A new technique is a dramatic breakthrough in the search for alien life, astronomers say. Researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project based at the University of California, Berkeley say they have developed a new way to be sure that any potential signal is really coming from space – and not from something more boring. Astronomers spend vast amounts of time looking for radio signals that might have come from alien civilisations as part of work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. But they have in the past been fooled by very human technology, such as cellphones, microwaves and car engines, that can produce a blast of radio signals that look as if they have come from distant worlds. One way to check whether signals are really alien is to point the telescope elsewhere and then repeatedly return to the same spot, with the hope of seeing the signal again and ensuring that it is not a false alarm. But that is not foolproof – and only works if the signal sticks around. Some of the most promising radio signals might only be detectable once. The so-called “Wow!” signal, for instance – a radio signal detected in 1977 that was so shocking the astronomer who found it wrote the exclamation on a printout – has not been detected since, and astronomers still do not know whether it was an alien message or just a mistake. Now scientists have devised a new test that can be used to see whether a signal has really passed through interstellar space, which should help show that it is not from elsewhere on Earth. It works by looking for “scintillation” – the changes in amplitude of a signal as it is affected by the cold plasma of space. “The first ET detection may very well be a one-off, where we only see one signal. And if a signal doesn’t repeat, there’s not a lot that we can say about that. And obviously, the most likely explanation for it is radio frequency interference, as is the most likely explanation for the Wow! signal,” said Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, which operates the world’s longest running SETI program. “Having this new technique and the instrumentation capable of recording data at sufficient fidelity such that you could see the effect of the interstellar medium, or ISM, is incredibly powerful.” Dr Siemion called the breakthrough “one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time” and said that it would be the first time researchers would be able to differentiate a real signal from a false alarm, even if it was only detected once. The technique can only be used for signals that have travelled 10,000 light years or more to Earth, researchers note. If it was closer to us, the scintillation effect cannot be seen because they are not travelling through enough of the interstellar medium, or ISM. The research is described in a new paper, ‘On Detecting Interstellar Scintillation in Narrowband Radio SETI’, published in The Astrophysical Journal. Read More Battery breakthroughs are about to trigger a transport revolution Huge asteroid nearly crashes into Earth – and is only spotted days later ChatGPT rival with ‘no ethical boundaries’ sold on dark web

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Sister Sledge was right, we are family. It's well-known that all humans share a common ancestor but according to researchers almost all Europeans can trace that back to one guy. That guy is Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor. In 2013, scientists Peter Ralph and Graham Cooper published a study indicating that all Europeans are descendants from the same people, mainly from the ninth century. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Charlemagne, who lived during the 800s allegedly produced eighteen children with seven different women. By number standards, this means that people of European decent are most likely related to Charlemagne in some way. Celebrities like Bill Hader and Brooke Shields have revealed that they share the common ancestor. Even Sir Christopher Lee is a descendant of the Holy Roman Emperor. And if you're European, you probably are too. According to Scientific American, "because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants, everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him." Some Europeans who take a DNA tests can see even their lineage directly traced back to the common ancestor. But before you jump at the chance to see for yourself, more than likely it won't pop up- even if you are a descendant of the Roman Emperor. This is because bloodlines have been diluted and not all genes are passed on from parent to child. So while you may be vaguely related to Charlemagne, you may not carry any of the same genes. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Two of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence firms are being sued by celebrities including Sarah Silverman. The writers claim that ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Facebook parent company Meta used their text to train their artificial intelligence systems, without permission. “Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system in March 2023, we’ve been hearing from writers, authors, and publishers who are concerned about its uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials, including thousands of books,” wrote Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, the lawyers behind the class-action complaint. Mr Saveri and Mr Butterick have already launched legal proceedings against GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant, as well as Stable Diffusion, the popular AI image generator. They call the systems “industrial-strength plagiarists” on a website built to track and promote that work that also includes the complaints that have been filed in California. Last week, the two lawyers launched class-action lawsuits against OpenAI, arguing that it was remixing the “copyrighted works of thousands of book authors—and many others—without consent, compensation, or credit”. That complaint was initially launched on behalf of two authors, Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, who have since been joined by Sarah Silverman, Chris Golden and Richard Kadrey. The lawsuit alleges that their work had been downloaded from “shadow library” websites that make it possible to download large amounts of text in bulk. They were then used to train the ChatGPT and LLaMa systems made by Meta and OpenAI, it claims. The suit shows that ChatGPT will summarise those authors’ books when prompted, infringing copyright and not giving any of the copyright information about the books, the lawyers claim. The authors “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material”, the lawsuit says. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent. Meta declined to comment. Read More Will.i.am hails AI technology as ‘new renaissance’ in music Instagram Threads hits 100 million users SpaceX smashes reusable rocket record as Elon Musk makes bold Starship claim

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