Corporate bankrolling of Mars mission and Arecibo Observatory’s search of artificial radio signals

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes - Ecology drives evolution. An article in the Jan 28 issue of the journal Science describes growing evidence that the reverse is also true, and explores what that might mean to our understanding of how environmental change affects species and vice-versa. See article.
g Life - Researchers have discovered the 100 million-year-old ancestor of a group of large, carnivorous, cricket-like insects that still live today in southern Asia, northern Indochina and Africa. The new find, in a limestone fossil bed in northeastern Brazil, corrects the mistaken classification of another fossil of this type and reveals that the genus has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period, a time of dinosaurs just before the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana. See article.
g Intelligence - A fossilized foot bone recovered from Hadar, Ethiopia, shows that by 3.2 million years ago human ancestors walked bipedally with a modern human-like foot, a report that appears Feb. 11 in the journal Science, concludes. See article.
g Message - Here’s a prerecorded Webcast at Aricebo Radio Observatory in March 2003 when scientists listened to the most promising transmissions from UC Berkeley’s SETI@home search. Join the Exploratorium’s Ron Hipschman and special guest Dan Werthimer, chief scientist and principal investigator for the SETI Institute’s efforts, as they also discuss Arecibo Observatory’s search of artificial radio signals coming from other stars; scroll to “What about Intelligent Life?”
g Cosmicus - NASA scientists and others think business corporations could bankroll a human mission to Mars. This raises the prospect that a spaceship named the Microsoft Explorer or the Google Search Engine could go down in history as the first spaceship to bring humans to the red planet. See article.
g Learning - Could the beauty of the universe attract children to science? See article.

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