Seth Shostak (born July 20, 1943) is an American astronomer, currently Senior Astronomer and Director, Center for SETI research. Read full biography of Seth Shostak →
Judging by informal observation, most young Americans burn up their spare time buffing their emotional IQ and self-esteem with social media and... →
Ever since the infamous quiz show scandals of the 1950s, the feds had insisted that TV game shows be honest - or that at least they didn't cheat.... →
Most of the things at the zoo don't look like us. We're one design that works. Our chimp pals sort of look like us, so that's a different... →
The mission of NASA's Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates... →
It will be the mother of all telescopes, and you can bet it will do for astronomy what genome sequencing is doing for biology. The clumsy, if... →
Disasters happen. We still have no way to eliminate earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, floods or droughts. We cope as best we can by fortifying... →
Jupiter, a world far larger than Earth, is so warm that it currently radiates more internal heat than it receives from the Sun.
Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I... →
Admittedly, it would take industrial-grade chutzpah and a massive dose of malevolence for anyone to bulldoze the spot where Neil Armstrong stepped... →
Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological... →
Plate tectonics is not all havoc and destruction. The slow movement of continents and ocean floors recycles carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans... →
Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge... →
The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the... →