture-tested in the lab or in the field. Experiment would arbitrate, either by validating the truth of a hypothesis, or by sending the scientist back to the blackboard to think again. Indeed, some research is done like that; investigations that proceed by testing a falsifiable premise. But there’s another way to learn...

An official announcement is expected tommorow. http://www.spaceref.com/calendar/calendar.html?pid=4200 http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=178899

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message. Those contributions -- part of media company Yahoo's "Time Capsule" project -- will be digitalized and beamed with a laser into space on October 25 from the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, now an archeological site near Mexico City. Archeologists say...

----cut---- The notion that Intelligent Design theory is fundamentally "unscientific" is based on the philosophy originated by Karl Popper (1902-1994), who postulated a set of rules for science known as "Falsificationism." The main idea is that a hypothesis or theory does not qualify as "scientific" unless it is "falsifiable" (which is independent of whether it is actually "true" or "false"). Popper is revered by evolutionists, but certainly even they would agree that we should not blindly accept his word as revealed truth. So let us consider some of the implications of his "falsifiability" criterion. ----cut---- The ultimate irony here is...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1,020 active CPUs - 70,500 completed Work Units and 12.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

A comprehensive review by leading scientists about our Solar System which speculates on the possibility of life on other planets has been published.Solar System Update brings together the work of 19 physicists, astronomers, and climatologists from Europe and the USA in 12 chapters on the sun, the main planets and comets.The book, co-edited by Dr Philippe Blondel, of the University of Bath, highlights the many recent discoveries and in particular the amount of water, one of the essentials for life, found in the Solar System.Recent studies have revealed ice in craters on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, and...

Astronomers are working to choose a site for a giant telescope that could read TV or radio signals from alien civilizations. Artist's concept of collecting dishes for the Square Kilometer Array. The instrument (see www.skatelescope.org)  is so named because it would have radiation-collecting surfaces totalling a square kilometer (about 1/3 square mile.) (Image © Xilostudios) The instrument, called the Square Kilometer Array or SKA, would be the world’s most powerful radio telescope and would begin operation by 2020, if all goes according to plan. Radio telescopes are devices that pick up radio waves, a type of light radiation that has...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1009 active CPUs - 55,700 completed Work Units and 9.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

On now....550 stations in the US, and XM165