It's around 200 light years from the nearest McDonald's restaurant, but it might be our best bet to find an alien civilization out there in the cosmos. Called HIP 56948, this distant star is most similar to our own sun in size, mass, temperature, and chemical makeup as reported by astronomers at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.

Despite the fact that other stars have been observed being similar to our sun, the major difference with this one is the identical levels of lithium between the two stars. This is important because less lithium means less activity from the stars which may cause solar flares that can bathe planets in deadly radiation.

Margaret Turnbull of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland has help draw up an existing list of about 17,000 possible targets for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project called the HabCat. While it may not be a sure thing, the study of stars similar to our sun might still be the best bet to search for alien life. Peter Backus has included the new star in the HabCat list and explains the upcoming search they will be heading using the new Allen Telescope Array:

It's on the list, but I don't think it will be given any special treatment. It's still a matter of speculation on just what range of stars could host habitable planets. We will eventually get around to observing all of the stars [on the list].

What makes the scientists hopeful is the fact that HP 56948 is around one billion years older than our own sun. This gives possible alien life time to mature and produce advanced civilization compared to our own. Observations will begin in November and concentrate more on a wider scale than individually focusing on each star in the HabCat list.

This story from Newsvine has it all. A wife madly in love with her geek husband. A piece of clever detective work. And really horrid rap music.

The story starts with SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI is a group of projects all over the world that try to detect intelligent aliens. Data received by the huge radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, is sent to institutes and universities to be processed by computers.

To help with the number-crunching, the University of California, Berkeley, created the SETI@home program. Volunteers from all over the world join SETI@home to donate computer time: when their computers are idle and enter screen saver mode, they start to process the Arecibo data from Berkeley.

Hey, if you're not using your computer, you might as well let it crunch numbers for science.

James Melin got his laptop stolen from his Minneapolis home on January 1. The laptop contained the drafts of his wife's novels and screenplays. Melin wanted the laptop back. He monitored the SETI@home database and waited. Sure enough, the laptop automatically checked in with SETI@home. When the laptop "talked" to the Berkeley server, the IP address of the laptop became plain for anybody to see. Melin sent the IP information to the Minneapolis Police Department. Melin got his laptop back.

"I always knew a geek would make a great husband," said Melin's wife. "He always backed up all my data, but this topped it all. It became like 'Mission: Impossible' for him, looking for hard evidence for the cops to use. ... He's a genius - my hero."

Maybe they're messages from aliens, but it's highly unlikely... It doesn't look like the thieves broke into the email or personal folders of Melin's wife, but they did leave behind something interesting. The laptop had "20 tracks of rap music with unintelligible lyrics."

"It's really, really horrid rap," Melin said. "It makes Ludacris look like Pavarotti."

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Update (actually, it's a shameless plug): Try FOLDING@HOME. This Stanford University project looks at how protein molecules fold - and it's discovered lots of useful stuff in medicine and biology. Help out humanity; sign up now.

You can check out how Team QJ.NET is doing at the Folding@Home stats page. Team QJ.NET ranks 4198 out of 47630 - not bad at all!

And here's a shout out to the QJ.NET forum members behind this awesome volunteer effort, especially Jammie (who really should demand an award for this), modcase, Josey Wales, gracz54, marv101 (who studies folding proteins for fun), and cyanide. (Anybody we forgot?) And Mr_Stanley_Dudek of the ATi group; let us know how you're doing when you can.

PopSci caught a bite with Spore creator Will Wright, the game developer responsible for rendering millions glued to their computer screens with their worldwide hit, The Sims series. His latest creation, due to ship this fall, took him seven years to finish. The game, showing its Sims roots, allows players to create worlds all the way from the microscopic up to the galactic scale.

Growing up, Will always thought that he was going to be an architect or an engineer. He was the sort of kid who "spent a lot of time building models, lots and lots of models, planes, tanks, ships, whatever." When he got his first computer, he realized that he could build more interesting models.

