The Daily Galaxy: News from Planet Earth & Beyond

"The Google Code": Powering the U.S. Spook World

I wonder if anyone in the CIA Google'd the Treadstone Project? Where is Robert Ludlum when we need him!

With the increasing intensity of global USA and British electronic and satellite surveillance of al Qaeda, the leadership of the global terrorist groups have gone "dark," an unintended consequence of successful surveillance by NSA and other intelligence sources -many using sophisticated keyword analysis of the daily global electronic communications traffic. To make the spooks job even more difficult, most of the top terrorists have switched from using satellite phones and email to employing centuries-old hand-delivered messenger networks, cutouts at Internet cafes, and a vast network of honey stores that have existed throughout the Islamic world since biblical times to generate income and secretly move weapons, drugs, and agents.

New Habitable Planets in Space

Frank Drake, the author of the famed "Drake Equation," which estimates the possible range of intelligent civilizations in our home Milky Way Galaxy, which contains about 400 billion stars will be giving a talk on Thursday, March 31, at the Alaska's Barrow Arctic Science Consortium on  "new habitable planets in space, and our new searches for the inhabitants."

Will Google Maps 'Rewrite' 21st-Century SciFi Novels?

Taking urban sci-fi to another level, the British headquarters of Penguin Books recently premiered a new website called - We Tell Stories. The basic idea is that six authors will tell six stories over a period of six weeks.

The first story, The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, was created integrating using Google Maps as an integral part of the plot structure.  In Charles Cumming's story, inspired by John Buchan's famed novel The 39 Steps, we follow a man, watching from above, in an omniscient satellite view.

Greatest Environmental Threats of the Future -NanoMaterials, Manmade Viruses & Biomimetic Robots

Forget about rising global water levels: Researchers, policymakers and environmental campaigners have identified 25 potential future threats to the environment including nanomaterials, manmade viruses and biomimetic robots. In addition to well-publicized risks such as toxic nanomaterials, the acidification of the ocean and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, the list includes some spooky scifi sounding possibilities:

A New Place to Search for Life's Ancient Traces on the Red Planet

Scientists using a Mars-orbiting camera designed and operated at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility have discovered the first evidence for deposits of chloride minerals, salts, in numerous places on Mars. These deposits, say the scientists, show where water was once abundant and may also provide evidence for the existence of former life on Mars. Salt deposits point to a lot of water, which could potentially remain standing in pools as it evaporates. For life, it's all about a habitat that endures for some time.

Over a long period of time, water flowing into a basin can concentrate the organic materials that could be well preserved in the salt. On Earth, salt has proven remarkably good at preserving organic material. For example, bacteria have been revived in the laboratory after being preserved in salt deposits for millions of years.

Our New Robotic Overlords -Tool-Using Octodons?

Everyone knows that the Japanese are engineering the imminent robotic destruction of Earth  What you might not know is that's only stage one of their plan.  When the dust settles and the last surviving humans claw their way out of the rubble, they'll immediately be enslaved by their new overlords: tool-using rats.

For reasons best known to their psychologists, researchers at the Japanese RIKEN facility spent two months teaching rats how to use a small rake.  Bush-tailed rats, specifically, and although the species (known as Degu) is technically an Octodon, quibbling over the exact genus of rodent the scientists just trained to replace us isn't the important point here.

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Harry Potter Wizardry Spawns New Ivy League Sport: Quidditch

Monday afternoon, the Middlebury Quidditch team swooped into Princeton University as part of its annual spring break Quidditch tour in an attempt to promote its ground-bound version of the sport at other American universities. So far this year, Middlebury has visited Bard and Penn and has games scheduled against Columbia and Vassar.

Like good Harry's gravity-defying favorite pastime, the non-magical version of Quidditch features seven players on a team, one quaffle, three bludgers and a golden snitch. This is where all similarities between the versions of Quidditch played at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and at Tiger Stadium end.

 

Will Cloning Save Earth's Biological Heritage?

“Modern life” is killing off the animal kingdom, but there are no easy solutions for the crisis. Some scientists believe that cloning may offer a partial solution. While it may make only a tiny dent in the problem, scientists argue that at least it would preserve the world’s biological heritage from total annihilation.

Laptops of the Future

A lot has changed in the 20 years since the first laptop computers appeared, including gigahertz processors, color screens and wireless data, but none are as profound as the change on the drawing boards at the world's leading technology designers.

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!" -A Saturn Moon Teaming with Organic Chemicals

NASA's Cassini spacecraft discovered a surprising organic brew erupting in geyser-like fashion from Saturn's moon Enceladus during a close flyby on March 12. Scientists are stunned that this tiny moon is so active, "hot" and teeming with water vapor and organic chemicals.

"Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life," said Dennis Matson, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We have quite a recipe for life on our hands, but we have yet to find the final ingredient, liquid water, but Enceladus is only whetting our appetites for more."

