The wow factor

摘要

Ever since 1993, when funding from America's space agency, n as a, was cut, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (seti), which scans the sky looking for ra dio signals from intelligent aliens, has been inventive in its methods. In particu lar, it was one of the pioneers of the field of "citizen science", in which interested ama teurs are recruited to help professionals crunch data.