The National Civil Defense Secretariat said deaths have occurred in eight out of the 11 states severely affected by the flooding , including Ceara with 15 deaths, 10 in Maranhao and seven in Bahia in the perennially drought-stricken northeast; and eight deaths in the northern state of Amazonas.

It goes beyond automated vacuums and mildly entertaining dance-bots. Japan and Korea plan to deploy humanoid robots to care for the elderly, while the United States already fields thousands of robot warriors on the modern battlefield. Meanwhile, plenty of people have enhanced their bodies technologically in ways that bring them closer to their robotic brethren.

So it's OK to become a bit of a paranoid android, because many experts say that the robotic future is rapidly approaching, if not already here. Robots probably won't completely take over or annihilate the human race anytime soon, but they may supplant us by other means -- and LiveScience is here to count the reasons why you need not hide your fear of the metal ones.

 

An oddly shaped space boulder appears to show eye sockets and a nose leading to speculation it might be a Martian skull.

At first glance it looks like a rocky desert - but this image of the Mars landscape has got space-gazers talking. An oddly shaped space boulder appears to show eye sockets and a nose leading to speculation it might be a Martian skull.

Internet forums are full of chatter about the picture, taken by a panoramic NASA camera known as Spirit. One alien-spotter speculated: "The skull is 15 cm with binocular eyes 5 cm apart. The cranial capacity is approximately 1400 cc

Were they meteors? A comet? UFOs ?

People from Maryland to Hampton Roads heard loud explosions and saw brilliant, streaking lights in the sky Sunday night.

There was no immediate explanation, the National Weather Service office in Wakefield said. The Virginia Beach 911 center had numerous calls waiting just before 10 p.m., a supervisor said. The Weather Service said reports were made from Dorchester County, Md., to the Virginia/North Carolina border. People said they saw a streak in the sky and heard an explosion.

“It was orange, like a fireball,” said Steve Wagner, who lives in the Great Bridge area of Chesapeake and said what he saw was too close to be a shooting star. Wagner was outside cooking with family when he saw the streak. He said he went inside when his daughter called, then heard an explosion that sounded like thunder.

The first came last month. The next is in November. Such a rare triple-threat occurs only once every 11 years.

The origin of the link between bad luck and Friday the 13th is murky. The whole thing might date to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune. In modern times, the superstition permeates society.

For decades, UFO buffs have claimed that conclusive proof of alien life is just around the corner. They believe that the "truth will be revealed" — either by extraterrestrials finally making themselves known (a visit to the White House lawn or Times Square might be on the agenda), or by the world's governments ending their conspiracy of silence and letting the public see the real evidence and alien bodies they've had on ice since 1947.

The dancing lights have appeared above most thunderstorms throughout history, but researchers did not start studying them until one accidentally recorded a sighting on camera in 1989.

"Lightning from the thunderstorm excites the electric field above, producing a flash of light called a sprite," said Colin Price, a geophysicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. "We now understand that only a specific type of lightning is the trigger that initiates sprites aloft."

Astronomers have detected the strongest radiation blast from deep space ever known, exceeding the power of 9,000 exploding stars.

The gamma ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away, and its light has taken most of the age of the universe to reach us. Scientists believe such bursts occur when stars run out of fuel and collapse to form a black hole.

It has been calculated that the material emitting the gamma rays must have been moving at 99.9999 per cent of the speed of light. The explosion was spotted by a Nasa telescope. - Independent

It shows a perfect rectangle the size of Wales lying on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean nearly 3½ miles down.A host of criss-crossing lines, looking like a map of a vast metropolis, are enclosed by the boundary.

They seem too vast and organised to be caused naturally. And last night the possibility of an extraordinary discovery had oceanographers and geophysicists captivated.

Our planet may harbour forms of "weird life" unrelated to life as we know it, according to Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University.

This "shadow life" may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes or in boiling deep sea hydrothermal vents, he says.

