Unlike other theories about extraterrestrial life in our solar system, this latest one from a Dr. Brett Gladman revolves around Earth being the source of that life. What Dr. Gladman and his colleaugues claim is that aside from wiping out the dinosaurs, the asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago also sent flying through space millions of planet fragments that might have contained microbes. Titan is the focus of the investigation as, according to the report, the mass of the moon would not have accelerated the incoming particles to a deadly speed.

It’s amazing how much detail web advertisers can get about web surfer behavior. I’m glad of the opportunity web advertising gives me to publish this site, but I sure get creeped out when I think how well some of the more sophisticated advertisers will be able to predict my behavior.

US News & World Report asks an interesting question: if warrantless electronic search of United States citizens is legal as the Bush administration claims, is warrantless physical search also legal? The article doesn’t really answer the question, except to say the White House seems intent on staking a legal position broad enough to cover all kinds of search, and the FBI under Mueller has been keen to disassociate itself from such shenanigans.

A great essay has been posted over at Worldchanging.com, discussing the ways our advances in technology are improving our ability to produce augmented realities, virtual worlds and simulations, and how building these capabilities into our ‘real’ world may help us make it a better place for everyone and everything. It’s impossible to sum it up in a paragraph, so just trust me and go take a look.

THE Mars Global Surveyor, back in 2000, detected gullies that some scientists believed were created by liquid water flowing on the surface in the recent history of the planet (for ‘recent’, read ‘last million years’). Gwendolyn Bart, a graduate student in planetary sciences at the University of Arizona, thinks that they may in fact be due to landslides caused by wind and asteroid strikes, having found evidence that the thoroughly water-free Lunar landscape has similar features.