It's a Bird, It's a Plane, it's a Coffee Lid UFO!

Actually, they're IFOs - identified as plastic Mr. Coffee lids strung up with fishing string and photographed by Jim Underdown to look like unidentified flying objects.

Find out what you need for this alien craft crafts project on Hollywood Reality Check
on "Skeptical Sunday: Take A Number" this week!

Turning Water into Slime

Here's a quick one minute video demonstrating the slime power of the hagfish. The animal is anesthetized, given a small pulse of electrical current, and when the tiny bit of slime extracted from it is put into a glass of water, well... You've Been Slimed!

Hagfish aren't really fish, as they have no jaw. In fact, they're the only animal that has a skull and no vertebral column. Their slime is believed to be used primarily as an escape mechanism. They secrete it when captured, but it is also believed that they use it as a lubricant to free themselves from the carcasses on which they feed. The slime also acts to clog up the gills of predator fish, and so the hagfish has developed a peculiar way of keeping its own gills free of slime. When agitated, the hagfish secretes enough slime to turn a 20 liter bucket of water into pure slime in a matter of minutes. To clear itself of this immense amount of slime, the hagfish ties itself into a knot, which then travels the length of its body, thereby wringing out the slime, and likely freeing it from its captor.

I've Been Slimed!

In our most recent program, "You've Been Slimed", Seth & Molly make slime in the SETI kitchen with guest Tori Hoeler. Here's how: Fill one cup with water and add a spoonful of the Borax powder and stir it up. Fill another cup with about 1/2 inch of glue. Add three tablespoons of water to the glue and stir. Add a few drops of food coloring and stir again. Add two tablespoons of the Borax solution and stir well and voila! You've been slimed! Of course, for the above photo, I'm the one forced to pose with the slime. It was kind of slick, viscous, sticky. I wish there were a single word to use to describe it. Blimey! I'm stymied.

Jill Tarter makes her wish at TED

SETI's Jill Tarter was the recipient of this years TED prize! You'll hear a little about it from her in our latest program, "A Man, A Planet, A Tenal: Panama!", and you can watch her full speech in the above video.

Jill's plan: To assemble a group of engineers to create a system to facilitate mass collaboration over the web and incorporate innovative data processing methods, including the ability to input alternative search algorithms. The aim would be to tap into the power of open-source initiatives, to globalize the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and empower a new generation of SETI enthusiasts. The launch of this new system would be backed with a major storytelling and awareness campaign whose goal is to inspire millions to participate.

Seth chats with Discovery Channel

Seth was recently interviewed by Dave Mosher for Discovery Channel's website. An afternoon of instant messaging touched on the subjects of life on mars, what aliens might look like, and why SETI is important. Here's an excerpt:

Dave on Earth (1:15 PM): Is there a chance SETI and everyone else is looking for the wrong thing?

SethHeartsAliens (1:15 PM): Of course there's a chance that we're doing the wrong thing, but if you don't know, then I think you should do SOMETHING. We'll never find the aliens by just throwing up our hands and saying "we don't know how to look!" Better to explore and not find them, than to not explore and be guaranteed not to find them!

You can read the entire interview on Discovery's website.

AWA Celebrates IYA!

The International Year of Astronomy is underway, and Are We Alone? will be dedicating program segments, blog entries, and sometimes entire shows to celebrate! Tune in, log on, and space out by listening to the show, visiting this very blog, or checking out the Are We Alone? webpage dedicated to the International Year of Astronomy. There are less than 12 months left before its over. Don't miss it!

Is Human Intelligence Special?

Our "You Animal!" show prompted this exhange between listener Chis Lehmann and Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University and guest on the program.

Bottom line: is human intelligence special (btw, we'll cover more of this in the show coming up: "Feather Knows Best!")?



Prof. Kacelnik,

I have a long and deep personal interest in the topic of what I call the human-animal relationship. Of course that includes the sub-topic of animal minds. Listening to you caused me to have an "aha" moment which shone some light on the struggle we (humans) have when discussing whether animals (non-human) have "intelligence." Specifically, you said:

"Just to show that an animal does something difficult does not mean that it does it having the same level of experience as we do. It is perfectly possible to do very complex things simply on the basis of simply very sophisticated programs of responding to the world."

My "aha" insight was this: we always approach this from our human perspective and with lots of references to our own abilities. which we know so well from personal experience. We find it fairly easy to prove, or to create sufficient doubt that any other animal species has the ability to respond to the world in quite the same way we do. So ... what if we turn the question around, look in the mirror and ask ourselves this question:

Q. Is human "intelligence" simply demonstrating a (more) complex programmed ability to respond to stimuli from the environment?

Prove to me that it is anything else. I mean this in the most sincere terms. If human intelligence is simply a more (differently) sophisticated form of programmed response to the environment, then we only differ from other species by degree.

Regards, Christopher J. Lehmann


Dr. Kacelnik's response:

You are right, Chris, and chaps in AI (artificial intelligence) deal with the problem repeatedly. Ultimately, we vouch for us having mental experiences because each of us knows by introspection, but we can’t tell about others.

This is related to what is called the “hard problem” of the study of consciousness. We may even have awareness of what we do post hoc, namely we do it, as zombies, and then we know that we have done it and we tell ourselves that we did it for some great motive.

Hope this helps.

- A

P.S. Have a look at this: