Alien Tea Shoppe

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency says its Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds, vaporizing before reaching the planet's surface. And the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says that, plus soil test experiments, have proven evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water -- both processes that occur on Earth. "A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars detected snow from clouds about 2.5 miles above the spacecraft's landing site," NASA said, adding data shows the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground. "Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars," said Jim Whiteway, of Canada's York University, the lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. "We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground." Since landing May 25, Phoenix has also confirmed a hard subsurface layer...

PARIS (UPI) -- The European Space Agency says the COROT spacecraft has discovered a massive planet-sized object that's unlike anything previously spotted. The object, named COROT-exo-3b, is so exotic, agency scientists said they are unsure whether the oddity is a planet or a failed star. The object is about the size of Jupiter but has more than 20 times the mass. It takes 4 days, 6 hours to orbit its parent star, which is slightly larger than the sun. COROT, an unmanned mission led by the French space agency, was launched in 2006. It has the dual objectives of searching for extrasolar planets and performing astroseismology. "COROT-exo-3b might turn out to be a rare object found by sheer luck", said Francois Bouchy of the French Institute of Astrophysics. "But it might just be a member of a new-found family of very massive planets that encircle stars more massive than our sun. We're now beginning to think that the more massive the star, the more massive the planet...

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency plans a Mars robotic mission to study that planet's climate history and potential habitability in greater detail than ever before. Called the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft, the $485 million mission is scheduled for launch in late 2013. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said it selected that mission from among 20 investigational proposals submitted in response to a NASA Announcement of Opportunity in August 2006. "This mission will provide the first direct measurements ever taken to address key scientific questions about Mars' evolution," said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. Mars once had a denser atmosphere that supported the presence of liquid water on the surface, scientists said. As part of a dramatic climate change, most of the Martian atmosphere was lost. The spacecraft, nicknamed MAVEN, will make definitive scientific measurements of present-day atmosp...

KRISTIANSTAD, Sweden (UPI) -- Swedish scientists say water bears -- tardigrades -- have become the first animals to have survived exposure to the vacuum and radiation of space. Water bears -- multi-cellular, invertebrate animals about 1 millimeter in size -- are unique in that they can survive repeated dehydration and can lose nearly all the water they have in their bodies. It's been nearly a year since Kristianstad University researcher Ingemar Jonsson sent some 3,000 microscopic water bears on a 12-day space trip. The aim of the project, supported by the European Space Agency, was to determine whether they could survive in space. They could. "Our principal finding is that the space vacuum, which entails extreme dehydration, and cosmic radiation, (was not) a problem for water bears. On the other hand, the ultraviolet radiation in space is harmful to water bears, although a few individuals can even survive that," said Jonsson. The next challenge, he said, is to determine ...

I was listening to a replay of a January 2000 Art Bell Coast to Coast AM show Saturday night. Art had Lloyd Pye on the show talking about skulls that he had recently acquired. He was talking about this girl. Her parents were from Mexico but she was a natural born citizen, they went back to Mexico on holiday in the 1930's. The girl went exploring and came upon a cave [actually mine shaft]. Apparently, inside the cave was a human skeleton, but a hand was protruding from the ground holding onto the human skeleton's hand. The girl dug around the hand to reveal a very oddly shaped skull. She took the bones of the human and the bones she exhumed back to the village with her. A rain storm came, and took all the bones away except for the skulls. She brought the skulls back to the U.S. with her and kept them her entire life. The girl, now an old woman, knew she was going to die. So, she asked a friend of her to take the skulls. He did so, but his wife hated having them in the ho...

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