An awful stench is wafting from the Huntington BotanicalGardens in San Marino, California, because theAmorphophallus titanum, the smelliest flower in the world,has bloomed. The flower’s fragrance has been described as across between excrement and rotting flesh. Conservationassistant Brendan Craughwell says, “As the A. titanum openedup, the rancid fish odor it emitted could be smelled 20 feetaway.”
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Farmers in Greece say that UFOs are destroying their fieldsby landing in them. “This huge circular flying object justfloated down from the skies on to my field,” saysAthanassios Tsioukas from the village of Prini. He rushedoff to tell his friends and “When we got back to the fieldthe aliens had gone,” he says. “But their machine had leftall these holes in the soil…which had cut into my crops.”
Apostolos Patramanis, who was in a nearby field at the timeof the sighting, says he looked up and saw “bright flasheslight up the skies–and then this huge object appeared andlanded on Tsioukas’s crops.”
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Researchers studying a 4.5 billion-year-old Martianmeteorite have found evidence that 25 percent of themagnetic material in it was produced by bacteria from Mars.Ever since the meteorite was recently rediscovered, therehas been a controversy about whether the markings on thesurface are the remains of Martian bacteria.
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Scientists are studying how to knock an asteroid that’sheading for Earth out of its orbit. Spanish companyDeimos-Space, in its Don Quixote mission, plans to launch apair of probes called Hidalgo and Sancho towards a far offasteroid. One would hit the asteroid at extremely highspeed, deflecting it slightly from its orbit. The otherwould observe the asteroid and measure what happened to itafter the impact. This would tell scientists how hard theywould have to hit a real the asteroid heading for Earth inorder to deflect it safely.
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