Here’s a CNN report featuring arguably the most affable astrophysicist out there: Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson responds to a rather doomsday-like scenario Stephen Hawkins paints about aliens in a new Discovery documentary. Watch the eminent deGrasse Tyson explanation below.

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The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been going on since the middle of last century, having been first postulated as a scientific possibility in 1959, but how far have we come and what new things have we learned?

In this Fora.tv lecture Professor Ian Morison discusses Drake’s Equation, Finding life on other planets, SETI@Home and how far we’ve progressed and what we’ve found.

If you’re interested in helping SETI out you can join the SETI@Home’s BOINC project, which will install a screensaver on your computer which will use CPU power when the PC (or Mac or Linux Machine) is idle to help go through the massive amount of data collected by the radio telescopes mentioned in the lecture. There’s even an 3nglish.co.uk SETI group you can join (search for 3nglish.co.uk when prompted to join a group).

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A holiday message from the Cassini Spacecraft.

Check out the great graphics.

Here’s an interesting video for you.. a HD camera (Canon Vixia HF20) launched in a balloon to a height of roughly 107145 feet (20 miles or 33 kilometers). The camera, named Bear-4 parachuted back to Earth safely.

From the project website (which, frankly, looks horrible):

The balloon was launched at 7:44 AM, burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. The camera recorded a total of 4 hrs. & 22 min. of Hi-Def Video before it stopped recording 53 sec’s after landing when its 32GB of memory was full. The only thing better would have been if the camera could have recorded for several minutes more to captured the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its Styrofoam container.

Here’s the last 10 minutes of the flight (and the moment the big balloon pops, presumably due to reaching the maximum expansion limit for the balloon’s membrane) at 8:26…

The Bear-4 website goes on to mention…

Balloon remains can be seen falling past the lens at 6:27 [8:28 in the video above - sn0r] and then the fun begins as the foam box and camera inside is repeatedly struck by the antenna hanging below and the several pounds of latex remaining from the burst balloon as everything tumbles every which way back to earth at up to 7900 ft./min (90 mph) in the near vacuum until there’s enough air for the parachute to start functioning.

I also encourage you to watch the whole thing, including the set-up and launch. The full 1 hour video is similarly available for you on Youtube.

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