Friday, November 19, 2010

Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence and doomed binary systems

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars - Researchers who found the first hypervelocity stars escaping the Milky Way announced that their search also turned up a dozen double-star systems. Half of those are merging and might explode as supernovae in the astronomically near future. See article.
g Abodes - Recent data from the Spitzer Space Telescope has helped scientist determine what the “dust tail” of Earth looks like. The finding could help astrobiologists search for Earth-like planets because similar dust tails trailing behind extrasolar planets might actually be easier to spot than the planets themselves. See article.
g Life - Tyrannosaurus rex was far from a plodding Cretaceous era scavenger whose long tail only served to counterbalance the up-front weight of its freakishly big head. See article.
g Intelligence - The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That's the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections. See article.
g Message - We’ve all heard of SETI, but what about METI — “Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” or sending both scientific and artistic messages to the stars? See article. This article is from 2005.
g Cosmicus - NASA’s IceBite team is in Antarctica this month testing a new drill for a possible future mission to Mars. Team member Margarita Marinova will be writing a blog of their activities. If you have a question about the IceBite project, click the 'Ask a Scientist' button and send it to the scientists in the field. See article.

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