Starship Asterisk*

In honor of April Fools', there's some good fake science news stories circling the web today. Here are a few of our favorites:

Want to be your own Dr. Doolittle? Check out Google's new app, which "translates animal speech into human vernacular." (Be sure to watch the video.)

And speaking of apps, here's a story and a video about gorillas "going ape" over the new iPad. An important clue into primate behavior, or just a waste of time? As head keeper Phil Ridges says in the article, "We thought they would bang them on rocks but they carry them round as if they were babies."

Fossil buffs will be excited to learn about a new find unearthed at the Tower of London that could rewrite evolutionary history. Here's a clue: It's got a single, thin horn.

"Who needs a thumb drive when you can store data in your thumb?" announces this news story. It turns out there's a new program called Sparsh that let's you move files between devices by storing the data in your body. No word yet on how many gigabytes are available in the average human.

And hot on the heels of a Science paper that reported bacteria that use arsenic instead of phosphorus in their DNA, comes a new breed of sea monkeys found feasting on these bizarre bugs. Warning: these guys get violent if you mess with them.

Alas, we didn't run our own April Fools' story this year, but here are a couple of our past attempts to trick you:

• Science, Nature Team Up on New Journal
  Pig-Footed Bandicoot Rises From the Dead

http://astrobob.areavoices.com/?blog=78068 wrote:
Abducted by aliens, this could be final post
Posted on April 1, 2011 by astrobob

I was able to grab one photo of the aliens before they confiscated my camera, reversed-engineered it and then returned it unassembled in a bag made of carbon nanotube material. Photo: Bob King

---

<<I’ve been abducted by aliens, but you needn’t be too concerned. I majored in foreign language in college and quickly learned enough vocabulary to ask where the bathroom was aboard this behemoth space ship. A dozen of my fellow humans are here with me. Each of us was selected for questioning on a particular aspect of our culture. My topic is hot dogs – their origin and evolution with particular emphasis on the construction methods employed to create the famous “Chicago-style” hotdog. Why aliens would care about hotdogs I can only guess. Perhaps they’re looking for something tastier to eat during those long interstellar journeys than pouches of powdered fruit juice.

With only a few minutes to spare before they put me under the laser ball, I’ll get to the point. Space station afficianados up at dawn these fine spring mornings will get another week’s worth of passes. The station looks like a brilliant star moving from west to east; a typical pass across the sky takes around five minutes. The times listed below are accurate for the Duluth region. For times for your city, plunk in your zip code on Spaceweather’s satellite flyby link. All passes this week will happen in the northern sky.

Times are CDT
* Saturday morning April 2 starting at 4:55 a.m. The station will first appear directly overhead as it exits Earth’s shadow and enters sunlight. It travels to the east from there.
* Sunday April 3 at 5:20 a.m.
* Monday April 4 at 5:45 a.m. Another nice northern sky crossing.
* Tuesday April 5 at 4:38 a.m. when the space station will first appear due north directly below the North Star traveling east. A second pass across the entire north begins at 6:11 a.m.
* Wednesday April 6 at 5:03 a.m.
* Thursday April 7 at 5:28 a.m.
* Friday April 8 at 5:53 a.m.
* Saturday April 9 at 4:45 a.m.

Uh-oh. I’ve got to cut this short - they’re coming for me. I already see those light-bulb shaped heads silhouetted against the ultra-blue, xenon-lit corridor. And now I suddenly can’t remember if you put the chopped onions on the hotdog before or after the hot peppers. Good lord, a screw-up like that could cost me my life. Gotta go …>>