NASA found Balls of Plastic on Mars (UPDATE: It’s a hoax)
[update] It’s a hoax, sorry. Meh. (Also: Die Merkus-Wasser-Story stimmt, die Plastikstory nicht.)
Gestern hat die NASA bekanntgegeben, dass sie Wassereis an den Polarkappen des Merkur gefunden haben: New Data Show Mercury Almost Certainly Has Buried Ice at Its North Pole. Finde ich fast langweilig, ich denke, dass Wasser ziemlich häufig auf anderen Planeten – oder besser: Brocken im Weltall – vorkommt.
Aber diese Meldung hier finde ich spannend: Curiosity untersucht grade eine Ansammlung kleiner Kügelchen und die sind aus Plastik. Plastik! Noch wichtiger: Das Mars-Plastik ist genau solches, das nur mit dem Einsatz von Petrochemikalien geformt werden kann, was stark auf Öl auf dem Mars hindeutet und dieses Öl ist bislang nur bekannt als Fossil ehemaligen Lebens und das wiederum heisst: Plastikkügelchen auf dem Mars könnten der Beweis dafür sein, dass es mal Leben auf dem Mars gab. Whoa!
The small spheres at Matijevic Hill have different composition and internal structure made completely of plastic. Curiosity’s science team is evaluating a range of possibilities for how they formed. The spheres are up to about an eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter.
Last week Curiosity was able to use its SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) device to confirm the discovery. A robotic arm with a complex system of Spectral Analysis devices was able to vaporize and identify gasses from the sample, concluding that it is in fact plastic. How plastic formed or ended up on the Martian surface is quite an exciting mystery that sparks many questions. The type of plastic sampled as we know so far can only be formed using petrochemicals, meaning not only that there could possibly be a source of oil on the Red Planet, but that somehow it got turned into plastic. Even more interesting is that oil or petrochemicals used to create this type of plastic are only known to come from ancient fossilized organic materials, such as zooplankton and algae, which geochemical processes convert into oil pointing to the earthshaking evidence that there was once life on mars.
Search for Aliens nixed by the BBC Bureaucracy
Brian Cox wollte live im TV nach Signalen von Aliens auf einem neu entdeckten Planeten suchen. Das wurde ihm von der BBC untersagt, wegen „regulations and health and safety and everything“. Ah, Bürokraten! Auch ‘ne Kunstform für sich. Gemacht hat er’s dann übrigens trotzdem.
“The BBC actually said, ‘But you can’t do that because we need to go through the regulations and health and safety and everything in case we discover a signal from an alien civilisation’.
“You mean we would discover the first hint that there is other intelligent life in the universe beyond Earth, live on air, and you’re worried about the health and safety of it?
“It was incredible. They did have guidelines. Compliance.”
Brian Cox’s search for alien life ‘nixed by BBC health and safety tsars’
Interactive Drake Equation: How many alien Civilizations exist?
Schicke Spielerei von BBC Future: Eine interaktive Visualisierung der Drake-Gleichung zur Berechnung der Anzahl der fortgeschrittenen und intelligenten Zivilisationen in unserer Galaxis.
Today, we live in an age of exploration, where robots on Mars and planet-hunting telescopes are beginning to allow us to edge closer to an answer. While we wait to establish contact, one technique we can use back on Earth is an equation that American astronomer Frank Drake formulated in the 1960s to calculate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations may exist in the Milky Way galaxy.
It is not a rigorous equation, offering a wide range of possible answers. Instead it is more a tool used to help understand how many worlds might be out there and how those estimates change as missions like Kepler, a telescope that is currently searching for Earth-like planets, begin to discover more about our universe. Until ground-based observations, space telescopes and planet-roving robots uncover any tell-tale signs of life, what better way to speculate on how many intelligent alien civilizations may exist than to explore the universe with our interactive version of the equation.
Extra Terrestrial Hobo Nickels
Hobo Nickel sind amerikanische 5-Cent-Münzen, deren Gravur „remixed“ wurde. Ist ‘ne alte Tradition und geht zurück bis Mitte 18. Jahrhunderts und populär wurden die Münzen während der 1920er Depression, als viele fahrende Arbeiter die Dinger machten (daher der Name). Kannte ich, wusste ich. Neu sind mir allerdings Alien- und UFO-Versionen davon.
This selection of extra terrestrial coins includes some of the most intriguing hobo nickels on Earth. If you’re not familiar, hobo nickels are any coin-not just nickels- of which the original carvings have been altered.
