"Nothing's Gonna Change My World"

What a great song. And what a wonderful idea...

NASA beams Beatles' song into space

The Beatles' song Across the Universe will be the first ever to be beamed directly into space next week, NASA said.

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney said it was an "amazing" achievement and John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono called it the "beginning of a new age".

The transmission of the song over the space agency's Deep Space Network on Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the day the band recorded the song.

The song will be aimed at the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away from Earth, and it will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, NASA said.

In a message to the space agency, Sir Paul said: "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

SETI may have found something

SETI, the search for possible extraterrestrial intelligence by scanning the heavens for radio signals, may have found something....

"Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak.
�We are looking for something that screams out �artificial�,� says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. �This just doesn�t do that, but it could be because it is distant."

This is pretty damn exciting...