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Allen Telescope Activated
Humans have wondered for ages whether Earth is the sole home of intelligent life in the universe. In the 1960s, SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, got scientific grounding with its first "formalized" search. The notion has passed in and out of favor through the decades and is largely championed by the SETI Institute and a network of distributed computers (aka SETI@home) processing endless databases of radio signals.
Today, the Allen Telescope, named for its benefactor Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, will be activated. Not only will the telescope exist as a dedicated platform for SETI research, but it ushers in a new era of cheaper telescopes built on commodity hardware taking advantage of advanced DSPs (digital signal processors) that can rival the abilities of older and larger radio telescopes.
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3 Nerd-Its
LHC@Home
By the way, NewScientist magazine has a good article on one of the BOINC projects, LHC@Home, which helps the Large Hadrion Collider project simulate the LHC so they can fine tune it. LHC@Home has actually been around since 2004, but the BOINC project for it is just re-launching.
So, if you want to help out the LHC project and do your part for some real hard core science, here's your chance. Even though I run SETI, I wonder if some people don't run some of these other projects because they think SETI is a frivalous program and don't differentiate between the projects or are unaware of these other projects.
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SETI@Home by PowerPointSamurai :: NR7 :: Show
Incidentally, the distributed computing program that began as SETI@home has expanded into BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which offers a wide variety of other distributed computing projects for volunteers to help out with.
I have been a SETI@Home volunteer since 1999, an Einstein@Home user since 2004, and a Rosetta@Home user since 2005. Einstein uses data from a couple of laser interferometry observatories to look for gravitational waves. Rosetta simulates protein folding to look for all the different ways a protein can fold, including malformation, to help understand proteins better. One use of this is to cure mad cow disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, malaria, AIDS, etc.
There are six total biology and health sciences projects to chose from (including Rosetta), seven physics/chemistry/astronomy projects (including Einstein), a climate change prediction project, and seven math/strategy projects (like looking for prime numbers, etc.
All of the projects work on Windows machines, most work on Linux, and SETI, Rosetta, Predictor, Climateprediction, and malariacontrol work on Macs.
The applications only run on your idle CPU cycles, so they don't slow down your machine when you are using it. Some of these projects, like Rosetta and malariacontrol are for very good causes if you are one of those who scoff at the SETI project. All but SETI contribute to science without a doubt. I've run SETI for about eight years and the only problem I've had with it at all is confrontations with the network Nazi's when I ran it at work.