Visual cues, new space shuttle crew and Alverian dung beetles

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Stars – Plans for the world's largest solar optical telescope moved forward this weekend when recommendations were endorsed to build the 4-meter Advanced Technology Solar Telescope at Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. The observatory will become the world's most powerful solar optical telescope when it starts operating around 2012. See article.
g Abodes – Florida’s biggest problem isn’t hurricanes but sinkholes. Here’s one town’s odyssey.
g Life – NASA and conservations are using remote sensing in an attempt to save mountain gorillas from extinction. See article.
g Intelligence – A new study suggests that the brain processes visual information about facial expressions by actively seeking out and fixate on the critical visual cues for fear — contradicting the commonly held notion that the brain passively receives information from the senses about the world. See article.
g Message – Science fiction author David Brin offers a copy of his 1983 article “Xenology: The Science of Asking Who’s Out There”. While two decades old, the information is still relevant and offers a good overview of fundamental astrobiological questions.
g Cosmicus – The seven astronauts who will return the space shuttle to flight in May say they’re eager to fly. See article.
g Learning – The Iowa City Press-Citizen ran an editorial last week about the need to encourage girls to excel at science and math. It offers some practical suggestions on how to accomplish this. See editorial. And yes, it’s my newspaper — and I wrote the editorial!
g Imagining – We’ve focused a lot on aliens from “Star Trek: The Original Series,” but let’s switch genres for a day and examine the Alverian dung beetle mentioned in the episode “Apocalypse Rising” of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” fame. It’s very likely that such a creature would exist in even an alien ecosystem to remove other lifeforms’ waste, as “waste” almost certainly is a natural chemical byproduct of a biological system. But the beetle almost certainly wouldn’t be an insect in the classic sense of Earth’s three-segmented, six –legged creatures, as that would require a couple of billion years of parallel evolution between the two planets. Most likely, the creature is similar to a beetle in shape and size to merit its name. Or perhaps instead it possesses some of the same behavioral characteristics of the beetle’s behavior, such as rolling dung into tiny balls, even though physically it is quite different. Unfortunately, the creature is not shown but merely mentioned during some heated dialogue (see article).
g Aftermath – What role will extraterrestrials play in humanity’s future? Click here for a paper by University of Toronto Professor Allen Tough. Though written almost 20 years ago, the paper contains plenty of useful ideas that are fresh (and ignored) today, especially those about extraterrestrial behavior and help.

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