The Kepler space telescope may be dead in the water, er space, but the data it has collected over the years lives on. A new initiative is set to use this data in an effort to locate alien spaceships, Dyson spheres, and a galactic laser internet — and they've been given $200,000 to make it happen.

The Templeton Foundation recently granted the money to Geoff Marcy, a NASA researcher for the Kepler mission. Marcy, who was recently appointed the new Watson and Marilyn Alberts Chair for SETI at the University of California at Berkeley, is a superstar when it comes to detecting planets outside of our solar system. His work has resulted in the discovery of over 100 exoplanets, including the first system of planets orbiting a distant star.

And fascinatingly, he's going to use the same approach used to detect exoplanets to search for extraterrestrial artifacts like massive spaceships, Death Star-like objects, and Dyson spheres. By using the transit method, where the dimming of a star indicates the presence of an orbiting planet, Marcy hopes to detect artificial objects as well.

"I do know that if I saw a star that winked out, then at some point it winked back on again, then winked out for a long, long time and then blinked on again, that that would be so weird," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "Obviously that wouldn't constitute the detection of an advanced civilization yet, but it would at least alert us that follow-up observations are warranted."

Indeed, Marcy is on the right track. A Dyson sphere — a hypothetical massive structure of solar panels that would completely surround a star at a distance of about 1 AU (the distance of the Earth to the Sun), would give off a tremendous amount of waste heat in the form of infrared radiation — a potentially detectable signature. The dimming of a Dyson-sphere-enveloped-star would be erratic or quasi-periodic, unlike the regular transit of planets. It's important to remember that a Dyson sphere would consist of a series of interconnected solar panels, and would not be a solid object.

The Court declined to adopt the district court's Ninth Amendment rationale, and instead asserted that the "right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the district court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

...

Among the 100 million people in this country who hold full-time jobs, about 70 percent of them either hate going to work or have mentally checked out to the point of costing their companies money — “roaming the halls spreading discontent,” as Gallup reported. Only 30 percent of workers are “engaged and inspired” at work.

At first glance, this sad survey is further proof of two truisms. One, the timeless line from Thoreau that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The other, less known, came from Homer Simpson by way of fatherly advice, after being asked about a labor dispute by his daughter Lisa. “If you don’t like your job,” he said, “you don’t strike, you just go in there every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”

The American way, indeed. Gallup’s current survey, covering two years, is a follow-up to an earlier poll that found much the same level of passive discontent from 2008 to 2010. Even in an improving economy, people are adrift at work, complaining about a lack of praise, with no sense of mission, and feeling little loyalty to their employer.

...

All of that is certainly at play. But here’s the surprise: the main factor in workplace discontent is not wages, benefits or hours, but the boss. Yes, that cretin from Kentucky Fried Chicken, in countless forms. The survey said there was consistent anger at management types who failed to so much as ask employees about their opinion of the job. Ever.