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.

But I have to admit the wallaby story just reaffirms my passion for the stoic-faced Brits pounding out these stories for online consumption. The BBC first caught my attention, and my undying affection, back in 2007 with a story about how the British Army was in no way responsible for unleashing man-eating badgers on the villagers of Basra, Iraq.

Yes, you really did just read that last sentence. Go back and read the BBC story for what has to be the single best statement ever delivered and recorded at a press conference. (P.S. If anyone knows where video footage of this moment resides, please let me know. I would love to find out if the British Army spokesman gets through the categorical denial statement with the expression I’ve been imagining for the past few years.)

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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.

Conveniently the Federal Aviation Administration has come up with a classification that the Terrafugia Transition and other such cars can fit under: Light Sport Aircraft. It’s good to know that if Terrafugia does get “roadable planes” on the market by 2011 as they seem to think they can, potential owners and drivers – or should they be called pilots? Drilots? Pivers? No matter, we have at least two years to come up with an acceptable term – will know who they’ll need to contact to become qualified behind the wheel of a Transition or similar vehicle.

Admittedly all the transition talk brings back memories of the flying car that made it into the pages of the Neiman-Marcus Christmas Catalog a few years ago with a price tag of nearly half a million dollars. Sorry, Transition, but the Batplane-looking Moller SkyCar still looks cooler, and not just because of the shiny red paint, or the promise of taking to the skyways at 350 miles per hour when traffic is at a standstill.

Word of warning: at this speed, it’s probably not a good idea to ask for a top-down model…

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.

Combating the Mediterranean pest has been tricky, and research into countermeasures got dissed by Sarah Palin during the recent presidential campaign.

One method being applied involves controlling the fruit fly’s population by unleashing predators, in this case wasps, into the area. The trick with unleashing a non-native species into a new territory however, is finding out whether or not the biological control can stick to its previously determined prey. Otherwise, it could become a new pest that in turn needs to be controlled.

An article in the February issue of the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research magazine features Agricultural Research Service entomologist Victoria Yokoyama, who led a team that recently unleashed a new biological weapon  to counter the olive fruit flies’ depredations in the state: an African wasp that eats the young fruit flies hatched in the olives before the flies can grow up to eat the olives themselves.

Its worth noting that Yokoyama’s team isn’t the first one to come up with a biological control for the olive fruit fly, just the most recent. A couple of years ago, researchers at UC Berkeley released a Pakistani wasp that specifically targets the olive fruit fly called Psyttalia ponerophaga in several test orchards.

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.

If you read the rest of the article, the argument appears to be that the washing machine countered attempts made post-World War II by men who came home to find their wives had gone Rosie the Riveter instead of just staying home and tending the house and family left behind.

The washing machine, wrote Giulia Galeotti, was a technological development that meant anyone could do the laundry, which in turn meant women suddenly had the time to do what they wanted outside the home.

The logic behind the above statement boggles the mind. Really? Then what about baking mixes ( Duncan Hines is named for a man) and TV meals and refrigerators and the pill? Oh wait, the Vatican has nothing nice to say about that. Maybe that’s why they chose to honor the washing machine instead.

Galeotti added at the end that the creation of the laundromat transformed laundry into a social activity.  But haven’t washerwomen gathered at rivers and other bodies of water for centuries? Didn’t Jesus meet washer women in the Gospel of John? Did Renoir paint this from his imagination alone?

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.

The study’s findings are based on data collected from 6,500 children who were divided into three age groups: 2-to-5 year olds; 6-to-11 year olds; and 12-to-18 year olds.

According to researchers at Ohio State University, the youngest children ate more fruits and drank more juice than the older children while the adolescents ate the most vegetables. But they also found that nearly half of all the vegetables eaten by all three groups were fried potatoes, and less than 10 percent of the vegetables the children ate were either dark green or orange in color.

