The pandemic has been hard, but we have managed to get some research done at the PSETI Center for the past few months.

In Fall 2020, we had the second instance of the Penn State graduate SETI course (now on the books officially as ASTRO 576) and the students’ final projects were great! Some of the students have chosen to polish them up and submit them for publication, and the first one is now out!

Julia LaFond has extended the work of Alan Reyes from the 2018 instance of the class to flesh out and expand the SETI bibliography at ADS.  The paper, now peer-reviewed and accepted to JBIS, is on the arXiv here, describes how we now categorize papers, and our workflow for finding new papers and providing monthly updates.

Thanks to work by Macy Huston, we are now working with James Davenport to maintain the SETI.news mailers.  Macy uses ADS and its nifty library and search features to find potential new papers and applies Julia’s criteria to add papers to the SETI bibgroup on ADS.  Then you can restrict any search you like at ADS to bibgroup:SETI and these papers will be included, like this:

Every month, Macy then adds a soupçon of editing to the new entries and sends the latest batch to James, whose algorithm produces the SETI.news mailing for our subscribers:

We hope this is useful for the community.  Do subscribe to seti.news, use the ADS bibliography, and tell us what you think!