In 1999, the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory set up SETI@home to search the skies for signs of extraterrestrial life. Previous SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) projects used special-purpose super-computers located at a telescope to do the bulk of the data analysis, but the SETI@home screensaver became the first distributed-computing system. Read more
Australians are curing cancer and addressing global warming in their sleep. From classical musicians to council workers, they are donating their idle computer time to science - BOINCing, to be precise. Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) allows users to download and run components of complex research projects, becoming part of a global "super-computer" that can then tackle problems such as finding a cure for AIDS or discovering life in outer space. It was developed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
A new computer screen saver made available by the European Space Agency now allows computer users to watch spectacular, almost real-time images of our Sun. The images, coming directly from 1.5 million kilometres away in space, will flash on your computer screen courtesy of ESA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
The Hubble Space Telescope Part 1 Free Screensaver of 21 of the top 100 images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope A free screensaver that displays 21 high quality images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a telescope in orbit around the Earth, named after astronomer Edwin Hubble. Its position outside the Earth's atmosphere provides significant advantages over ground-based telescopes - images are not blurred by the atmosphere, there is no background from light scattered by the air, and the Hubble can observe ultra-violet light that is normally absorbed by the ozone layer in observations made from Earth.
AllWindowsSoft has released Wator Screensaver v3.0, a windows screensaver which simulates artificial life on your screen. Wator is a toroidal world, covered entirely with water. It is populated with two species: fishes and sharks. Wator Screensaver v3.0 runs under Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista, costs $60( US ) for a single-user license. The download demo is a free 30-day trial version. The website thankfully also contains other demos which are free...
Look towards the sky for the planets, but look at your computer for possible inhabitants of those planets. Might sound like ET, the Extra Terrestrial, but thats long and short of the message from astronomy educators to the Capitals star-gazers, amateur astronomers and school students. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, a US-based planetary organisation, is now encouraging Delhiites to download BOINC, a software screensaver that helps analyse radio waves coming to Earth. With millions of users worldwide, students and astronomy enthusiasts here are warming up to the idea, as explained during a recent workshop at the Nehru Planetarium.