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A new technique is a dramatic breakthrough in the search for alien life, astronomers say. Researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project based at the University of California, Berkeley say they have developed a new way to be sure that any potential signal is really coming from space – and not from something more boring. Astronomers spend vast amounts of time looking for radio signals that might have come from alien civilisations as part of work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. But they have in the past been fooled by very human technology, such as cellphones, microwaves and car engines, that can produce a blast of radio signals that look as if they have come from distant worlds. One way to check whether signals are really alien is to point the telescope elsewhere and then repeatedly return to the same spot, with the hope of seeing the signal again and ensuring that it is not a false alarm. But that is not foolproof – and only works if the signal sticks around. Some of the most promising radio signals might only be detectable once. The so-called “Wow!” signal, for instance – a radio signal detected in 1977 that was so shocking the astronomer who found it wrote the exclamation on a printout – has not been detected since, and astronomers still do not know whether it was an alien message or just a mistake. Now scientists have devised a new test that can be used to see whether a signal has really passed through interstellar space, which should help show that it is not from elsewhere on Earth. It works by looking for “scintillation” – the changes in amplitude of a signal as it is affected by the cold plasma of space. “The first ET detection may very well be a one-off, where we only see one signal. And if a signal doesn’t repeat, there’s not a lot that we can say about that. And obviously, the most likely explanation for it is radio frequency interference, as is the most likely explanation for the Wow! signal,” said Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, which operates the world’s longest running SETI program. “Having this new technique and the instrumentation capable of recording data at sufficient fidelity such that you could see the effect of the interstellar medium, or ISM, is incredibly powerful.” Dr Siemion called the breakthrough “one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time” and said that it would be the first time researchers would be able to differentiate a real signal from a false alarm, even if it was only detected once. The technique can only be used for signals that have travelled 10,000 light years or more to Earth, researchers note. If it was closer to us, the scintillation effect cannot be seen because they are not travelling through enough of the interstellar medium, or ISM. The research is described in a new paper, ‘On Detecting Interstellar Scintillation in Narrowband Radio SETI’, published in The Astrophysical Journal. Read More Battery breakthroughs are about to trigger a transport revolution Huge asteroid nearly crashes into Earth – and is only spotted days later ChatGPT rival with ‘no ethical boundaries’ sold on dark web

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Ryan Reynolds appeared to troll celebrity pal Taylor Swift over recent rumours that she's dating The 1975's Matty Healy. In a post to his Instagram Stories, the 'Deadpool' actor shared a selfie of himself and chose to include The 1975’s hit song "Chocolate," for the music. There was also a caption: "Zoom Zoom," that appeared on Reynolds's forehead, in what can only be described as a random post with no context whatsoever. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter While Swift herself wasn't not mentioned in the Insta story, it hasn't stopped fans from questioning the song choice, given recent reports that Swift and Healy were spotted together, with The 1975 frontman also in attendance at the popstar's Nashville Eras Tour shows. It comes after The Sun first reported a "source close to Taylor" alleged Swift and Healy are "madly in love," and that it's "super-early days, but it feels right." With this recent post by Reynolds, fans don't quite know what to make of it all. Reynolds often takes to social media to troll his actor wife Blake Lively and his showbiz mates such as Rob McElhenney, and Hugh Jackman, so it could be another instance of this. While he and Lively are good friends with Swift, as back in 2016 the couple spent the Fourth of July with the 'Anti-Hero' singer and her then-boyfriend Tom Hiddleston. A voice recording of the couple's eldest daughter, James features on Swift's 2017 song 'Gorgeous,' while their third daughter's name is also a track ('Betty') on the singer's album Folklore where James and their second daughter Inez are also mentioned in the lyrics of the song. "I named all the characters in this story after my friends' kids... and I hope you like it!" Swift said on country radio in 2020. When Swift won Album of the Year award for 'Folklore' at the 2021 Grammy's, she thanked "James, Inez and Betty and their parents who are the second people that I play every new song that I write." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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