Even today many people think the mystical powers of the full moon induce erratic behaviors, psychiatric hospital admissions, suicides, homicides, emergency room calls, traffic accidents, fights at professional hockey games, dog bites and all manner of strange events. One survey revealed that 45 percent of college students believe moonstruck humans are prone to unusual behaviors, and other surveys suggest that mental health professionals may be still more likely than laypeople to hold this conviction. In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.

These early proposals - which predate by 150 years the first extraterrestrial message that was sent in 1974 - were based on visual signals, as the invention of radio was still decades away.

In fact, as history shows, ideas for interplanetary communication have largely been driven by whatever the current technology allowed - be it lamps, radios or lasers.

None of the findings shout, "Here be aliens!" but each report has stoked optimism among astrobiologists that they will discover life beyond Earth. Some leading stargazers, in fact, suspect we're now on the verge of learning that we're not alone—and that genesis wasn't a unique event.

As the year draws to a close and a new year begins, it is natural to reflect on what has passed and what may lie ahead. Goals are set, resolutions are kept (or not), and inevitably predictions are made.

Of course, anyone can make a prediction; all it takes is some knowledge of current events and good guessing. There are many self-described psychics who claim to see the future, yet perhaps their crystal balls need some Windex, because accurate predictions are the exception rather than the rule.

Here are five headline predictions from psychics that (thankfully) did not come true in 2008...

1) Locust Swarms Destroy Wheat Crops,  2) Top U.S. General in Iraq Killed; Troops Return, 3) Supervolcano Spews Ash Across Globe, 4) Beloved Entertainer Dies in Stunt Tomfoolery, 5) Global Famine Kills Millions

Are we citizens of Earth alone in the universe? It's a question that has long fascinated astronomers, sci-fi authors, kids with backyard telescopes and Hollywood executives who churn out spectacles about alien encounters. Polls have found that most Americans believe that some form of life exists beyond our planet.

"It's a fundamental question," said Tarter, the real-life inspiration for Jodie Foster's character in the 1997 movie "Contact." "And it's a question that the person on the street can understand. It's not like a ... super-collider or some search for neutrinos buried in the ice. It's, 'Are we alone? How might we find out? What does that tell us about ourselves and our place in the universe?'

The list of those who subscribe to the theory that alien life forms and UFOs have visited Earth amid a massive government cover-up is long and varied. It includes cranks, paranoid delusionals and editors of the Daily Star (and sometimes all three).

But a Nasa astronaut who has walked on the moon? The profile of Edgar Mitchell does not conform to that of your common or garden UFO aficionado. He holds two Bachelor of Science degrees and a doctorate in aeronautics from the prestigious and not exactly tree-huggy Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Along with Alan Shepard, he holds the record for the longest moon walk - for nine hours on February 9 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission, making him the sixth man to walk on the moon. Put all that together and it is no wonder that an interviewer with a UK radio station almost fell off his seat this week when he lobbed Mitchell what he thought was a throwaway question: Did he believe in life on other planets? "Oh yes," came the reply. "There's not much question at all that there is life throughout the universe. I'm totally sure we are not alone."

 Source : Guardian UK

If you still live with your parents, wear a zip-up cardigan over your collar and tie, have enamel badges in your lapel and don't get out much because you're too busy curating your collection of Star Trek memorabilia, it has been quite a week. While the rest of the country has been fussing over such trivia as Zim-babwe, you've been tabulating the latest activities of forces beyond our galaxy.

On Wednesday you awoke to a Sun exclusive from Shropshire: "A shaken soldier told last night how he saw 13 UFOs spinning in the skies above his military barracks." Not to be outdone, the Hastings Observer reported a woman's sighting of strange orange lights above the resort, and asked: "Are aliens the latest visitors to Hastings?" The following day, it was "orange orbs" over Liverpool, and The Sun's further report from Salop: "A mum who insists she was abducted by aliens on the A5 said yesterday, 'I knew they'd be back'."

