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You So Crazy, Nature

1 week 3 days ago
Even with my general (and limited) understanding of biology, that unless it’s forbidden by the laws of physics, nature generally does anything and everything you can imagine… This one blew my mind. And not just once, with creatures having eyes on their shells, but with the number of times eyes have evolved within just that […]
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Jack Welch

2 weeks ago
It is a sad day indeed to share the news of William (Jack) Welch’s passing. I won’t duplicate here his achievements and awards, list his papers, nor attempt to wax poetic about his outsized contributions to the fields of radio astronomy and SETI. That’s all here and here. What I’d like to add is that […]
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Black Hole Sun

1 month 3 weeks ago
Won’t you come, and wash the rain away? For those in California and around the world laboring under a deluge from the sky, perhaps this video from the frontiers of astroseismology will be entertaining and informative, if not comforting. The short version is that it’s not implausible for a microscopic black hole to enter the […]
eliotg

A New Puzzle

2 months ago
Some of my favorite moments in science are when we find something that we didn’t think was possible. I also think that’s a good way to describe a SETI experiment: an non-nature detector, sifting through the universe looking for something we don’t think nature does. Today’s instance is an invisible pulsar companion with a mass […]
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Maui Back From Vacation

2 months 1 week ago
Every year, now for the past 3 years, there’s a giant wind/ice storm that knocks power and connectivity out at the summit of Haleakala. This year, it started over a week ago, and we’ve just regained connectivity to the instruments. Hooray! Fingers crossed we’re done for this year and that the infrastructure improvements they’re doing […]
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PCBs: Progress and Compromise

2 months 2 weeks ago
Making our next 10 instruments efficiently, as well as ensuring their reliability and ease of maintenance, is a top priority. Some of you might remember a previous iteration of a power board, an attempt to reduce wiring and build effort that encompassed all power wiring in the instrument and attempted to eliminate a COTS (commercial […]
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Get Them While They’re Hot

3 months ago
Eclipses are one of those things that are easy to assume they’ve been around and will always be around. But no. While the Anthropic Principle guarantees the universe must be sufficiently fined tuned for us to exist, there’s nothing which requires us to be alive during the “Golden Age of Eclipses.” So we’re just lucky. […]
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New Set(s) of Wheels

3 months 1 week ago
Since we’re building 10 new instruments, we’ve made a number of small investments to make building them easier and faster. This was a fun one to share: On the left, you’ll see an off-the-shelf appliance dolly. Cheap and easy to obtain, but it only allows access to the wiring area in the instrument base with […]
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