Word: probe
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...possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy, he wrote in Nature that an advanced civilization might not necessarily use long-range radio signals to communicate with other intelligent beings. Such signals would be considerably weakened over interstellar distances. Instead, Bracewell said, those far-off beings might employ robot space probes as their message bearers. Sent to a promising nearby star, such a vehicle could swing into an orbit around it at approximately the right distance to encounter a planet with life-supporting temperatures. If it picked up telltale radio signals, the probe might then bounce them back to advertise...
...pronounced boh-oh-tis). Only the star Epsilon Boötis (actually a double star system whose members are popularly called Izar and Pucherrima) was significantly out of place. But Lunan had a ready explanation for that displacement. He says that it may well have been the space probe's way of saying that Epsilon Boötis was its place of origin...
Encouraged by this somewhat flimsy evidence, Lunan plotted more radio echoes, including those reported by a French scientific expedition that went to Indochina in 1929 to observe an eclipse. These graphs not only showed the same constellation, but also indicated the number of planets around the probe's parent star. In fact, says Lunan, "the logical sequence" of one diagram is "so clear it can be represented in standard, even colloquial English." Unsatisfied with a simple translation, Lunan went on to more daring conclusions. He claims, for instance, that the constellation's brightest star, Arcturus, was slightly...
...London meeting, a leading British computer expert, Anthony Lawton, announced that Lunan's theory would soon be put to the test. For the next year, Lawton said, he will send off blip-like radio signals into space at regular 30-second intervals in hopes of stirring the putative probe into another response. As a precaution, however, he is keeping his operational frequency a highly guarded secret. Otherwise, he says, "someone might hoax the experiment right...
...design probe comes on the heels of complaints by community members that the orientation of the memorial complex, which was designed by Pei to look out over the Charles, ignores the interests of the nearby neighborhoods and business districts...