The practice of defacing coins dates back as early as the 1750′s when a man would make a “love token” for his lady by smoothing the coin and adding their initials. The art of hobo nickeling had a surge of popularity after the release of the Buffalo nickel since the large Indian head offered the perfect amount of space for creating a new scene and people had a lot of time on their hands due to the lack of jobs during the Great Depression.
EXTRA TERRESTRIAL NICKELS ARE OUT OF THIS WORLD (via Coudal)
Alien Abductee Portraits by Steven Hirsch
Steven Hirsch, über dessen Crustypunks ich vor zwei Jahren gebloggt hatte, knippst jetzt Portraits von Leuten, die von Aliens entführt wurden. Inklusive Zeichnungen der Außerirdischen und den Stories um die Entführung. Großartig! Das da oben ist Cynthia, die Alien-DNA im Blut hat.
When I was in my thirties I found out from my father the truth about a government experiment that I was part of in which they were using other alien DNA to create me. I also have been on the ships most of my life off and on. I’ve had lots of contacts. Most of my contacts began when I was a teenager although I had it when I was younger. I was being taken. I’ve been taken on ships quite a bit.
I’ve also been on various ships. Mother ships and transporter ships. I’ve got to meet numerous types of beings. I’ve met Salamander beings and I’ve met Greys, various different types of Greys. I’ve also met the Blue Arcturians which are incredible. They all have their own personalities and their own purposes. So I’ve met Blue Arcturians. I’ve met Andromedans, the Assyrian Warriors of Light. I’ve met the Sirius Nephrons. I’ve also met the Cat People that are from Sirius. I’ve met many. I’ve actually seen people that can shape shift from human looking to Reptilians.
Little Sticky Legs – Alien Abductee Portraits by Steven Hirsch (via Dangerous Minds)
Bundesregierung versteckt UFO-Akten
Ein Abgeordneter hatte ein Dossier beim Wissenschaftlichen Dienst des Bundestags zum Thema „Die Suche nach außerirdischem Leben und die Umsetzung der VN-Resolution A/33/426 (sic!) zur Beobachtung unidentifizierter Flugobjekte und extraterrestrischen Lebensformen“. In Auftrag gegeben. Das Dossier wird zurückgehalten und nun legt der Bundestag Berufung gegen ein Urteil des Berliner Verwaltungsgericht ein, um die Herausgabe zu verhindern. Deshalb, liebe Bundesregierung: Welche welterschütternden Erkenntnisse über UFOs und Außerirdische haben Sie zu verbergen? Wurde der Bundestag von Mothmen from Mars unterwandert? Hat Dr. Günter Krings von der CDU mehr als einen Tentakel?
Der Bundestag geht gegen ein Urteil des Berliner Verwaltungsgerichts für mehr Transparenz seiner Wissenschaftlichen Dienste (WD) vor. „Die Bundestagsverwaltung hat Berufung eingelegt“, sagte ein Sprecher dem Tagesspiegel am Dienstag. Während des laufenden Verfahrens würden „keine weiteren öffentlichen Erklärungen“ dazu abgegeben. […]
Schlagzeilen hatte der Fall gemacht, weil ein Mann ein Gutachten zur „Suche nach außerirdischem Leben“ herausverlangt hatte. Der Bundestag verweigerte das Ufo-Dossier und argumentierte, die WD-Ausarbeitungen seien parlamentarische Zuarbeit.
Informationsfreiheit – Bundestag klagt gegen Transparenz (via Netzpolitik)
Es gibt übrigens tatsächlich eine Website namens Exopolitik Deutschland. Wo ist mein Alu-Hut?
Surfing the Alien Invasion
Youtube Direktsurf, via Dead Cat Bounce
Youtube-User keef70 hat Surfaufnahmen mit einer CGI-Alieninvasion aufgehübscht. I love the Smell of Thermal Detonators in the Morning.
Area 51-themed Alien-Brothel for Humans
In Nevada eröffnet Amerikas berühmtester Zuhälter demnächst einen Puff mit Alien-Ladies.
The reality television star and outspoken sex merchant recently bought a rundown bordello 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and unveiled plans to renovate and reopen it with a science fiction theme. He is calling it Alien Cathouse and promising “girls from another world.”
Hof has turned to an old friend to plan the costumes and decor: Hollywood Madam turned Pahrump resident Heidi Fleiss. “She’s the chief alien design queen,” he said.
