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CLOCK GENES. "Mammalian circadian rhythms are driven by endogenous biological oscillators, the biological clock. Major molecular insight into the biological clock has been gained since the identification and cloning of the first clock genes.” https://lnkd.in/dvGxeQP View in LinkedIn

NO SUCCESSION PLAN. “To give another metric of the academic maturity of the field: ​only five people in the US have ​ever​ received PhDs in the physical sciences for dissertations whose primary focus was SETI​, only two of whom are astronomers today. Four were trained at Harvard by Paul Horowitz, eventually building a dedicated optical SETI observatory. The fifth is Andrew Siemion, trained in radio astronomy at Berkeley by Dan Werthimer and Geoff Bower—today Dr. Siemion serves as the director of the Breakthrough Listen SETI project and as the Oliver Chair for SETI Research at the SETI Institute.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

Coin shell fossils in Girona limestone. View in LinkedIn

CATCH-22. “One reason for this is that because the field has been largely funded philanthropically, much of the work has happened outside of academia and outside the aegis of the NSF, which strongly supports training as part of its scientific efforts. What SETI work has been done since 1960 has thus not been accompanied by a proportional amount of student training or formal curricular development, and has happened largely outside of academic publish-or-perish culture.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

SCANT PUBLICATIONS. “Despite a high public profile for nearly 60 years, the field is still small and many of the search strategies identified in the 1960’s remain essentially unexplored, to say nothing of the many more recently identified avenues. Indeed, an ADS bibliography of all work in the field contains fewer than 2,000 entries, only 66 of which have more than 20 citations—​the h-index of the field ​as a whole​ is 33​.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

MASTER CLOCK. “Biological rhythms are driven by endogenous biological clocks; in mammals, the master clock is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus. This master pacemaker can synchronize other peripheral oscillators in several tissues such as some involved in endocrine or reproductive functions.” https://lnkd.in/dqAxc6b View in LinkedIn

TINY COMMUNITY. “The Key Issue we identify in this white paper is the small size of the trained community of SETI practitioners, and the lack of federal support for both searches for technosignatures and for growing the community.​ This issue has led to the neglect by NASA and the NSF of one of the primary avenues for pursuing a major component of the Planetary Systems thematic area of the Astro2020 Decadal process: the search for life in the universe.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn

CIRCADIAN CLOCKS. “In birds, biological clock function pervades all aspects of biology, controlling daily changes in sleep: wake, visual function, song, migratory patterns and orientation, as well as seasonal patterns of reproduction, song and migration. The molecular bases for circadian clocks are highly conserved, and it is likely the avian molecular mechanisms are similar to those expressed in mammals, including humans.” https://lnkd.in/dnUbn2y View in LinkedIn

HOMELESS SUBJECT. “Technosignatures remains, however, somewhat homeless at NASA. For instance: not all searches for technosignatures are focused on planetary systems (some focus on other galaxies, or the Solar System, or on all-sky searches, for instance), and so many worthy projects will not be in-scope at XRP. And some of the inconsistencies noted by Tarter et al. (2018) persist: for instance, Exobiology still explicitly excludes radio and microwave technosignatures from its scope for no reason other than institutional inertia.” https://lnkd.in/djnMhU6 View in LinkedIn