Can fish be far behind?

Evolution of Life was Stalled for 2 Billion Years

A coherent picture of the environmental conditions that led to the evolution of animal life is finally emerging. Scientists say that oxygen deficiency and a lack of the heavy metal molybdenum in the oceans had blocked the evolution of life on Earth for nearly two billion years.

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Planet of the Monkeys -A Comedy Classic

Ernie Klein's comedy portrayal of life on Planet of the Monkeys -a scathing, brilliant dissection  of Planet of the Monkeys history: evolution, religion, music, greed, war and peace. R rated, not work-safe (audio only).

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Hummm...

Arctic "Time Travel": Exploring a 26-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem

There are few regions on the planet as strange and mysterious as the untouched seafloors beneath the Arctic ice. Over the past several years, scientists have launched expeditions to reveal exotic seafloor life, focusing on an area of hydrothermal vent fields along the Gakkel Ridge, an area that has been almost entirely cut off from other ecosystems for at least 26 million years.

"Boskop Man": Was There an Extinct Breed of Humans With an Intellectual Capacity Far Surpassing Our Own?

Macmillan publishing have brought us a book on the hyper-intelligent Boskop species, an extinct breed of humans with an intellectual capacity far surpassing our own.  It's a stirring tale of amazing abilities and wonderful creatures; tales featuring fictional creatures usually are.

Most sources reporting on this offshoot species mention the fact that 'The term "Boskop Man" is no longer used by anthropologists', brushing it off like it's a minor technical dispute over naming conventions.  It is not. 

100% Organic Software -Your New "Green" Firefox Browser

Move over Whole Foods! The Mozilla corporation, creator of the superb Firefox web browser, has declared their software to be 100% organic. In a revealing interview with with Treehugger, Paul Kim, Mozilla VP, who helped launch Firefox 1.5 and 2.0, explains why the term is relevant.

According Kim, Mozilla is  not trying to create a new model. Instead, what they're trying to do is "to help new sets of people who know nothing about open source software quickly start to understand that Firefox is something different from the software they're currently using to access the Web. 'Organic software' is a concept we came up with that we thought would resonate with end users in ways that 'free software' doesn't. I think 'free software', at least in the US, doesn't carry the same valence that 'FLOSS' does in, say, Europe."

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Are Drones Spying in the Sky Over Miami?

Like a scene out of a sci-fi version of Miami Vice, Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, drone technology to beef up their fight against crime.

Is Robot Evolution Mirroring the Evolution of Life?

“I see a strong parallel between the evolution of robot intelligence and the biological intelligence that preceded it. The largest nervous systems doubled in size about every fifteen million years since the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Robot controllers double in complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us within a half century."

Hans Moravec,  pioneer in mobile robot researcher and founder of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.

"78 Billion" -A 'Hubble' Video: Journey to the Beginning of Time

It helps to put things in perspective here on our frenetic little planet with a look at this extraordinarily powerful and moving video of the Hubble Space Telescope mapping of the Universe, whose known size is 78 billion light years across.

The video of the images is the equivalent of using a "time machine" to look into the past to witness the early formation of galaxies, perhaps less than one billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang.

Skulls of African Lions Unearthed at Tower of London -Gifts to 13th & 14th Century English Kings

The skulls of two lions, which were kept by royals during medieval times, have the same genetic make-up as the north African Barbary lion, a DNA study shows. Experts believe the animals were gifts to English monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries.

The two well-preserved lion skulls were recovered during excavations of the moat at the Tower of London in 1937. They have been radiocarbon dated to AD 1280-1385 and AD 1420-1480. Researchers at the University of Oxford extracted DNA from the skulls, and found that it matched that of the north African Barbary lion.

The Interplanetary Mars-Earth Microbe Shuttle -A Galaxy Classic

A little-known fact is that each year Earth is hit by by half a dozen or so one-pound or larger rocks that were blasted off the surface of Mars by large impacts and found their way into Earth-crossing orbits. Nearly 10% of all rocks blasted off into space from the Red Planet end up crashing into Earth.

This natural "interplanetary transportation system" begs a fascinating question: If primitive and nearly indestructible micro-organisms exist on a given planet, must they by definition as a natural act or nature, travel to their immediate solar-system neighbors?

New Theories on the Ancient Supercontinent of Gondwana

The history of Earth’s supercontinents is one constant change and new theories to match. A theorized cyclical phenomenon, supercontinents are thought to form roughly every 250 million years. In fact, we currently have a supercontinent of our own today: Eurasia.

New Interactive TV: One That Watches You!

Who watches the watchers?  Apparently, the watchee - JVC is developing a television which will interpret hand gestures.  On the upside this makes it impossible to lose the remote.  On the downside, it may be more exercise than the average daytime