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For all you science and space buffs, engineers are making a whole new generation of gizmos designed to find extraterrestrial life. I look forward to success in my lifetime.

Hardly a week goes by without some keyboard correspondent reluctantly telling me that SETI has a honking big problem. "Even if the Galaxy is brimming with intelligent life," they’ll gravely intone, "SETI has virtually no chance of success." Their reasoning is this: the probability that SETI’s receiving antennas are pointed at the aliens’ world just when their transmitting antennas are aimed at ours is vanishingly small. Since we lack a TV Guide for extraterrestrial broadcasts, we’ll never twist our telescopes to the right direction, at the right time, to pick up a signal. Note that this is not the well-known...

Welcome to the folding at home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's members, or it's founders, it is comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing, who 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 Alzheimers, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 777th place,...

New thread for this week. Congrats to all new members who joined this week! We've made excellent progress so far and have smoked the DUmmies and Kossacks. Let's keep folding!

A continuation of the Freeper Folder Thread

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 104 processors and 76 users. We have a number of new users in the team, with Clara Lou, fzx12345, SamfromLivingston, brityank, manwiththehands and Tami all popping onto the hit list this week. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. Malsua is continuing to add systems and now accounts for 10% of the FR total. Great...

OK, new thread for the next week. First, a big shout out to the SETI members who have added CPUs to the effort. Remember, its Team 36120, NOT Team 0. Next, congrats to all for bumping our team up to 65 processors. ArgentCent is the latest to have joined our happy band of folders and jumps in at # 36 with his first completed WU. We now have 51 members in the team, and about 45 active participants. Malsua, uriah and Ken in Texas are solidly in the top 10. One of these will probably be the new Numero Uno...

SETI@Home Project Ends For years, volunteers shared idle CPU cycles to analyze interstellar data. Phil Hochmuth, Network World Friday, December 16, 2005 Along with the Howard Stern Show, another radio endeavor involving alien life forms is going off the air this week; SETI@Home, a grid supercomputer project for detecting signs of extra terrestrial life from deep space, officially ended December 15. "We'll be shutting down the "SETI@home Classic" project on December 15," read an e-mail sent by SETI@Home administrators at the University of California at Berkeley, where the project started in 1999. "The workunit totals of users and teams will...

SETI and Intelligent Design By Seth ShostakSETI Instituteposted: 01 December 200506:37 am ET If you’re an inveterate tube-o-phile, you may remember the episode of "Cheers" in which Cliff, the postman who’s stayed by neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night from his appointed rounds of beer, exclaims to Norm that he’s found a potato that looks like Richard Nixon’s head.This could be an astonishing attempt by taters to express their political views, but Norm is unimpressed. Finding evidence of complexity (the Nixon physiognomy) in a natural setting (the spud), and inferring some deliberate, magical mechanism behind it all,...

Dr. Backus, what is SETI exactly, and who or what funds it? The Institute is a non-profit research organization founded in 1984 "to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe." The word "SETI" is an acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI is a field of research that seeks evidence of life on planets orbiting other stars by searching for electromagnetic signals (radio, optical, or infrared) that may be produced by advanced, technological civilizations. Although SETI is in our name, the institute currently conducts more than forty other research projects in the...

Science education is a profession, and as such, professional development is imperative to the practice, just as in the medical, dental and other professions. Professional development occurs in many settings and structures. The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and state affiliates sponsor multi-disciplinary education conferences both nationally and regionally. Discipline specific education conferences are sponsored by organizations such as the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), the National Earth Science Teachers Association (NESTA) and American Chemical Society (ACS). Conferences last from one to five days, and offer college credit, continuing education units or...

Ever wondered how life began and whether there is life on other planets? You're not alone, but the curiosity rarely turns into a career. The UW astrobiology program gives hope to would-be professional stargazers. Astrobiology -- the study of life in the universe -- looks for scientific answers to questions like "How did life begin on this planet?" and "Are we alone in the universe?" The field builds on knowledge across several disciplines. UW biology professor Peter Ward and UW astronomy professor Donald Brownlee believe discovering intelligent aliens on other planets is unlikely. In Rare Earth, a book the two...

Monday night was Halloween, so I spent a couple of hours dosing the neighborhood kids with carbohydrate treats. Most of the diminutive petitioners at my door were intent on being scary, and therefore dressed themselves as ghouls, goblins, or politicians. I enjoyed these juvenile impersonators, but it never occurred to me to believe that these kids were mimicking real entities (excepting, of course, the politicians). However, my skeptical mood seems to be out of synch with that of my neighbors. A just-released Gallup poll notes that 37% of Americans believe that "houses can be haunted." Our counterparts in Canada and...

The tent looked so big when it was first installed. The vaulted top stands 35 feet above the ground. It is 40 feet wide. The door is almost 30 feet high. It’s gleaming white. In short, it’s a perfect place within which to build the antennas for the Allen Telescope Array. Well, when you build an entire 20 x 24 foot antenna on a pedestal inside of it, all of a sudden the tent doesn’t look so big. In fact, the door looks a skosh too small. But the assembly does fit in the tent; even the somewhat tricky "flip"...

If civilizations exist in our galaxy with levels of technology at least equal to our own, we might be able to detect some of them using radio telescopes. And if civilizations exist with technologies far in advance of our own, we might expect them to have colonized millions of habitable worlds in the Milky Way, and even to have visited our own planet. Yet there is no evidence in the astronomical, geological, archaeological, or historical records that extraterrestrial civilizations exist or that visitors from other worlds have ever been to Earth. Does that mean, as some have concluded, that ours...

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has a fundamentally fascinating hypothesis. Not only do SETI researchers assume extraterrestrial life exists, which most mainstream scientists now take as a given, but they further theorize extraterrestrial civilizations exist that can be detected from Earth. Since about 1960, a handful of SETI researchers have tested that hypothesis by scanning the heavens using radio telescopes and increasingly powerful, sophisticated search programs. Optical SETI, looking for ET laser pulses, is now beginning. The political situation of the times, however, has pushed those interested in SETI into a narrow philosophical position. Most humans want their life’s...

An atmosphere rich in oxygen is the most likely source of energy for complex life to exist anywhere in the Universe Recent research argues that an atmosphere rich in oxygen is the most likely source of energy for complex life to exist anywhere in the Universe, thereby limiting the number of places life may exist. Professor David Catling at Bristol University, along with colleagues at the University of Washington and NASA, contend that significant oxygen in the air and oceans is essential for the evolution of multicellular organisms, and that on Earth the time required for oxygen levels to reach...

What if E.T. called to say hello? How would the third planet from the Sun respond? We can't speak for the planet as a whole, but we can say that the Santa Cruz Astronomy Club is ready for such challenges. And never mind quantum physics and fancy telescopes. This club has eyes for the earthling community below, as well for the infinite skies above. Take Santa Cruz Astronomy Club events coordinator Doreen Devorah, who wears a satisfied gaze as she notes that the Harvey West Clubhouse, which is where the club meets, is full of mostly graying SCAC members. "Two...

While most depictions of extraterrestrials are confined to science fiction, nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that some form of alien life exists somewhere in the universe, according to a new survey. The telephone poll, which questioned 1,000 Americans, found that 60 percent of those surveyed believe extraterrestrial life exists on other planets. Of those who believed, most agreed that they would be “excited and hopeful” upon learning of the discovery of extraterrestrial life while 90 percent of them said Earth should reply to any message from another planet, the poll reported. At least two-thirds of those polled who said they...