Hof purchased the brothel and adjacent gas station, bar and convenience store on U.S. Highway 95 from notorious longtime Nye County brothel owner Maynard “Joe” Richards. The store is being rebranded as the Area 51 Alien Travel Center and will feature its own line of merchandise emblazoned with little green men and women.
It’s all an attempt to cash in on the property’s location just south of the federal installation formerly known as the Nevada Test Site — though nowhere near the actual Area 51.
Alien Cathouse brothel to feature ‘girls from another world’ (via Gizmodo)
Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport
Wieder was gelernt: Als 1994 gleich sechs Meteoriten auf den Jupiter zusteuerte, verabschiedete die Gemeinde Green River in Wyoming eine Resolution, laut der einen Abschnitt ihres Flughafens offiziell in „Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport“ umbenannt wurde und für Flüchtlinge vom Jupiter gedacht war.
Green River, Wyo., is certainly neighborly: In 1994, when NASA determined that up to six meteors might strike Jupiter, Green River’s city council designated an airstrip south of town as the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. They asked NASA to broadcast the news to any fleeing Jovians and warned residents to “prepare themselves to make welcome any refugees who might cast themselves upon our mercy.”
Mayor George Eckman told the Rock Springs Rocket-Miner, “I feel it is a gesture that could be made and should be made by someone on the planet Earth to fellow citizens of the solar system.”
The two council members who opposed the resolution pointed out that the region already has a problem with illegal aliens and noted the local housing shortage. But the mile-long runway remains open.
Bookmarks for August 3rd: NYC Garbage Art, Hofmanns Potion, Spaceflight Psychology
Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared on Vimeo
Retro Future: Space Art Update
Spaceflight Psychology and the New ‘Right Stuff’ | Wired Science | Wired.com
AFP: Icelanders hand in draft of world’s first ‘web’ constitution
Princess Leia Costume Made of Duct Tape
Heather Holliday, Sword Swallower on Vimeo
LEGO Dragon Breathes Actual Fire | Geekosystem
“Space Night – Earth Views” 4-10 komplett online
NYC Garbage, Trashy Art In A Cube From New York City
Hacker stock art – Boing Boing
Mac ‘n’ Cheese on Vimeo: Mac 'n' Cheese is an animated short directed and created by four students at the Utrecht School of Arts in the Netherlands. This roughly two minute animation took about five months to make, and about a bajillion peanut butter sandwiches.Synopsis: When you find yourself running scared and running out of energy, there's only a few options left to outrun your opponent through the southern desert. Stopping at nothing, watch these two guys wear each other out and rip through boundaries hitherto unbroken.
Mona Lisa – 6,239 dot to dot drawing on the Behance Network: I created an A0 poster with dots numbered from 1 to 6,329 and took a time lapse video of myself linking them all up over 9 hours. Here's how it turned out.
The Mission to Get Osama Bin Laden : The New Yorker: What happened that night in Abbottabad.
Essential Mix by Paul Kalkbrenner (30.7.2011) [Mix,Download] | Dressed Like Machines: This Essential Mix is a live set of Kalkbrenner’s own productions and remixes, including tracks from his new album ‘Icke Wieder’.
Hofmann’s Potion (LSD documentary) – YouTube: The documentary delves into the little known early history of the world's most notorious psychedelic.Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "turn on, tune in and drop out," lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was being used by researchers trying to understand the human mind. This documentary is a fascinating look at the story of "acid" before it hit the streets.Featuring interviews with many LSD pioneers, Hofmann's Potion is much more than a simple chronicle of the drug's early days. <br />
With thoughtful interviews, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, it is an invitation to look at LSD, and our world, with a more open, compassionate mind.
The Bible of Western War, Now Featuring Cartoon Animals | Danger Room | Wired.com: On War is Clausewitz’s attempt to distill warfare down to its enduring essentials. Its only equal is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. If you’ve heard the phrase, “war is politics by other means,” you know the nickel version. If you want to go for the jackpot, stroll over to one of the war colleges or onto any military listserv to hear people debate Clausewitz’s relevance to their pet issue or dispute what he really said like he was Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall.But if you’d like something in between, Fitzgerald’s Clausewitz for Kids blog is slowly recasting On War, section by section, into a lecture series in the Prussian forest, conducted by Hare Clausewitz (get it?), the intense-looking rabbit officer pictured above in Napoleonic-era regalia.
CINEMETRICS: cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.