This disinterest in eating fruits and vegetables might be due to influences such as the Veggietales’ original Bunny Song. (Which reminds me, does he just want “a plate, a book and a bunny” or “a plate, a fork and a bunny”?)

If this is the case, perhaps another song from a different children’s show might have the opposite effect. Over the weekend I got hold of Songs from the Street, a 3-CD collection of well-loved songs, well-known artists and classic song segments involving both great music and great artists from 35 years of Sesame Street.

One of the best songs in the collection is the one from Captain Vegetable, as voiced by the immortal Jim Henson. If you didn’t watch the video above, the song features a caped rabbit who loves his carrot and celery and goes about convincing children that regular helpings of vegetables is better than constantly eating candy and spaghetti.

If they’d played this segment more often, Cookie Monster might not have had to suffer the indignity of acknowledging that cookies are a sometimes food.

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.

This week, Lancelot Encore came home. The owners remarked on the puppy’s assumption — or should be it resumption? — of authority over the 9 other dogs in the household within hours of his arrival.

To his owners, the lab is a second chance to be with the canine companion they loved and lost six months ago. Now they have Lancelot by their side for several more years.

“Henry also wanted me to tell you that a year is a small slice of eternity…. He said you’d understand later.” – Tony Foster to Mike Celluci, from Tanya Huff’s Blood Pact

But the real question here is whether or not Encore will ultimately live up to his owners’ expectations of the eternal canine companion. They have memories of shared experiences with the original Lancelot after all; in comparison, Encore is a blank slate. Hopefully Encore’s owners will see him as a continuation of Lancelot’s bloodline, if they don’t already, and love him for himself rather than who he was cloned from.

As Queen so aptly put it, who wants to live forever anyway?

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.

As much fun as it is to ponder the ability to shrink everything down to manageable proportions, every so often, we get reminded of the technological drawbacks to this age of taking it all with you. Case in point, the story of the Kiwi who bought an MP3 player that turned out to have potentially confidential U.S. military files stored on it. Unfortunately this was not the good kind of bargain buy that Antiques Roadshow appraisers would call a steal.

It’s not clear how much information was stored on there, and what might have happened if they hadn’t been retrieved in time. Would the military personnel have found themselves de-friended on Facebook so that someone could rack up his Whoppers? Or could the information have been used to pad the list of people petitioning for the return of the sacrificial app?

This isn’t the first time that confidential files have found their way out of secured areas. There’ve been several reports of laptops going missing (see here, here and here as examples) with information that arguably shouldn’t have been on something so portable in the first place.

Maybe its time to draw a more definitive line between carry out and dine in. Maybe the really valuable information should be made tangible instead of stored on a computer so there’s a chance it can be copied off and taken away. There’s something to be said about those archives where documents and other tangible artifacts absolutely cannot leave the building, much less the room in some cases. After all, didn’t Skip have to go to the Cray supercomputer when he wanted to figure out the Red October’s caterpillar drive?

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:

2. The Adventures of the HMS Beagle: The Musical. Performed in a town whose claim to fame is that the young Darwin was once near there, the show features post-publication of the theory of evolution Darwin, a figure older than the man who actually sailed to South America (albeit light on his feet), singing in counterpoint to the Beagle’s supposedly pro-Bible Captain Fitzroy. To find out more, read the book.

3. Because Eric is one of those writers who can make you see what he does, and why he appreciates it. Along the way, you also get to appreciate his sense of humor. Case in point: his story about the six-foot long, hot pink nuclear worm and other invasive species threatening the San Francisco Bay.

So celebrate Darwin’s Day early and get a copy of this book.

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. 

Hobbits at the DragonCon '07 Parade (from Photobucket)

Baab and McNulty’s work adds weight to the idea that the bones belong to Homo floresiensis rather than H. sapiens.

The anthropologists based their findings on the results of 3D modeling studies done on one of the so-called “hobbit” skulls from Indonesia. The study was published online in December 2008 and will appear in a future print issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.