In order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), England’s Telegraph newspaper asked readers to submit what they would like to communicate to aliens before the visit Earth. Expecting wonderful, uplifting notes extolling our virtues as humans, the Telegraph was shocked to discover the opposite, with the overwhelming majority asking for aliens to please put us out of our misery.

For what would he learn about mankind? First, that we are vicious, creatures who have already done a great job of wrecking our home. “Please kill us now … have no mercy,” urged a gentleman from Indiana. “We are evil and you must defend yourself.”

“Keep away from this planet,” agreed Pamela from Sicily. “Mankind is only intent on depleting, abusing and destroying [it]. They will do the same to yours should they find it. Mankind is the worst virus in the universe. You have been warned.”

Nick from Calne was equally blunt: “If you manage to work out how to travel to us, don’t bother, as we’ll probably probe you, try to blow you up or worse still, steal your technology and invade… Have a nice day.”

Rob from Georgia, meanwhile, was prepared to throw the rest of mankind to the lions: “Dearest Aliens, If you choose to conquer Earth, please do not kill or enslave those of us who can name all 12 men to have walked on the Moon. We are the ones worth keeping around.”

Seema from Elgin had a compelling reason for ET not to bother with us: “If you’re planning to visit our planet, please know you will need to remove all metal from your person, take your shoes off and submit to a full body scan, carry all liquids/gels/aerosols in clear plastic bottles no bigger than 3.4oz, surrender all cigarette lighters and batteries, pack all jams and jellies (but pies can be carried on)… Oh, yes. Welcome to the Earth!”

The California Institute of Technology has announced the invention of a new type of solar cell, one that is way beyond current technology.  Better yet, this new solar cell is comprised of 98% plastic and only requires 1/50th of the semiconductor material used in convention solar cells, meaning this new CalTech invention will be incredibly cheap to produce. Even better…CalTech’s new technology runs at 90% efficiency, which is a remarkable 4X greater than existing solar cells.

“Our technology uses 50-100 times less silicon,” he said, “in the form of a sparse array of wires. And that sparse array of wires has exactly the same light absorption and electricity-collection properties as the conventional silicon wafer cell.”

The tiny silicon wires stick up from the base, or substrate, looking something like a microscopic hair brush. And because the key component of solar cells is an expensive, highly purified form of silicon, there’s a real economic benefit to this design.

“So what that means is, in terms of cost, is you can use 100 times less silicon. And that’s potentially very significant.”

But the silicon is what converts light into electricity, so you might think using so much less silicon would reduce the electrical output, but Atwater says that’s not the case.

“The light comes in and is both directly absorbed by the wires, and some of the light bounces around in between the wires. And that bouncing around or multiple scattering in between the wires results in dramatically enhanced absorption,” Atwater explained. “In fact, the absorption enhancement that we see is in the range of 20 to 50 times the single-pass absorbance.”

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A glimpse into the ancient past has been revealed by the discovery of a 600,000 year-old leaf beetle. The remains of the beetle were well-preserved, thanks to a perfect mix of water and acidic levels. This allowed the true color of the leaf beetle to remain intact, just as it appear 600,000 years ago.

Parker told Discovery News that “these fossils are important because, rather than simply predicting that relatives of animals today were similarly colored, we can prove it.”

Parker, who authored the book “In the Blink of an Eye,” has extensively studied color and its connection to the emergence of vision in the animal kingdom.

“Since vision evolved, everything has been fully adapted to the presence of a retina, adapted in terms of their color, shape and behavior,” he said. “Prior to the first highly mobile predator with vision, the rules would have been much different, and indeed we know from fossils that animal forms and ecology were much different.”

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A new find on the Greek island of Crete is re-writing the earliest entries of human history, most notably our understanding of when humans first began exploring the seas. A wide-assortment of stone tool were discovered that date to approximately 130,000 years ago, so long ago that the people who wielded these tools would be considered “pre-human”.

Since Crete has been an island for well over 5-million years, any sign of ancient tools indicates sea-faring as the only explanation for their existence. Hence, the history of Mediterranean exploration has pushed back a staggering 100,000 years.

Even more intriguing, the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch, they conceded, but the tools resemble artifacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean, which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.

More than 2,000 stone artifacts, including the hand axes, were collected on the southwestern shore of Crete, near the town of Plakias, by a team led by Thomas F. Strasser and Eleni Panagopoulou. She is with the Greek Ministry of Culture and he is an associate professor of art history at Providence College in Rhode Island. They were assisted by Greek and American geologists and archaeologists, including Curtis Runnels of Boston University.

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Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

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Part 6

Part 7