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6/6/2016: Green Bank tour celebrates role in extraterrestrial intelligence search
The first scientific search for intelligent life in the universe began in 1960 at the Green Bank Observatory, in Pocahontas County, with a four-month effort to detect interstellar radio signals from two stars in a relatively nearby constellation. It continues today, as the observatory’s 300-foot Green Bank Telescope serves as a key component of Breakthrough…
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06/29/2016: Seeking Radio Silence in West Virginia’s Quiet Zone
The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is a sleepy Appalachian town, the kind one might move to in order to escape the grind of urban centers and bustling suburbs. But its 143 residents didn’t exactly move there for literal quiet. Green Bank is located in eastern West Virginia, in what’s known as the National Radio Quiet Zone,…
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06/14/2016: A Molecule In Space Could Help Us Understand The Origin Of Life On Earth
Are your molecules lefties or righties? There are a lot of concepts that help life exist here on Earth. One is as simple as whether a molecule is right handed or left handed. As straightforward as it is, we still don’t know how the molecules got that way. But a recent discovery of a molecule…
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06/14/2016: Astronomers find first evidence of chiral chemistry in distant cosmic cloud
An organic (if toxic) alcohol could point the way toward finding more “handed” molecules — the kind that make up RNA, DNA, and other building blocks to life. To make life, our bodies require many chemicals to have a certain “handedness,” a left or right orientation called chirality that determines the behavior of those substances…
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06/07/2016: Growing crops, business in WV no small potatoes
What can people in West Virginia do to make the state more economically productive and diverse, particularly to overcome the loss of many of its traditional big money industries? How about agriculture? A crazy idea considering the rugged terrain of much of the Mountain State, but when you look further, is it such a crazy…
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6/6/2016: Green Bank tour celebrates role in extraterrestrial intelligence search
The first scientific search for intelligent life in the universe began in 1960 at the Green Bank Observatory, in Pocahontas County, with a four-month effort to detect interstellar radio signals from two stars in a relatively nearby constellation. It continues today, as the observatory’s 300-foot Green Bank Telescope serves as a key component of Breakthrough…
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6/5/2016: Green Bank Observatory sets sights on new generation of spuds
Better known for probing deep space to study the nature of gravitational waves, discover the presence of molecules that could potentially support life, and search for the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence, the Green Bank Observatory has added a more down-to-earth research role to its repertoire: potato production. On Thursday, the last of six five-acre plots…
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6/1/2016: The Galaxy Is Under Pressure To Make Stars
A new study led by Canadian astronomers provides unprecedented insights into the birth of stars. Using observations from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Hawaii-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in the United States, astronomers from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) have discovered that star formation is more regulated by pressure…