SETI@home Ramps Up to Analyze More Data in Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

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.

"The next generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has done before," says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."

According to project scientist Eric Korpela, the new data amounts to 300 gigabytes per day, or 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) per year, about the amount of data stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. "That's why we need all the volunteers," he says. "Everyone has a chance to be part of the largest public participation science project in history."

The 1,000-foot diameter Arecibo dish, which fills a valley in Puerto Rico, is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center operated by Cornell University with funds from the National Science Foundation. Since 1992, Werthimer and his team have piggybacked on radio astronomy observations at Arecibo to record signals from space and analyze them for patterns that could indicate they were transmitted by an intelligent civilization.

When the team's incoming data overwhelmed its ability to analyze it, the scientists conceived a distributed computing project to harness many computers into one big supercomputer to do the analysis. Since SETI@home was launched, other distributed computing projects have arisen, from folding@home to predict the three-dimensional tangle of a protein to the newly-launched cosmology@home to model possible universes. Most are now on a platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which was developed by SETI@home's director David Anderson so that the various projects could share resources.

"There are now 42 projects on BOINC, and, until now, there has been enough computing power to go around," Werthimer says.

What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources.

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A New Target for the Treatment of Breast Cancer

The active ingredient in a drug currently being tested to treat rheumatoid arthritis might also one day serve as an effective means of treating one of the deadliest forms of breast cancer.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have demonstrated that inhibiting the activity of the protease enzyme known as TACE can deprive tumor cells of a key factor needed for their proliferation. TACE is strongly present in a form of breast cancer which responds poorly to current therapies

“We have shown that inhibition of the TACE protease in breast cancer cells blocks the shedding of two critical growth factor proteins and results in an inhibition of a key signaling pathway that controls cell division,” says Paraic Kenny, a post-doctoral cell biologist with the research group of Mina Bissell in Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “Based on analysis of cells grown in three-dimensional cultures, the inhibition of this protease results in the reversion of the malignant phenotype of these breast cancer cells and switches their behavior back to a phenotype very reminiscent of non-malignant breast epithelial cells.”

Kenny is the co-author along with Bissell of a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation titled: "Targeting TACE-Dependent EGFR-ligand Shedding in Breast Cancer." This paper presents the latest experimental results from an on-going investigation led by Bissell into the ecology of tumors.

It has long been Bissell’s contention that “no tumor is an island.” Tumor cells, she maintains, exist in the same microenvironment as healthy cells and must therefore appropriate normal physiological processes to facilitate their growth and spread. As she and her colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated, this idea can open up potential new avenues and targets for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

For this latest paper, Kenny and Bissell looked into the pathway by which the EGFR signal is carried. EGFR, which stands for Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor, is the protein on the outer surface of a cell that is activated by EGF and related growth factors and signals for the cell to divide. Given that one of the hallmarks of cancer is cell division run amok, the reduction of high levels of EGFR activity has long been a primary target for anti-cancer drug development. So far, however, drugs aimed at directly inhibiting EGFR activity have met with only limited success in the cancer clinic, primarily in a small number of lung cancers.

“Because of this, we turned our attention to the processes that regulate the production of the ligands which bind and activate EGFR,” Kenny says. “We reasoned that this binding and activation is essential for EGFR activation and that finding a way to block this interaction might prove to be an important additional approach to explore for inhibition of this pathway.”

Kenny stresses that the importance of EGFR to so many different tumor types, including lung, head and neck, bladder, colorectal and kidney, makes it likely that “TACE inhibition has the potential to be an effective means of stopping tumor growth for EGFR-dependent cancers outside the breast as well.”

<---We all know someone or are some one who has or have had cancer. The most common for women is breast cancer. Slow progress is made in the battle. A new vaccine prevents a virus that causes cervical cancer. Still cancer has no vaccine, nor cure. Scary too is the rise in cases of prostate cancer in men 18-37.--->

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