A while back I wrote about a wonderful piece of art-meets-science-meets-the-public called Tweets In Space, the brainchild of Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall. You can read all about this project here. The terrific news is that all systems are go for today, Friday 21st September, as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in [...]

When the interplanetary missions Pioneer 10 and 11 launched in the late 1970s they each carried a metal plaque engraved with a set of pictorial messages from humanity. Eventually these extraordinary probes will traverse interstellar space, carrying these hopeful symbols towards anyone, or anything, that might one day find them. A few years later also [...]

[Every so often Life, Unbounded allows itself a little more speculative leeway, a little bit of armchair musing, this post is very much in that vein, and yes, it was written on a Mac] Like many scientists of my generation the first time I experienced Steve Jobs was through the almost magical interaction with a [...]

The count of exoplanets, those outside the Solar System, now has reached the multi-hundreds, with mucho mas inevitably to be counted. Working through financial troubles, SETI is again searching for intelligent life in the great Out There. So paraphrasing the relevant question posed by Enrico Fermi: If they’re out there, why aren’t they here? The [...]

The search for alien civilizations is returning to its roots. In the latest chapter of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, researchers are using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to check out some of the distant worlds being discovered in droves by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Green Bank is where SETI began in [...]

The hunt for extraterrestrial life just lost one of its best tools. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a field of radio dishes in rural northern California built to seek out transmissions from distant alien civilizations, has been shuttered, at least temporarily, as its operators scramble to find a way to continue to fund it. In [...]

This is an updated and edited version of a past post on my blog. The part about chirality has been added and the rest of the post has been edited. What do aliens want? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has traditionally hinged on detecting electromagnetic waves, most commonly radio waves but also infrared and [...]