SETI Institute Invites Applications for the 2025 Frank Drake Postdoctoral Fellowship
SETI Institute
Leading humanity's quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe...
The SETI Institute is pleased to open the call for applications for the 2025 Frank Drake Postdoctoral Fellowship (FDPF), which supports groundbreaking research in the search for life in the universe. This fellowship offers early-career scientists a unique opportunity to make impactful contributions across the diverse fields of the Drake Equation, including Astronomy & Astrophysics, Astrobiology, Environmental Science, Geoscience, Life Science, Planetary Science, Planetary and Space Exploration, Cognitive Science, Biosignature and Technosignature Detection, Computing and Data Science, and Epistemology—fostering new intellectual frameworks for the search for life.
SETI Institute Launches Art and AI Residency, Unveils Six Nominees for Innovative Program
The SETI Artist in Residency (AIR) program announced Algorithmic Imaginings, a new residency that explores how AI technologies affect science and society. The residency focuses on creative research topics such as imaginary life, human-AI collaboration, AI futures, posthumanism, AI and consciousness, and the ethics of AI data. It also connects with current SETI Institute research, including exoplanet studies, astrobiology, signal detection, and advanced computing. The two-year program offers $30,000 in funding and an exhibition at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Celebrating 40 Years of Cosmic Exploration
Join us for a night of interstellar adventure as we commemorate four decades of groundbreaking research and discoveries in science and space exploration. This special anniversary event will feature renowned scientists, interactive exhibits, and a captivating atmosphere. Don't miss your chance to be part of this historic celebration!
SETI Live Replay: Looking for Life in All the Wrong Places: The Atacama, NASA Viking Experiments, and Salts
In 1976, NASA's two Viking spacecraft touched down on Mars, becoming the first successful landers on the red planet. On board Viking 1, the craft carried several biological experiments to search for life. While most scientists consider the results of those experiments to be negative for Martian life, one experiment gave a positive result. The resulting controversy has spanned decades, with numerous scientists weighing in. Now, Dirk Schulze-Makuch from the Centre of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ZAA) at Technische Universit?t Berlin questions how those experiments were performed in light of what we know of extremely dry environments here on Earth. These Mars analogs, such as the Atacama desert in Chile, show that while microbes can survive in harsh conditions, too much water becomes a problem. And those Viking experiments may have involved too much water.
Big Picture Science: Platypus Crazy
They look like a cross between a beaver and a duck, and they all live Down Under. The platypus may lay eggs but is actually a distant mammalian cousin, one that we last saw, in an evolutionary sense, about 166 million years ago.
Planetary Picture of the Day - Week of October 15, 2024
We kick off with aurorae on Saturn and then spend the rest of the week with Earth, looking up and looking back.
Our mission is to lead humanity's quest to understand the origins and prevalence of life and intelligence in the universe and share that knowledge with the world.