SETI Girls

I just got caught up on Science Friday (I was at a meeting an not able to listen live) and they did a segment on SETI this week with some of the big names including Frank Drake, Jill Tartar, Seth Shostak, and my old friend Any Fraknoi. It's a pretty good segment and you should give it a listen.

One thing they mentioned is the video SETI Girls done by a bunch of Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) students. REU students spend the summer doing research at a lab (we have REU students at NOAO). This video takes on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Not as professional as some, but they are having fun. When I was teaching, I did the Research Experience for Teachers (RET), a similar program, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. At the end of the summer, all the REUs and RETs teamed up at the picnic thrown in honor of the advisors to perform "NRAO" to the tune of YMCA. Mercifully, no known video of this event exists!

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.