Are you ready to send a message to the stars? If so, head over to HellofromEarth.net (header above) and type in a 160-character message in English (think of it as an extra-long but non-pointless Tweet if you need to) on the site.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, these messages are being aimed at Gliese581d, a planet located 20 lightyears from Earth which is supposed to be orbiting another star in what’s being called a Goldilocks (“not too hot, not too cold… just right”) zone.

The messages are expected to be sent on August 24th via NASA’s Tidbinbilla space station outside Canberra, Australia. Don’t expect a quick answer though: delivery isn’t scheduled until 2029. And replies aren’t expected to reach us until 2049 at the earliest.

I have to start by saying that the BBC rocks.

Seriously, how many news services can deliver a straight-faced story about crop circles caused by wallabies high on poppies?  And I had never once considered the possibility that these smaller cousins of the kangaroo had Gummi-Bear-jumping-here-and-there-and-everywhere powers when under the influence of an opiate. Surely they’d need said jumping abilities to cross continents and states, popping up all over the world and leaving behind tamped down grass and earth in a concentric circle.

To think, all this time I’d been pinning the blame solely on aliens in circular spacecraft.

Somewhere in one of J.D. Robb’s stories is a time-travelling boy who gleefully discovers flying cars in 2060.

But in one of those cases where truth is stranger than fiction, flying cars already exist in this time period. And this isn’t an April Fool’s Day hoax either. Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a startup called Terrafugia teamed up to develop a car with fold-up wings that also has the capability to get airborne. Unsurprisingly, the vehicle has been named the Transition.

Sometimes the best defense is the smallest one

For 2,000 years a pest that measures about the width of a pinkie fingernail from end to end has menaced the olive trees of the Mediterranean.

In 1998, the olive fruit fly was  detected in Los Angeles; it has since managed to spread to all olive growing regions in California. That’s not good for the state since it produces nearly all of the olives grown in the country. Olive production, which can rise to as much as 166,000 short tons in a year, sunk last year to just 65,000 tons, barely half of the originally projected production figures.

Behind every liberated woman is a ... hard-working washer?

In time for International Women’s Day, described as a day to celebrate “the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future,” comes an article from the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano with the following introductory sentences:

“In the 20th century, what contributed most to the emancipation of western women? The debate is still open. Some say it was the pill, others the liberalization of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. Others go even further: the washing machine.”

Articles like this one have already covered the controversial lines. The article in the original Italian appears here; use your own translator of choice to parse the entire text.

A study in the March 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association has found that children in the United States aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables to meet the recommended dietary guidelines.

In ASL, the sign for “forever” is a combination of the signs for “always” and “still.”

Lancelot the yellow lab achieved immortality when he died last year by living on in his owners’ memories.

His immortality was assured in another way when his owners paid a commercial cloning company to produce a puppy with Lancelot’s DNA.

Like Alton Brown, I believe in multitaskers.

There’s a reason why Swiss Army knives never go out of style, why it seems each new cell phone model gets closer and closer to being not just a portable entertainment center, but the entertainment center of choice.

Right now these gadgets can surf the series of tubes to find out what time happy hour is at Candybar,  shoot video footage of a car accident, listen to music, and sync with the not-so portable devices you left at home.  And, oh yeah, they let you make and receive calls too.

There are many reasons to read Eric Simons’ Darwin Slept Here, a sort-of travel book about retracing the footsteps of Charles Darwin when he was a twentysomething biologist wandering around South America. Here are a few:

1. To understand why Eric demonstrates the fine art of the discus throw using inflatable iguanas (really, they’re props) in the following video:

Treebeard asked. “What are you, I wonder? I cannot place you. You do not seem to come in the old lists that I learned when I was young.”

“Merry replied: “Yet we’ve been about for quite a long time. We’re hobbits.”

“Why not make a new line?” said Pippin.

—from The Two Towers, Chapter 4: Treebeard

A recent paper from Karen Baab of New York’s Stony Brook University and Kieran McNulty of the University of Minnesota adds fuel to the ongoing debate of whether or not the bones found on Flores Island back in 2003 are from a new species or else from very tiny humans with unusually small heads.