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Welcome to the science podcast for September 11th, 2020. I'm Sarah Crespi.

First up this week, senior correspondent Dan Cleary talks about a boost in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And as part of a

special issue on how gene expression makes people different, Brandon Pierce joins us to discuss his

work on variation in telomeres. These are the tips of our chromosomes that wear away as we get older,

and they're not the same in all people.

Now we have senior correspondent Daniel Cleary. He wrote this week about a big boost in the

search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Hi, Dan. Hi. The big money that we're talking about

now for SETI research, this is the search for extraterrestrial

intelligence, is not from NASA or other space agencies in this case. Where is this funding

coming from? Well, it's coming from a very rich individual called Yuri Milner, who five years

ago decided that with some of his accumulated wealth, he wanted to support science.

And he supports things like the breakthrough prizes, for one thing, which people may have heard

of, but also breakthrough listen, which is a project to listen out for messages from other

civilizations. And he put $100 million into it over a 10-year span,

and we're halfway through that now.

How has having this much money enter this research space changed things?

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