Unique window on the young Earth and distinguishing ET’s signals hearing stellar noise

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. You may notice that this and future entries are shorter than usual; career, family and book deal commitments have forced me to cut back some of my projects. Now, here's today's news:
g Abodes - Scientists have discovered rocks that are 4.28 billion years old, making them 250 million years more ancient than any previously discovered rocks. Our planet formed about 4.6 billion years ago, so these rocks could provide a unique window on the young Earth. See article.
g Message -Our most efficient attempts to broadcast our planet's existence to another civilization would resemble the thermal radiation emitted by stars. By analogy, more advanced worlds would likely do the same, making our chances of listening in hard to distinguish from hearing stellar noise. See article. Note: This article is from 2004.
g Learning -Think most junior high girls would rather spend their Saturday afternoon gossiping about boys or hanging out at the mall than attending a science festival? See article.
g Imagining -Could the legendary dragons of Pern from Anne McCaffrey’s famous science fiction novels actually exist? Welcome to the theoretical science of dracogenetics. See article.
g Aftermath - How would we go about deciphering a message sent by extraterrestrials? Two anthropologists suggest that we might gain clues to decoding more complex extraterrestrial messages by examining past attempts to decode languages right here on Earth. See article. Note: This article is from 2001.