Search for alien life finds laptop

SETI: The group's database, which culls IP addresses, helps find the missing computer.

The Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley has signed up more than 1 million volunteers worldwide in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. They've found no aliens yet, but they have at least turned up one missing laptop.

The Berkeley effort, better known as SETI@home, uses volunteers' computers when they go into screen-saver mode to crunch data from the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico. The computers are trying to spot signals in the radio noise from space.

One volunteer, James Melin, a software programmer for a county government agency in Minnesota, runs SETI@home on his seven home computers, which periodically check in with University of California servers. Whenever that happens, the servers record the remote computer's Internet Protocol address and file it in a database that people running the SETI software can view.

One of the computers on which Melin installed SETI @home is his wife's laptop, which was stolen from the couple's Minneapolis home Jan. 1.

Annoyed -- and alarmed that someone could delete the screenplays and novels that his wife, Melinda Kimberly, was writing -- Melin monitored the SETI@home database to see if the stolen laptop would "talk" to the Berkeley servers. Indeed, the laptop checked in three times within a week, and Melin sent the IP addresses to the Minneapolis Police Department.