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It turns out a group of psychics believe Apollo 16 might have found an alien ship on the moon. Plus, the sun is spitting giant magnetic bubbles of radiation at the Earth like we talked about its sister! Enjoy This Week in Discovery News.

via Psychics on the Moon and Incoming Sun Spit : Discovery News.

Wingnut and former president Baby Bush used to say that we needed to go back to the moon and build a base there in order to go to Mars. Huh? That’s like saying you need to go around the world in order to visit your next door neighbor. Even for a certified moron, that’s quite a remarkably dumb idea. But, in fact, Baby Bush was practicing the ancient art of misdirection.

What nobody wants you to know (and which I’ve been telling you for years), is that there is in fact a secret U.S. military base on the moon. Now, for the first time anywhere, we get a picture of it, hidden in a cave. This photo was taken by an Indian space probe.

The secret U.S. moon base is in the hole. Really.

Here’s from a clueless post by Dvice:

Discovered by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, this chamber is more than one mile long and 393 feet wide. There would be lots of benefits of building a moon base in there, mainly for protection from the nastiness of the surface of the moon. It’d provide a nearly constant temperature of -4 degrees Fahrenheit, unlike the surface, which fluctuates between 266 degrees and -292 degrees. And it would provide protection from radiation, micro-meteor impacts and dust.

So, what’s the holdup? Let’s get building! I want to visit a hotel in a moon base sometime in the next 20 years, please!

Hello, Earth to Dvice (make that, Moon to Dvice): the base is in there. Really. I should know. I was abdicated by the lunar kings and banally probed without mercy until I let go my own top-secret knowledge of just about everything worth knowing.

It's... a claw!

Alien From The Deep, dir. by Antonio Margheriti (aka Anthony Dawson)
Starring Daniel Bosch, Marina Giulia Cavalli, Robert Marius, Luciano Pigozzi, Charles Napier
Review by Brian Charles Clark
Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD
3 stars

A hot babe, Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli), and some guy named Bob (Daniel Bosch), who isn’t nearly as hot, are environmental activists roaming the jungle looking for do-badders. They find the evil ones in the green depths: E-Chem corporation is conspiring to dump toxic waste into an active volcano.

Dumping toxic chemicals into a volcano is in some sense (which one, though, is not at all clear) brilliant. After all, one thing real-world toxics producers want to do to get rid of their vile putrescences is incinerate them. So why not turn to Mother Nature’s Milk of Magma to settle a toxic stomach? But let’s overlook the logistics of building a complex waste-disposal facility in the bowels of a volcano and move right along to the snake milker. Read the rest of this entry »

Escherichia coli, one of the many species of bacteria present in the human gut

You think you’re a person, but you’re really a spaceship for bacteria:

A team of scientists from around the globe have found that gut bacteria may influence mammalian brain development and adult behavior.

“The data suggests that there is a critical period early in life when gut microorganisms affect the brain and change the behavior in later life,” says Dr. Rochellys Diaz Heijtz, first author of the study.

The research team compared behavior and gene expression in two groups of mice — those raised with normal microorganisms, and those raised in the absence of microorganisms (or germ-free mice). The scientists observed that adult germ-free mice displayed different behavior from mice with normal microbiota, suggesting that gut bacteria may have a significant effect on the development of the brain in mammals.

The adult germ-free mice were observed to be more active and engaged in more ‘risky’ behavior than mice raised with normal microorganisms. When germ-free mice were exposed to normal microorganisms very early in life, as adults they developed the behavioral characteristics of those exposed to microorganisms from birth. In contrast, colonizing adult germ-free mice with bacteria did not influence their behavior.

Subsequent gene profiling in the brain identified genes and signaling pathways involved in learning, memory and motor control that were affected by the absence of gut bacteria, highlighting the profound changes in the mice that developed in the absence of microorganisms. This suggests that, over the course of evolution, colonization of the gut by microorganisms (in total 1.5 kilograms) in early infancy became integrated into early brain development.

via Bacteria in the gut may influence brain development.

