Move over, chemists. Thanks to proteins from Icelandic bacteria, scientists at Caltech have managed to coax microbes into making silicon-carbon bonds, a feat that until now has been achieved only by humans in the lab.
The findings, published last week in the journal Science, could open the door to new avenues in organic chemistry and drug development — and could help scientists investigate essential mysteries, such as whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon on other planets.
A team of astronomers believes that strange signals emanating from a cluster of stars are actually aliens trying to tell the universe they exist.
The study, which appeared in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, analyzed the odd beams of light from 234 stars — a fraction of the 2.5 million that were observed.
The bizarre beacons led the paper’s authors, Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier from Laval University in Quebec, to conclude that it’s “probably” aliens.
Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.
Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.
Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.
Since it was first suggested that the flickering star known as KIC 8462852 might be a Dyson Sphere, telescope-toting astronomers associated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have been scouring the system for signs of aliens. Now, the most well-funded SETI program on Earth— UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen —is getting in on the hunt, too.
BELGRADE – NASA’s ground-breaking voyager 2 probe is more than 3 decades into its epic journey towards deep space. On April 22nd, 2010 just as the craft prepares to cross the boundary to enter into interstellar space, it malfunctions, physics-astronomy.com reported.
As NASA’s planetary scientist, Kevin Baines said:
“Just about 10 billion miles away from the Earth and all of the sudden it starts sending data in the language we don’t understand. It can be called as an alien language”
World ring desighned to collect hellium 3?
The more scientists learn about “Tabby’s Star,” the more mysterious the bizarre object gets.
Newly analyzed observations by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope show that the star KIC 8462852 — whose occasional, dramatic dips in brightness still have astronomers scratching their heads — has also dimmed overall during the last few years.
“The steady brightness change in KIC 8462852 is pretty astounding,” study lead author Ben Montet, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life].
A mysterious star that some astronomers believe could harbor an “alien megastructure,” continues to confound researchers.
A study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal has only “deepened the mystery” surrounding the strange light pattern emitted from the star known as KIC 8462852.
Josh Simon of the Carnegie Institute and Ben Montet of Caltech analyzed data gathered by the Kepler space telescope during the four-year period the telescope observed KIC 8462852, Carnegie Science said in a statement.
