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.

From a particle smasher encircling the moon to an "impossible" laser, five scientists reveal the experiments they would run in a world powered purely by imagination In physics, breakthroughs are rare. Experiments are slow, expensive and often end up refining, rather than rewriting, our understanding of the universe. But what if the only constraint on scientific ambition were imagination? We asked five physicists to describe the kind of experiment they would do if they didn't have to worry about budgets, engineering limitations or political realities. Not because we expect any of it to happen soon - though in a few cases, momentum is building - but because it is revealing to see where their minds go when the usual boundaries are stripped away. One researcher wants to launch radio telescopes deep into space to probe dark matter with cosmic energy flashes.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Billions of light-years away, a cosmic jet bearing a striking resemblance to the eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings is swirling at the heart of a very active galaxy. The unique cosmic body was spotted thanks to 15 years of observations using the Earth-based Very Long Baseline Ar-ray and is helping scientists better understand the anatomy of cosmic jets,powerful beams of plasma and energy that come from black holes, neutron stars, and other celestial bodies. The unique attributes of this "Eye of Sauron" cosmic jet is detailed in a study published August 12 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning," Yuri Kovalev, study co-author and astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement.

If aliens were to contact Earth, what would it sound like? Such a scenario has been imagined countless times in science fiction but in reality we have no proof extraterrestrials even exist. That hasn't dampened the excitement that an advanced civilisation might be out there, however, and the discovery of a mysterious stellar object which emits a five-minute pulse every 22 minutes will only serve to intensify that. What's more, the scientists who detected it aren't 100 per cent sure what it is. An international team of astronomers led by Australia's Curtin University think it could be an ultra-long period magnetar -- a rare type of star with the most powerful known magnetic fields in the universe.

Stars are formed by molecular gas and dust coalescing in space. These molecular gases are so dilute and cold that they are invisible to the human eye, but they do emit faint radio waves that can be observed by radio telescopes. Observing from Earth, a lot of matter lies ahead and behind these molecular clouds, and these overlapping features make it difficult to determine their distance and physical properties, such as size and mass. So, even though our galaxy, the Milky Way, is the only galaxy close enough to make detailed observations of molecular clouds in the universe, it has been very difficult to investigate the physical properties of molecular clouds in a cohesive manner from large-scale observations. A research team led by Dr. Shinji Fujita from the Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Science, identified about 140,000 molecular clouds in the Milky Way galaxy, which are areas of star formation, from large-scale data of carbon monoxide molecules, observed in detail by the Nobeyama 45-m radio telescope.

The Far-side Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets (FARSIDE) is a proposed mission concept to the lunar far side that seeks to deploy and operate an array of 128 dual-polarization, dipole antennas over a region of 100 square kilometers. The resulting interferometric radio telescope would provide unprecedented radio images of distant star systems, allowing for the investigation of faint radio signatures of coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events and could also lead to the detection of magnetospheres around exoplanets within their parent star's habitable zone. Simultaneously, FARSIDE would also measure the "Dark Ages" of the early Universe at a global 21-cm signal across a range of red shifts (z approximately 50-100). Each discrete antenna node in the array is connected to a central hub (located at the lander) via a communication and power tether. Nodes are driven by cold=operable electronics that continuously monitor an extremely wide-band of frequencies (200 kHz to 40 MHz), which surpass the capabilities of Earth-based telescopes by two orders of magnitude. Achieving this ground-breaking capability requires a robust deployment strategy on the lunar surface, which is feasible with existing, high TRL technologies (demonstrated or under active development) and is capable of delivery to the surface on next-generation commercial landers, such as Blue Origin's Blue Moon Lander. This paper presents an antenna packaging, placement, and surface deployment trade study that leverages recent advances in tethered mobile robots under development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which are used to deploy a flat, antenna-embedded, tape tether with optical communication and power transmission capabilities.

Several years of research experience involving the analysis of large interferometric radio astronomy data sets is required. Leadership experience within projects or research teams is considered a strong asset. Other highly valued qualifications include current scientific involvement in projects exploiting large data sets from SKA precursor/pathfinder telescopes (in particular MeerKAT, ASKAP, MWA or LOFAR), experience setting up data processing workflows on large computer systems, experience with applying ML and/or AI techniques for data analysis, and/or experience working with developers of cluster/HPC (High Performance Computing) systems in optimizing processing for science return. It is also meritorious to have a record of working for equality and diversity within the workplace.This position is advertised at Researcher or Senior researcher level. The selected level of the position will be decided based on the qualifications of the selected candidate.

There are many ways to think about alien, extraterrestrial life forms. Science-fiction writers do it all the time. Scientists, more interested in nonfiction, think about how to receive signals that real aliens might send, as well as what sort of signals we might send to "them." SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is a real, ongoing project, with a real budget overseen by real researchers. Others partner with biochemists and evolutionary biologists to investigate how life might have begun on Earth and whether, and under what circumstances, it could also exist elsewhere in the universe. But not many scientists have gone beyond to speculate on what alien life might actually, seriously, genuinely be like. One exception is Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at Cambridge University, whose recent book, The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, might remind readers of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Zoologist's Guide, though, is definitely science and not fiction.

Modern radio telescopes produce unprecedented amounts of data, which are passed through many processing pipelines before the delivery of scientific results. Hyperparameters of these pipelines need to be tuned by hand to produce optimal results. Because many thousands of observations are taken during a lifetime of a telescope and because each observation will have its unique settings, the fine tuning of pipelines is a tedious task. In order to automate this process of hyperparameter selection in data calibration pipelines, we introduce the use of reinforcement learning. We use a reinforcement learning technique called twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) to train an autonomous agent to perform this fine tuning. For the sake of generalization, we consider the pipeline to be a black-box system where only an interpreted state of the pipeline is used by the agent. The autonomous agent trained in this manner is able to determine optimal settings for diverse observations and is therefore able to perform 'smart' calibration, minimizing the need for human intervention.

Pingtang, China – Nestled among the mountains in southwest China, the world's largest radio telescope signals Beijing's ambitions as a global center for scientific research. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) -- the only significant instrument of its kind after the collapse of another telescope in Puerto Rico this month -- is about to open its doors for foreign astronomers to use, hoping to attract the world's top scientific talent. The world's second-largest radio telescope, at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, was destroyed when its suspended 900-ton receiver platform came loose and plunged 140 meters onto the radio dish below. Wang Qiming, chief inspector of FAST's operations and development center, said during a rare visit by the foreign press last week that he had visited Arecibo. "We drew a lot of inspiration from its structure, which we gradually improved to build our telescope," he said.