Research can take place in more places than you may think. Sterile labs and well-stocked work benches are great when you have the resources, but for the casual Cousteau and the impromptu Hubble, all you need is a laptop, a comfy chair and a hot cup of coffee.
Today’s post is all about research projects that you can actively take part in, all from the comfort of your favourite WiFi hotspot.
1) SETI@home - http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
Among the trees and the hills in the beautiful landscape of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, there lies a curious thing: the Arecibo radio telescope, and at a whopping 305m in diameter, it just so happens to be the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world. As you might have guessed from the name, its purpose is to pick up and record radio waves. The thinking goes that if there’s intelligent life somewhere close by, any radio signals they could be using could oscillate past Earth and then the telescope would pick them up. To maximize the chances of us finding transmissions, the telescope is always recording.
If this seems like an enormous amount of data, you’re right on. There is no one computer that can possibly go through all this data to look for patterns, but many thousands of computers might just do the job. So began SETI@home.
Quick and free to install, it takes up a little bit of your CPU to run quietly in the background while you work away on your computer. It scans data from the Arecibo telescope, looking for patterns, then sends off the results to move on to the next piece of data. I myself have it turned on as my screen saver, but you limit it’s access to your CPU to your liking.