I just found a couple more reviews of On Joanna Russ, to which I contributed an essay. This review is by Paul Kincaid, and was featured on The SF Site; snip:

Anyone who came into science fiction during the late 60s and 70s would have been aware of Joanna Russ. Even if you never read any of her relatively few novels or stories, you couldn’t avoid the name. Of the three great women writers who did so much to transform science fiction at this time, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., and Russ, Russ was far and away the most controversial. So much so that it was known for her name to be greeted with boos at an sf convention, and believe me even in the conservative world of fandom that was unusual.

Joanna Russ is an incredibly important figure in the history of science fiction and the author of a couple of novels and several short stories that deserve to endure. This beautifully produced collection of essays is a fitting tribute to her, and even those who know Russ’s work well will learn from many of these essays. Even so, this is still only telling part of the story about an elusive and complex writer. We’d be better off if all her work were back in print, but until that happens this is a superb reminder of what a valuable and important writer she is.

The other review is by Cheryl Morgan who makes a point about book reviewing that is near and dear to my heart; snip:

it occurs to me that those people who complain that book reviews should always be neutral and objective, and not bring in the reviewers personal viewpoint in any way, are very like those people who claim that books that have no obvious character ethnicity (and are therefore default white) are good because they are “colorblind”. If you get criticized for standing out from the cultural norm it is probably because you have said something interesting and subversive.

If there’s one group of authors who excel at envisioning utopias and dystopias, particularly those brought about by technology, it’s the science fiction crowd. So the fact that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America are sounding the alarm over the Google books settlement ought to give pause, at the very least.

via Is Google Books a Dystopian Nightmare? – critical difference.

Boing Boing has a great piece on copyright orphans. That’s what happens when we keep extending copyright:

Remember folks, thanks to 11 copyright term extensions in the past 40-some years, more than 98% of all works in copyright are “orphaned” — still in copyright, but no one knows to whom they belong…. the vast majority of the culture swept into this 20th century black hole was not commercially available and, in most cases, the authors are unknown. The works are locked up — with no benefit to anyone — and no one has the key that would unlock them. We have cut ourselves off from our own culture, left it to molder — and in the case of nitrate film, literally disintegrate — with no benefit to anyone.

The threat of an asteroid crashing into Earth has captivated the imaginations of movie audiences for years. Now, however, Russia is working to develop a very real plan to counter such a threat.

The Russian space agency says it is working to prevent a large asteroid from colliding with Earth.

Without giving many details, a spokesman for the agency said it is working on a way to divert the path of the asteroid, named Apophis, without destroying it.

NASA’s latest calculations put Apophis at having only a one in 250,000 chance of hitting Earth by, or during, the 2030s.

via Russia, US at Odds Over Future Asteroid Hit | Science and Technology | English.

There’s more! Russia’s Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with asteroid

There's a secret moonbase near you.

Via Slashdot:

“Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre says that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. ‘The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,’ Pal said. At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea.”

The U.S. has long had a secret base on the moon manned by astronaut-spies with telepathic powers. Telepathy is used to communicate with Earth-based controllers in order to avoid detection by foreign powers monitoring radio frequencies.

The City and the City by China Miéville

Detective Tyador Borlú of Besźel’s Extreme Crimes Squad is assigned to what at first appears to be a fairly straightforward case: the murder of a young woman whose body was discovered dumped in a park situated on the border between Besźel and Ul Qoma.

And right away the reader realizes that, no matter how straightforward this murder mystery might be, there’ll be nothing straight about the narrative, for Besźel and Ul Qoma aren’t merely countries that happen to border one another. They are city-states in a state of intimate balkanization.

One side of a street may be in Besźel while the other is in Ul Qoma. Part of the park is in one country, while little islands of playground are in the other. The top storey of an apartment building is in Ul Qoma, the rest in Besźel. Situated in an unnamed Eastern European milieu, the conjoined cities are ill at ease with one another and, historically, occasionally at war. Like territories in the former Yugoslavia, various areas of Besźel/Ul Qoma are either disputed or not claimed by either city. Read the rest of this entry »

Nisi Shawl’s novella, “Good Boy,” is a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. “Good Boy” appears in Nisi’s 2008 book, Filter House, which has already made a lot of folks’ best-of lists — including mine. Good luck, Nisi!