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" Yes, George Washington was pretty great, but this holiday weekend I&amp;#039;m celebrating a different point of national pride: spectacular scientific achievement. I&amp;#039;ve flown to St. Louis, where the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is holding its annual meeting. Though it was 5\u00B0 outside this morning, here inside the conference center several hundred attendees had the warm glow of PowerPoints to keep us warm.  A good chunk of today was devoted to the search for life on other planets. Margaret Turnbull, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, took the opportunity to announce her short list of potentially habitable stars\u2014five to hone in on with radio antennas, and five good candidates to search for Earth-like planets. (Unfortunately, while 42 of the telescopes in the new Allen array will be operational this year, NASA&amp;#039;s Terrestrial Planet Finder program is to be deferred indefinitely under its proposed 2007 budget.) Turnbull whittled down the list of 147 known stars by using several criteria conducive to the formation of life. For the radio scan, the star had to be 3 billion years old and have at least 50 percent of the iron content of the sun. Stars to search for Earth-like planets had to have enough luminosity to suggest good prospects for a habitable zone. The two most promising candidates, respectively, were beta CVn, a sun-like star about 26 light-years away, and epsilon Indi A, a star about 11.8 light-years away.\u2013-J. Bogo  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a507/2334076/>