Building models is still his favorite pastime and the latest game he built still deals with creating and modeling; in particular, a game where players pilot the development of life from a single cell into a galactic empire. The creative aspect of the Wright games has always appealed to women. Will this game be more "masculine" than its predecessors, The Sims, which appealed more strongly to the female contingent?

The full article, along with the answer to the question above, awaits after the jump!

A previously unknown ring of Saturn was revealed recently by the Cassini spacecraft last Sunday, as it spent over entire Saturnian day in the planet's umbra, or nightside shadow. Backlighting from the sun revealed this latest ring. Scientists' best guess indicate that it is made from dust resulting from meteoroids colliding with two moons that orbit at the same distance.

The moons in question, Janus and Epimetheus, are too small - a mere 120 and 85 miles across (194 and 138 km) - for the type of volcanic activity capable of spewing volcanic dust into space like Enceladus, which is nearly three times the size of the larger moon, Janus. "When an object is that small, it's basically a dead ice ball," said Mark Showalter of California's SETI Institute. "There really can't be much going on except the shooting gallery out there of meteoroids and little comets."

Because these two moons are so small, they are incapable of holding on to dust stirred up by meteor impacts. The dust escapes into outer space, where it is captured by Saturn's gravity and eventually forms a ring. While other planetary rings may be formed this way - similar rings exists in the orbit of Saturnian moon Atlas, as well as the orbits of Jovian moons Thebe and Amalthea and Uranian moon Mab - it begs the question of why other tiny moonlets like this do not have similar rings.

Cassini measured the rings with its Infrared Spectrometer. The data should eventually tell scientists the speed of the ring's particles, its rate of rotation and how often they collide. In the meantime, click on the thumbnail above for a more detailed look at the newest addition to Saturn's family of rings.

After almost half a century of intergalactic eavesdropping, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has yet to report any signs of contact. Does this mean we're truly alone? Or is SETI aiming at a dead spot in the universe? SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak says a 46-year long search is not the same as a thorough one and, no, he doesn't think we're alone.

"The number of star systems we’ve carefully examined is only about a thousand. That’s a trifling sample compared with the several hundred billion suns that stud the Milky Way, and of little statistical significance. It’s comparable to initiating a quest for Americans who play the oboe, but considering the search meaningful after interrogating only two people," is how he described it.

It's no surprise Shostak gets a lot of email from folks with their own ideas on why SETI has turned up empty handed after all these years. He took the top four reasons and added his opinion to each:

1. "You’re counting on the aliens using communication technology (radio, light) that’s oh-so-last century. They will be far beyond this."

In other words, SETI’s technical approach is wrong. Some have suggested looking for gamma rays, gravity waves, or taking advantage of "hyperdimensional physics." Shostak says gamma rays are wasteful since they require enormous amount of energy per bit. Gravity waves are difficult to produce produce ("You need to shake planets or something similar") and hard to detect. In addition gravity waves is not known to move faster than the speed of light.

As for "hyperdimensional physics" Shostak says that might work if they knew what it was. He is not discounting using methods based on undiscovered laws of the universe that will allow sending of bits from one place to another more cheaply than light and radio, or faster. But they're waiting for someone to discover these new laws first before they adjust their experiment accordingly.

2. "If hi-tech societies or thinking machines were out there, they’d have colonized the Galaxy by now. Clearly, we’re alone… lone… lone."

The Fermi Paradox assumes that if sophisticated societies are common, they should also be ubiquitous. But if you look out the window and don't see large animals with long, prehensile noses does that mean elephants don’t exist on this Earth? "To use the Fermi Paradox as a reason for the lack of a SETI signal is to make a very big extrapolation from a very local observation. Seems chancy to me," say Shostak.

3. "The aliens don’t want to communicate with us. Look at what we’re doing to the planet!"

Shostak says this is a self-centered view to think that what we do to our planet would matter to them.

