Over 11 years, citizen scientists collected billions of data signals for the SETI@home project. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. After reviewing almost 30 years of signals, University of California Berkeley researchers have identified 100 mysterious, deep-space radio blips they want to review for signs of extraterrestrial life . And they couldn't have done it without 11 years of volunteer work from millions of PC owners around the world. Even with today's advanced computers, the world's most complex data problems can't be solved by a single machine.

Scientists have found the source of a strange form of communication in the ocean that they say could help them locate extraterrestrial life in space. Researchers from the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) revealed that large'smoke ring-like' bubbles coming from underwater were created by humpback whales, which researchers believe is their way of greeting nearby humans. It's the first time scientists have seen whales sending out these unique rings while interacting with people in the wild, and the SETI team said they show an intentional attempt to get the attention of humans - just like saying hello. Until now, the bubble rings have only been seen while humpbacks were gathering prey and when males were making a trail of bubble rings to attract a mate. Researchers said it's quite possible whales have been trying to communicate with people for years but the phenomenon hasn't been studied until now.

A water world ruled by octopus-like creatures. A planet divided by light and dark where the sun never rises. These are not descriptions of foreign worlds in science fiction novels, these are some of the'exoplanets' most likely to be harboring aliens right now. Dozens of these exoplanets - planets that orbit stars outside our solar system - which have been classified as'potentially habitable' or'Earth-like' have been documented in tantalizing detail in a new book. Humanity is in a'new golden era of exploration,' according to Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger, whose new book explores what science now knows about how distant worlds in our galaxy could support life.

Seti is building a parallel, AI-powered software system for the observatory's core facility, the Very Large Array. Built between 1973 and 1981, the VLA comprises 28 large, 25m diameter, dish antennas spaced out across a desert plain. Imagine the satellite dishes you find on people's homes, just on a giant scale.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking artificial intelligence to the next level -- by sending it into space disguised as a robotic snake. With the sun beating down on JPL's Mars Yard, the robot lifts its "head" off a glossy surface of faux ice to scan the world around it. It maps its surroundings, analyzes potential obstacles and chooses the safest path through a valley of fake boulders to the destination it has been instructed to reach. Once it has a plan in place, the 14-foot-long robot lowers its head, engages its 48 motors and slowly slithers forward. Its cautious movements are propelled by the clockwise or counterclockwise turns of the spiral connectors that link its 10 body segments, sending the cyborg in a specific direction.

An unknown object with flashing lights appeared to hover over Marine base in Twentynine Palms, California, in 2021. A Stanford University pathology professor said, "Aliens have been on Earth for a long time and are still here," and claims there are experts working on reverse engineering unknown crashed crafts. Dr. Garry Nolan made the bold statements during last week's SALT iConnections conference in Manhattan during a session called, "The Pentagon, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Crashed UFOs." The host, Alex Klokus, said that's tough to believe and asked him to assign a probability to that statement that extraterrestrial life visited Earth. "I think it's an advanced form of intelligence that using some kind of intermediaries," Nolan said.

Are we alone in the universe? Scientists may have just moved us closer to answering this question. The team – led by researchers from the University of Toronto – has streamlined the search for extraterrestrial life by using a new algorithm to organize the data from their telescopes into categories, in order to distinguish between real signals and interference. This has allowed them to quickly sort through the information and find patterns, through an artificial intelligence process known as machine learning. They discovered eight extraterrestrial signals that seem to have the hallmarks of technology.

When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, "if they're out there, why haven't we found them yet?" And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithms developed decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern petabyte-scale datasets. Now, research published in Nature Astronomy and led by an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, Peter Ma, along with researchers from the SETI Institute, Breakthrough Listen and scientific research institutions around the world, has applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest. "In total, we had searched through 150 TB of data of 820 nearby stars, on a dataset that had previously been searched through in 2017 by classical techniques but labeled as devoid of interesting signals," said Peter Ma, lead author.

Earlier this year, scientists spotted the building blocks of RNA at the center of the Milky Way. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, a molecule similar to DNA and it is present in all living cells. The team of researchers discovered the building blocks of RNA in a molecular cloud in our galaxy. Such building blocks have also been discovered on asteroids. Most notably, Japanese researchers discovered more than 20 amino acids on the space rock Ryugu, which is more than 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) from Earth. Scientists made the detection by studying samples retrieved from the near-Earth asteroid by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which landed on Ryugu in 2018. According to Kensei Kobayashi, a professor emeritus of astrobiology at Yokohama National University, "Proving amino acids exist in the subsurface of asteroids increases the likelihood that the compounds arrived on Earth from space. This means that amino acids could likely be found on other planets and natural satellites – a clue that "life could have been born in more places in the Universe than previously thought," Building Blocks of Life Were Found on an Asteroid in Space For The Very First Time: ScienceAlert Victoria Meadows, Principal Investigator for NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington has noted that life forms can produce detectable indicators, including the presence of substantial amounts of oxygen, smaller amounts of methane, and a variety of other chemicals. She believes that "upcoming telescopes in space and on the ground will have the capability to observe the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby cool stars, so it's important to understand how best to recognize signs of habitability and life on these planets," Meadows said, "These computer models will help us determine whether an observed planet is more or less likely to support life."

Earlier this year, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines for a particularly outlandish claim: After engaging in conversation with a highly sophisticated algorithm named LaMDA, he decided that the A.I. was in fact a sentient being, and as a result it deserved legal personhood. Since Lemoine made this claim, Google has fired him, and almost everyone has concluded that he is clearly wrong, but this clearly-wrong claim nonetheless launched a barrage of articles, many with the premise "Yes, but what if he wasn't?" Attention to this case isn't surprising: A century of science fiction should be enough to demonstrate that we're fascinated by the prospect of creating true artificial life. By this point, however, we ought to recognize that claims about the advent of new techno-religions tend to be--to use an industry term--almost entirely vaporware, with exactly none of the grassroots interest or staying power of the movements that are typically classified as religions. Anthony Levandowski's much-hyped Church of AI, founded in 2015, officially closed last year (do religions "close?") after several years of inactivity.