Posts Tagged ‘seti@home’
SETI Turns Radio Telescopes Toward Kepler Candidate Planets, Listening for Signs of Life
Listening to places where conditions are right for life
The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.
SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.
“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an .
In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.
SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.
While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.
The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by .
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SETI Turns Radio Telescopes Toward Kepler Candidate Planets, Listening for Signs of Life
Listening to places where conditions are right for life
The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.
SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.
“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an .
In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.
SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.
While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.
The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by .
[]
SETI Turns Radio Telescopes Toward Kepler Candidate Planets, Listening for Signs of Life
Listening to places where conditions are right for life
The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.
SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.
“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an .
In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.
SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.
While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.
The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by .
[]
Distributed Humans Smarter Than Distributed Computers In Solving Complex Biology Problem
The researchers, based at the University of Washington in Seattle, are incorporating the best Foldit players' strategies into their own algorithms. Forget distributed computing -- this is distributed thinking.
In what might be a video-game first, gamers will see their work translated into actual protein structures designed in the lab, according to the . Last year, a Texas player who goes by the name "BootsMcGraw" was the first Foldit player to have his new protein design synthesized in the lab. Though it didn't work, the researchers plan to try again and are optimistic about the possibilities, according to a press release from UW.
The program stems from Rosetta@home, which works like in that it uses a network of idle home computers to crunch data. Biologists were using Rosetta to figure out how proteins develop their final three-dimensional shapes. They know which amino acid chains make up proteins, but the way they're structured is not well understood, and that knowledge has huge potential, because proteins act as gatekeepers in the body.
Rosetta@home included a screensaver that showed users what the computer was doing. Sometimes the computer would get stuck on a tricky folding problem, but gamers thought it looked easy. "People started writing in saying, 'I can see where it would fit better this way'," says David Baker, a biochemist at UW in Seattle who developed Foldit, in Nature News.
Baker's team figured they would let them try it out, and the result was Foldit, wherein players can compete, collaborate, develop strategies, gather points and move to different levels.
It turns out that humans' highly evolved spatial manipulation talents were a boon for this type of problem-solving. Even a small protein can have hundreds of amino acids, meaning thousands of connections are possible -- and that means plenty of work for a computer. But humans can often see the solution intuitively, Nature News reports.
Even has turned to video games to make science more appealing, but as points out, this might be the first time gamers have helped solve an actual scientific question.
The paper's author list acknowledges more than 57,000 Foldit players, which may be unprecedented on a scientific publication, UW News says. Hey, it's got to be more satisfying than racking up ADAM.
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