Any more news?

[bassman]

A Portuguese teacher recently got e-mailed by Seti@Home informing that he had submitted a WU that could point out to an artificial radio signal. It's currently being studied - I'll post a link if I find one...Any more news?

[RampageIII]

I don't see anything about it on the SETI site. :confused:

[bassman]

Here's the link to the newspaper's online edition:
http://www.dn.sapo.pt/noticia/mostra_noticia.asp?CodNoticia=95178&CodEdicao=621&CodAreaNoticia=2
Put it on http://babelfish.altavista.com/ and select Portuguese to English; I've been laughing my pants out on the translation it did :D But it's quite understandable :)

[RampageIII]

Oh, eu v agora. :D

[bassman]

Eheheh, you're getting the hang of it ;)

[genesound]

I did receive this (excerpted from email) from SETI Web about a month ago. but haven't seen or heard anything since...


Scientific News
---------------
With the help of participants like you, SETI@home has analyzed
about 10,000 hours of data from the Arecibo radio observatory,
producing a database of several billion events
(spikes, Gaussians, pulses, and triplets).
From this database, we have extracted the "candidates" that,
in our judgement, have the greatest likelihood
of coming from an extraterrestrial synthetic source.
The factors in this evaluation include:
- Signal power
- Goodness of fit
- Detection several different times
- Proximity to a nearby star, especially one similar to our Sun.
Our next step is to re-observe the top candidates
by pointing a radio telescope at that location in the sky
and checking for a similar signal.
We applied for telescope time at Arecibo and were granted 24 hours,
in three 8-hour chunks on March 18-20, 2003.
If everything goes well, this will be enough time to re-observe
about 150 candidates.

The re-observations will be done using the main receiver at Arecibo,
which has a smaller beam and greater sensitivity than
the antenna we normally use.
We'll record the re-observations on magnetic tape,
both in our usual format of 2 bits per sample,
and in a higher-resolution format with 8 bits per sample.
Then we'll analyze the recorded data in three ways:

- We'll do a fast analysis using computers at Arecibo;
this will guide us in choosing candidates on which to spend more time.

- We'll analyze the 2-bit data using the current SETI@home client;
this will take place during the week or two after the Arecibo visit.

- We'll analyze the 8-bit data using a new client program
based on BOINC (see below), yielding better sensitivity.
This will take place a month or two after the Arecibo visit.

More information on the re-observation project is here:
http://planetary.org/stellarcountdown/


Project News
------------
The re-observation is just one of the things keeping us busy.
We have built a new data recorder capable of handling
the 13-channel multibeam receiver at Parkes in Australia.
This will produce data for our new "Southern SETI@home" project,
which we hope to start later this year if we can raise the necessary funds.
In addition, we are preparing a new distributed computing project,
Astropulse, that will analyze our current SETI@home data,
looking for evidence of evaporating black holes,
fast pulsars, and new types of ET signals.
See http://www.planetary.org/astropulses.html

Our upcoming distributed computing projects will use the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC),
which we are developing with support from the National Science Foundation.
See http://boinc.berkeley.edu.
BOINC will also be used by science research projects in other areas,
such as molecular biology and climate prediction.
BOINC lets you choose how much computer time to devote to each project.
The transition from SETI@home to BOINC will be gradual.
We'll continue to record new data at Arecibo even while BOINC ramps up;
for now you can help us most by continuing to run SETI@home.

Whether or not the re-observations find an ET signal,
SETI@home has been a tremendous success and a lot of fun.
We are very grateful for the participation and enthusiasm
of our users all over the world,
and we look forward to continuing working together
to investigate the mysteries of the universe.


Dr. David P. Anderson
Project Director, SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu