Virginia Hughes

(First of all, props to me for including in the first post title of 2008 what the grammar nazis call an “ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment”—and what I call, simply, hilarious!)

The SETI Institute, whose mission since 1984 has been the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, works under the assumption that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, should they exist, emit lots of electromagnetic radiation into space. SETI scientists receive and analyze radio signals from many major telescopes, including the world’s largest in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. (Here’s more information—too complicated for me—about the needle(s) they’re searching for in these EM haystacks.) So far, they haven’t found any sure-fire signals from ET.

But they’re not discouraged. Now, more sensitive receivers on the 1,000-foot Arecibo telescope, as well as 40 times more frequency coverage, mean that SETI is collecting 500 times more data than it’s accustomed to. (That’s 100,000 gigabytes per year, or about the same amount of data that’s stored in the Library of Congress, according to project scientist Eric Korpela.) To help sort through all of this extra data, they’re calling for collective computing help from processors across the globe—even yours.

The SETI@home project lets anybody with an internet connection download and analyze radio signals from home (that is, while you’re wearing your pajamas, not, you know, inside of your pajamas). SETI@home started eight years ago and already enlisted 170,000 people on 320,000 computers. (They’ve also had 5 million “interested volunteers” sign up, whatever that means.)

Wanna put your machine to work? Click here to download the program. Or find out more about similar “distributed computing” science projects, like Stanford’s folding@home project that models protein folding, or the University of Illinois’s cosmology@home, which models possible universes.

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The Earth’s oldest ice has been thawed, and its drippings contained fragments of very, very old DNA. Scientists recently brought this DNA back to life.

As he describes in a recent PNAS paper, microbiologist Kay Bidle and colleagues at Rutgers discovered DNA pieces in thawed chunks of Antarctic ice that ranged in age from 100,000 to eight million years old.

When they tried to make the bacteria “viable” again—that is, when they tried to get it to grow and reproduce in lab cultures—the researchers found that the older samples were much more fragmented than the newer ones. From these samples, they calculated a “DNA half-life:” The length of DNA fragments in the ice breaks in half about every 1.1 million years.

They attributed the DNA breakdown to its long-term exposure to cosmic radiation, which digs another nail into astrobiology’s Panspermia Hypothesis. The idea, which dates back to the writings of the 5th Century Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, is that the “seeds of life” are found throughout the universe. In 1973, the co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick proposed a “directed panspermia” theory: An advanced alien civilization, perhaps facing its imminent demise, intentionally spread small grains of DNA in random directions through the universe, some of which landed on Earth.

Panspermia, though an immensely popular idea in science fiction, has been widely criticized in the astrobiology field, mostly because the specific combination of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen necessary for life isn’t found widely in the universe.

Moreover, stellar winds and cosmic rays make space is a harsh environment for poor little traveling microbes. Biddle’s latest research seems to support this latter point. As he recently told Nature News: “If you take the speed of a comet and take the distance it would need to travel it would take longer than eight million years to do that. In a comet the DNA would be completely deteriorated.”

(For more astrobiology goodness, check out my Master’s thesis about the hunt for life on Mars.)