If you want to make sure your extra-terrestrial efforts can survive a nuclear attack, working inside the Jamesburg Earth Station on, fittingly, ComSat Road, just outside Carmel, California, is a fine choice. A short drive to Pebble Beach and Spyglass golf courses means it is not a bad way to spend your weekends either.

If you enjoyed seeing Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, Jamesburg is one of the dishes you can thank. But the 10-story high antenna went out of service in 2002. The land was sold to a gentleman who wanted a vacation home - the coolest Cold War vacation home ever, if you ask me, with blueprints and cinder block walls and a room the size of a football field.

David Brin first wrote this in 2006, summarizing a controversy that was then emerging among members of the community engaged in SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations. Since I am covering a new effort at METI - Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations - going online next week, he sent me this in our email exchanges and agreed to repost it here and provide a follow-up addendum at the end - Hank

If you watch musicals from the 1950s or teen comedies from the 1990s, you find a lot of movies with different titles but the themes and plotlines barely change; two friends competing for a girl in the former or some teen wants to improve another teen, who becomes really popular, in the latter.

It's not that Hollywood lacks imagination, we are naturally drawn toward a specific set of universal narratives within cultural products, says a new paper. We have evolved to like stories about Superman saving strangers or Brad Pitt fighting zombies. 

A new statistical estimate projects that the world population could reach nearly 11 billion by the end of the century, according to a United Nations report issued June 13 - about 8 percent more than their previous projection of 10.1 billion, issued in 2011. 

In the past 11,00 years, there have been 22 large and megathrust earthquake shaking events along the Pacific coast of North America, an average recurrence interval of about 500 years, though the time between major shaking events can stretch up to about 1,000 years, according to a new paper.

X-ray experiments have found chemical traces of the original 'dinobird' Archaeopteryx and dilute traces of plumage pigments in a 150 million-year-old fossil.

Only 11 specimens of Archaeopteryx have been found, the first one consisting of a single feather. Until a few years ago, researchers thought minerals would have replaced all the bones and tissues of the original animal during fossilization, leaving no chemical traces behind, but two studies have turned up more information about this 'dinobird' and its plumage.

Paleontologists have presented the most extensive review yet available of toothed pterosaurs from the Cretaceous in England, featuring detailed taxonomic information, diagnoses and photographs of 30 species.

A trending "miracle" weight-loss product is green coffee bean dietary supplements. Some people swear by them and marketing claims are not modest about the effectiveness.

But do they actually work or is it placebo and/or other changes (exercise, diet) that concerned people adapt?

Science would never criticize coffee. It is rich in healthful, natural, plant-based polyphenol substances and evidence from past studies links coffee drinking to a lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and other disorders collectively termed the "metabolic syndrome."  Chlorogenic acid (CGA), one coffee polyphenol, is the main ingredient in scores of dietary supplements promoted as weight-loss products.

Glacier Changes in NE Greenland


Substantial cracks in the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier ice tongue appear to be growing in extent and number.  While not as spectacular as the 2010 calving of the Peterman Ice Island, it is more closely linked to global warming than

Otherwise known as 79 North, Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier is a floating outlet glacier, about 60 km long and 20 km wide located at 79°30'N, 22° W, draining a large area of the northeast Greenland ice sheet.