Christian Groß — SMS to Paper Airplanes: The text messages were filtered and analyzed using PROCESSING. The sender was encoded by the direction of the paper airplane, the length of the message with its size and the amount of positive emotional words with the amounts of folds. Additionally the paper airplanes were divided in two types depending on the length of their text. Finally, the paper airplanes resulting from this construction plan were placed in the room depending on the time when they were sent, as well as their emotional value.
Chicago: The Ferris Bueller high school – YouTube: You can make a strong case for The Blues Brothers as the definitive Chicago film, but Ferris Bueller's Day Off almost seems like a 103-minute commercial from the Chicago Office Of Tourism. That was no accident. Director (and Chicagoan) John Hughes described the film as his "love letter" to the city. He wanted to capture "not just the architecture, but the spirit."
In Test Tube, Hint of Chemicals Coming Alive – NYTimes.com: SAN DIEGO — Here in a laboratory perched on the edge of the continent, researchers are trying to construct Life As We Don’t Know It in a thimbleful of liquid.
Animation-Short: First Contact
(Vimeo Direktcontact, via Superpunch)
Schöner Kurzfilm der Media Design School darüber, warum die NASA letzte Woche keine Aliens gefunden hat und warum die Anzahl von UFO-Sichtungen seit den 50ern auch eher rückläufig ist. Hier noch ein Making Of.
NASA finds alien Lifeform on EARTH!
Die Katze ist aus dem Sack, die NASA hat zwar keine Aliens auf dem Titan gefunden, dafür aber eine völlig neue Form des Lebens im Mono Lake, ein „alkalischer Salzsee in Mono County im zentral-östlichen Teil von Kalifornien.“ (Wikipedia)
Dort haben sie Bakterien gefunden, die aus Arsen bestehen. Eine komplett neue Form des Lebens die mit allem bisher bekannten Leben auf der Erde nichts zu tun hat. Was das für die Wahrscheinlichkeit von Leben auf anderen Planeten bedeutet, muss ich wohl niemanden erklären.
Von Gizmodo:
Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. […]
All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible.
[update]
Nature: Arsenic-eating microbe may redefine chemistry of life: „Oddball bacterium can survive without one of biology’s essential building blocks.“
New Scientist: Arsenic-eating bacteria point to new life forms: „We could be witnessing the first signs of a “shadow biosphere” – a parallel form of life on Earth with a different biochemistry to all others. Bacteria that grow without phosphorous, one of the six chemical elements thought to be essential for life, have been isolated from California’s Mono Lake. Instead of phosphorous, the bacteria substitute the deadly poison arsenic.“
Discover Mag: Mono Lake bacteria build their DNA using arsenic (and no, this isn’t about aliens) „Phosphorus helps to form the backbone of DNA and it’s a crucial part of ATP, the molecule that acts as a cell’s energy currency. Arsenic sits just below phosphorus in the periodic table. The two elements have such similar properties that arsenic can usurp the place of phosphorus in many chemical reactions. But arsenic is a poor understudy – when it stands in for phosphorus, it produces similar but less stable products. This partially explains why the element is so toxic. But the bacteria of Mono Lake have clearly found a way to cope with this.“
PopSci: NASA’s Newly Discovered Arsenic-Loving Bacteria Are Fascinating, but Not Aliens „This finding essentially tells us that we should ditch these assumptions and broaden our horizons. If a humble Earthling bacteria can subsist on a poisonous chemical, then who knows what might lurk elsewhere in the solar system? We’ll have to recalibrate our mass spectrometers.“
NASA found something in Space
Die NASA hat für den 2. Dezember eine Pressekonferenz anberaumt, in der sie über eine Entdeckung informieren will, „that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.“ Jason Kottke hat ein bisschen recherchiert und alle Beteiligten haben auf die ein oder andere Art mit Astrobiologie zu tun. Mein Tipp: Rudimentäre Lebensform auf Titan. (Aliens! Finally!)
[update] „It’s not that.“ Schade: „I’m sad to quell some of the @kottke-induced excitement about possible extraterrestrial life. I’ve seen the Science paper. It’s not that.“
Alien Invasion today!
Irgendjemand heute schon Aliens getroffen?
September 13, 2010 — A newly-published 352-page book by a retired Air Force officer, Stanley A. Fulham, tentatively predicts October 13, 2010 as the date for a massive UFO display over the world’s principal cities. According to the author, the aliens will neither land nor communicate on that date; they are aware from eons of experience with other planets in similar conditions their sudden intervention would cause fear and panic.
Retired NORAD Officer’s New Book Predicts a Tentative Worldwide UFO Display on October 13, 2010 (via Coudal)
