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SETI scientists who used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to analyze 150 radio signals collected in the world’s biggest computing project found no signs of intelligent life. Susan Lendroth, of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, which sponsors Seti@home, says, “The odds are probably against a quick find but SETI researchers around the world hope that they will one day find evidence of an alien civilization.”

Since 1999, millions of people from more than 200 countries have been running a special screensaver program on their desktops that uses their PC?s downtime to sift date from radio telescopes that might be communications from space.
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With the excitement about SARS, it’s easy to forget that Lyme Disease season is coming again. Lyme is carried by ticks that hitch a ride on mice and deer. The increase in Lyme may be caused by the decrease in large forest areas, because the ticks do better in suburbia. White-footed mice, which are the main carriers of infected ticks, are more abundant in forest fragments, because there are fewer predators there. These mice especially like areas smaller than five acres. And deer are thriving in the suburbs, again because their predators can’t live there.
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If you have to have an earthquake, don’t have a shaky one?have a slow one. That’s what?s happening in the Northwest right now: an earthquake is slowly unleashing energy that measures 6.7 on the Richter scale. But it’s releasing it over weeks rather than seconds, so no one can feel it. The quake, which started Feb. 26 and seems to be finally coming to a halt, stretches from northwest Washington state to southwest British Columbia.

An earthquake has been predicted in that general area for years?will this take care of the situation? Alas, no?”These slow slips aren’t reducing the stress on the locked zone,” says Herb Dragert, of the Geological Survey of Canada. “They’re actually, in little pulses, adding a tiny bit of stress to the locked zone.”
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On this week’s Dreamland, science reporter Linda Howe gives us a special report on SARS. It’s spreading fast, and health officials now admit they don’t have any effective medicine to treat it. An entire apartment building has been infected in Hong Kong, raising fears that SARS can be spread through the air, rather than by droplets from sneezing or coughing, the way most viruses spread. Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the CDC, says, “The global epidemic continues to expand. We recognize this as an epidemic that is evolving.”
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