Word: signal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that was me," I tell him. His blue eyes--destroyed years ago by glaucoma and cataracts--stare forlornly back at me. "Well, that's what you keep telling me," he says. He looks sad, confused. He starts making a thin whistling sound, a sign I recognize as his signal of distress...
...radio astronomer played by Jodie Foster rips off her earphones in astonishment after hearing four telltale beeps. Pure fiction, say scientists--and not only because of her hokey headset. When extraterrestrials finally make themselves known, they may not use radio at all. Instead, they're just as apt to signal us with beams of light. Says physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.: "It's foolish to try to guess what an extraterrestrial civilization might use. You ought to try all available technologies to detect...
...David T. Wilkinson will soon begin surveying nearby stars with a detector similar to Horowitz's. At the University of California, Berkeley, extrasolar-planet hunter Geoff Marcy is re-examining his data for sharp spectral lines that might indicate a continuous beam of light intended as a low-power signal. Another Berkeley team, led by SETI veteran Dan Werthimer, is looking for short, powerful laser bursts in a series of automated observations of 2,500 nearby stars. Later he plans to turn to invisible infrared light and other galaxies...
...complaints about service continue. Mark Meyer, a lawyer and constant cell-phone user from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., spends three months a year in Romania on business. He has two cell phones--one from AT&T for the States, the other from Romanian GSM carrier Connex. "You never lose a signal in Bucharest," says Meyer, "and the signal is always clear." But in New York, he can name five different spots along his 26-mile commute from Westchester to Wall Street where his phone will go dead every time. "It's maddening," he says. "We have to have a problem...
...only cancer that can be at the root of fatigue. The sense that you're run down all the time can signal a host of undetected ailments, from gum disease and sinus infection to anemia and multiple sclerosis. Not every ailment can be cured, but many can be treated...