As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis´s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples-water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis´s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001-contain microbes from outer space.
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Science is reinventing play, from extreme sports to gamification to ridiculous roller coasters to the playgrounds of tomorrow, and this issue is chock full of fun. Also, on a less fun note: Did global warming destroy my hometown?