Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. You may notice that this and future entries are shorter than usual; Career, family and book deal commitments have forced me to cut back some of my projects. Now, here's today's news:

g INTELLIGENCE - TV really does act like a painkiller when it comes to kids, reveals a small study published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060817102310.htm.

g MESSAGE - You don't have to leave Earth to find intelligent life on other worlds. All you have to do is tune in... at the right time... on the right frequency... in the right direction... with the right spectrometer... using the most powerful supercomputer on this planet. See http://www.xilinx.com/publications/xcellonline/

xcell 48/xc seti48.htm. Note: this article is from 2004.

g COSMICUS - Unshaken by a launch failure of its Falcon 1, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is pressing forward on a return-to-flight of its privately-built booster. See http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060817 spacex musk.html.

g LEARNING - Here's a cool set of classroom lessons courtesy of NASA: Astroventure, in which students search for and design a habitable planet. See http://astroventure.arc.nasa.gov/.

g IMAGINING - Like stories about communicating with aliens? Be sure to scour your favorite used bookstores for Michael Bishop's "Transfigurations" (1979), in which ET converses by changing colors.

g AFTERMATH - Often the advanced science and technology of alien civilizations is touted as a benefit of contact with alien civilizations. So what type of physics would an advanced, extraterrestrial civilization likely possess? See what theoretical physicist Michio Kaku thinks that civilization might have at http://www.mkaku.org/articles/physics of alien civs.shtml.