aliens

For everyone out there who's been fighting aliens with a flamethrower, but now needs something with a little more kick, you're in luck. Panasonic has taken a break from hawking TVs and camcorder to build the power loader from Aliens.

Designed by Panasonic subsidiary Activelink, the "Dual Arm Amplification Robot" weighs 500 pounds, and allows the user to lift 220 pounds with the flick of a wrist. That's not quite enough to bench press an alien queen, but then again, it's still in the design phase.

After almost 50 years of waiting for aliens to contact us, Australia's Cosmos Magazine has decided to be a bit more proactive. In honor of Australia's national science week, the magazine is giving you a chance to have a message of your choice beamed to the nearest Earth-like planet.

Proving that life exists on distant planets may seem a near impossibility, but researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have a theory that may shed light (literally!) on the age-old question. They’d like to launch an instrument into space that could detect the “chirality”—or handedness—of the light from molecules on other planets.

Get ready for more interstellar signposts. Astronomers have directly spotted no less than three planets orbiting a star that sits 130 light-years from Earth. The three gas giants are 10 to seven times the size of Jupiter, with their parent star weighing in at 1.5 times the mass of our sun. Both the Gemini North telescope and W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii helped scope out the planets through infrared light.

The existence of a race of sentient alien robots might be not just possible, but inevitable. In fact, we might be living in a "postbiological universe" right now, in which intelligent extraterrestrials somewhere have exchanged organic brains for artificial ones.

The driving factor is a pragmatic desire to improve mental capacity. Alien beings may have already reached a point in their evolution where, having exhausted the potential of their biological brains, they have taken the next logical step and opted for robotic brains equipped with artificial intelligence.

For as long as humans have looked to the night sky to divine meaning and a place in the universe, we have let our minds wander to thoughts of distant worlds populated by beings unlike ourselves. The ancient Greeks were the first Western thinkers to consider formally the possibility of an infinite universe housing an infinite number of civilizations.

Just because NASA has two robots on the surface right now doesn't mean the landing of the Phoenix probe is a sure thing. At a news conference yesterday, NASA officials stressed that landing a spacecraft on Mars isn't easy: 55 percent of all attempts to do so have failed. Not to mention that the technique Phoenix will use to do so hasn't been employed in a while.

At 4 PM on April 19, 1984, a team of air traffic controllers at an airport in the east of England reportedly watched a strange, bright, circular vehicle touch down, then blast off again at a tremendous speed and with a near vertical trajectory. Although they didn't want their names to be included in the report covering the event, they believed it was a UFO. And they were sober.

Radivoje Lajic thinks aliens don't like him. The Bosnian man says his home has been hit by meteorites no less than five times. He took the rocks to experts at Belgrade University, who confirmed that they are the real thing. But they haven't been able to verify that Lajic did anything to anger the extraterrestrials, or that he's the target of some extra-planetary prank. Still, Lajic seems sure this isn't just a coincidence.