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With Mars closer to Earth than it has been since prehistoric times, scientists hope to learn if there is (or ever was) life on Mars. They once assumed that the hostile environment of Venus meant there was never life on that planet, but now they’ve changed their minds. Since finding life in incredibly harsh places here on Earth, they now think we’ll eventually find signs of life on Venus as well. If life turns out to be fairly common, there’s a much greater chance we’ll meet another highly-developed form of it one day.
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Can two plants living 100 miles apart find romance? They can if they have a gardener who’s handy with a turkey baster. A rare female cycad plant, which only produces seeds every few years, is currently ready for fertilization in a British botanical garden, but has no mate. A male plant producing pollen was found in another garden in the U.K., so horticulturist Wesley Shaw is playing the role of cupid.

Shaw says, “Pollinating these cycads is quite a tricky business but we are confident it will work.” Most plants solve the problem by being bisexual, but ancient plants like cycads, which were around 206 million years ago, are still either male or female. Cycads can live for hundreds of years, and the male plant is about 80 years old?but he’s not too old to be a dad.
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Archeologists have long insisted that people first came to the Americas by crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia between 10,000 and 18,000 years ago. However, most indigenous people in both North and South America deny this. South Americans say they came from the sea and many Native Americans say they came from the South. Now it’s been discovered that they couldn’t have crossed the Bering Bridge, since it didn’t exist then.
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Andrew West Griffin wrote in the June 5th edition of TheTownTalk.com about Louisiana crop circles. Now he says his hometown is being visited by UFOs.

He writes: Controversy continues around the identity of strange lights appearing over areas in southwest Louisiana on August 28. The sightings have baffled residents in this corner of the state since then.

A spokesman at the Oakdale Police Department said several officers reported seeing unusual lights over that Allen Parish town. “What we know is that it was special helicopters from Fort Polk,” said Oakdale Police Sgt. Chris Oakes.
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