ET is more likely to be sending out short, directed messages than continuous signals beamed in all directions, experts said.

”This approach is more like Twitter and less like War and Peace,” said Californian physicist Dr James Benford, president of Microwave Sciences Inc.

He and twin brother Gregory, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine, looked at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) from the aliens’ point of view.

They concluded that Seti scientists may have been taking the wrong approach for the past five decades.

The discovery of the timber henge just metres from its giant stone double has been hailed as the most exciting find the site in 50 years.

A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

“When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.