BERKELEY – The longest-running search for radio
signals from alien civilizations is getting a burst of new data from an
upgraded Arecibo telescope, which means the SETI@home project needs more
desktop computers to help crunch the data.
Since SETI@home launched eight years ago, the
project based at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences
Laboratory has signed up more than 5 million interested volunteers and boasts
the largest community of dedicated users of any Internet computing project:
170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers.
Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the
world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency
coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The
SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new
opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe.
Read complete article here.
Contribute to the SETI program by running BOINC, an application that will use your idle cpu to analyse radio signals emitted from outer-space.
The program will run in the background without interfering with PC use. It is completely customizable and will process as much or as little as you
want. Some laptop computers do get hot as the cpu is crunching data, which you could prevent by lowering the maximum % cpu used.
Can you imagine the numbercrunching capacity of the bittorrent community if they all had this application running while their computers are sharing. We would find some dangerous aliens in no time 
Some links below.
