Asteroid explorer lands, birds and dinosaurs, play Space Doctor

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 - The most detailed measurements to date of the dusty disks around young stars confirm a new theory that the region where rocky planets such as Earth form is much farther away from the star than originally thought. See article.
g Abodes - With a maneuver that scientists compared to landing a jumbo jet in a moving Grand Canyon, Japan's asteroid explorer, Hayabusa, touched down on the surface of the asteroid Itokawa Saturday for the second time in a week and this time it successfully collected a sample of the surface soils, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced several hours after its bird had flown. See article.
g Life - The fossil skeleton of the Archaeopteryx shows it had features common to birds and a group of meat-eating dinosaurs. See article.
g Intelligence - University of Alberta researchers say that using magnetic resonance imaging they found a man's brain works differently than a woman's brain. See article.
g Message - SETI researchers have long had to beg time on instruments built for conventional radio astronomy. Now they're building one of their own. See article.
g Cosmicus - A Brazilian suborbital rocket successfully launched a European microgravity experiment Thursday in a debut flight staged from northern Sweden. See article.
g Learning - Do you have what it takes to keep a trio of astronauts healthy? Play Space Doctor and see if you can make it to Mars alive. See article.
g Imagining - Here’s a neat site that examines aliens in science fiction films. While short on studying the evolution of those aliens, it does discuss how these villainous creatures are a manifestation of our own fears, a nice take on the anthropomorphic bias most people possess regarding alien life.
g Aftermath - How to predict reactions to receipt of evidence for an otherworldly intelligence? Some scientists argue that any unpredictable outcomes can only be judged against our own history. See article.

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