4. "You SETI types are just looking in the wrong places. We know where the extraterrestrials are: on a planet in the Zeta Reticuli system."

According to Shostak he likes this explanation the best, even though it’s the worst. Zeta Reticuli is the star system that was the supposed hometown of aliens who reportedly abducted social worker Betty Hill and her husband in 1961. The system’s identification is based on a "star map" Betty drew after their release. But Shostak clarifies that, as a matter of fact SETI did look at both of Z. Reticuli’s stellar components during SETI's observing run in Australia ten years ago and "the aliens, for their part, remained coy."

Aside from the eighth grade social studies student who thought "Seti" was an ancient Egyptian deity, many people have strange ideas about just what the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence actually is, or what it does.

Some folks think its a "National Agency." This was promulgated by  a line in the movie Starman, in which a government official flashes a badge and announces "I'm from SETI."  Never let it be said that Hollywood lets facts stand in the way of a good movie.

The reality is that SETI is a field of research, carried on by a group of 30 scientists from several different countries. There is a SETI Institute - but no "National SETI Agency."

Another misconception is the idea that this is the primary purpose of radio telescopes. In fact, while SETI does make occasional use of these, these radio arrays spend 95% of the time observing quasars and other celestial phenomena.

The third misconception has to do with the length of time that SETI has been on the job. A common argument by politicians (not the best nor the brightest of people) wielding budget axes runs like this: "SETI has been listening for nearly fifty years and hasn’t discovered ET, so SETI is a failure."

As with many other issues, politicians making this statement demonstrate their ignorance about what SETI is and how it actually works. While SETI actually did go on-line in 1960, the search for alien intelligence has not been continuous over intervening decades. In fact, during the first twenty years, the twenty-three targeted SETI projects comprised a total of three months of actual search time.

It should also be noted that a "radio telescope" is not like your AM/FM Radio. It is an extremely precision, directionally-sensitive instrument, searching one ten-millionth of the sky at any given time, and over a very limited spectrum, running from 1GHz to 10 GHz containing about nine billion channels. Each sky position requires at least 90 observations to cover all of that "real estate."

One last point: not all SETI projects are given equal priority. To date, only two SETI projects have done any significant searching at all. (It's a big universe out there....)

Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware George Basalla, in his book Civilized Life in the Universe, made a comment regarding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

He referred to the group as a faith-based endeavor rather than a pure scientific undertaking. The fact that SETI has continued its efforts after failing to make contact with any ET intelligence for the past forty years prove that the group is working under a kind of religious zeal. Basalla continues with a suggestion that SETI should start lowering their expectations and admit that they are on a "wild goose chase".

These words caused SETI Institute member David Darling and Director of the Center for SETI Research Jill Tarter to comment on the Institute's weekly radio program, "Are We Alone?".

As Darling says, they are not following a blind faith. As he reasoned out, "It isn't an unreasonable hypothesis that if intelligence has come about on one planet that it may also have arisen elsewhere, especially given the vast number of stars in this and other galaxies." If SETI ever adheres to a kind of faith, it is the faith in the scientific method, reiterates Darling.

Read full articlce after the jump!

Representative John Culberson of Texas' 7th Congressional District has issued a letter to scientists urging them to join him in standing against George W. Bush's funding cuts to NASA.

Along with draconian cuts to education and social and health programs, the proposed U.S. Federal budget for fiscal 2007 includes plans to take 3 billion in funding away from NASA, cutting financing for astrobiology by 50%. Missions that would be cancelled by the cuts include the Terrestrial Planet Finder and the much-anticipated mission to the Jovian moon of Europa.

Culberson calls the funding cuts "completely unacceptable."  According to Thomas Pierson, CEO if the SETI institute, Bush's proposed funding cuts would cause irreparable harm to to NASA and U.S. science.

Representative Culberson urges people to contact their members of congress as soon as possible and register their protests against what is a socially and scientifically irresponsible and reprehensible budget proposal.