Only the week before, according to the ever-vigilant Sun, a "flying saucer-shaped" object "attacked" a police helicopter over Cardiff. The story got so much coverage that, within days, hundreds of sightings were coming into the newspaper.

 Source : Independent UK

Three children were recently removed from a remote church compound called Strong City in New Mexico. There had been allegations that children at the cult may have been sexually abused, though the matter remains under investigation and charges have yet to be filed. The leader of the group, Wayne Bent, claims to be the son of God.

In early 2007, Bent said that the world would end on Halloween of that year. That apparently fell through, however Bent was undeterred and has updated his prophecy to say that the Apocalypse will happen at any moment: "The seven last plagues are all falling now and the end of all things is at hand," Bent wrote on his church's Web site.

Failed doomsday predictions are nothing new, of course. There have been thousands of people predicting the imminent end of the world, dating back to at least 2800 B.C . They have all been wrong for thousands of years (or however how long since they spoke), but that doesn't keep people from trying. End-times claims are often rooted in Bible passages, but also based on everything from schizophrenia to misunderstood astronomy. Most doomsday promoters are quite sincere, genuinely believing that they have discovered a (literally) Earth-shaking secret that must be shared with others.

 Source : Live Science

Francis Tovey, 81, who lived alone in Burleigh Heads on the Australian Gold Coast, was found dead in his driveway.

According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, he had been unhappy about the demands of relatives living elsewhere in Australia that he should move out of his home and into care.

Notes left by Mr Tovey — who was born in England — revealed that he had scoured the internet for plans before constructing his complex machine, which involved a jigsaw power tool and was connected to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets. It could fire multiple shots once triggered remotely.

 Source : Times Online UK

If SETI succeeds, then it's very likely the civilization we discover will be much older than our own. The reasoning is simple. The only way we are likely to detect ET is if alien civilizations are much older than we are. If the typical civilization has the capacity to communicate by radio for only a few decades before it self-destructs, then it's very unlikely that we and they will happen to co-exist in the long lifetime of our galaxy. That disparity of age explains why current SETI programs merely listen for signals from other civilizations, rather than transmit. Transmitting requires greater patience and more resources than listening, so shouldn't we expect our cosmic elders to shoulder the burden?

Besides, what could a young civilization possibly have to offer in an intellectual exchange across interstellar space? Surely advanced aliens would have little to gain from our understanding of astronomy or physics, chemistry or mathematics. What then might we say to hold up our end of an interstellar conversation?

 Source : Live Science

Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.

"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.

At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, "but once you have a story like 'I had sex with a robot, and it was great!' appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I'd expect many people to jump on the bandwagon," Levy said

 Source : Live Science

Although the array was used to capture radio images of galaxies, one of its primary roles will be to search for communications from extraterrestrial civilizations. It works on the idea that many smaller radio telescopes working together are more powerful and cheaper than a single large dish.

 Source : Universe Today

The festival, which began Thursday, is a mixed bag that includes live concerts (one headlined by a band with a computer-generated 'alien' drummer), costume contests, a Main Street parade and a slew of lectures that ponder everything from body snatchers to "What Does NASA Really Know?"

The festival emerged in the 1990s to spark debate about the purported flying saucer crash, which the government says was a top-secret weather balloon. Believers in the Roswell Incident say the government is conspiring to hide the truth about the events of that day and, more broadly, the existence of extraterrestrial life.

 Source : Live Science

Aliens are alive and well - and could be tuning into vintage human radio broadcasts, according to scientists.

Experts involved in the study of alien worlds told the Government they were convinced that life exists elsewhere in the universe. They gathered at the Department of Trade and Industry in London to meet the Science Minister, Malcolm Wicks, reports the Daily Telegraph.

They told him that there have been remarkable advances in looking for stars with planets and said they are beginning to find Earth-like planets that might have water. Prof Glenn White of Open University said a European Space Agency mission called Darwin, a flotilla of telescopes due for launch in 2018, will scan 500 stars over five years within a distance of 60 light years.