Alien

Anja Huwe realised things were about to change for Xmal Deutschland in 1982, when they opened for Cocteau Twins. Up until then, the band had been a creative experiment concocted by five women in Hamburg’s small but productive punk scene. Now, embarking on a UK-wide tour and recently signed to 4AD, the experiment was starting to look like it could become a phenomenon.“I wanted to be part of a band but not really the front person,” remembers vocalist Anja Huwe. “When we had our first gig with the Cocteau Twins, that was…

Researchers report that a truck traversed the area near the seismic station in Manus Island. Image based on satellite images acquired on March 24, 2023. Alert your neighbors. Take shelter. Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa and Benjamin Fernando/Johns Hopkins University, with imagery from CNES/Airbus via Google I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Rodents eating herbal remedies. I watched a truck mistaken for an alien…

Jupiter's icy moon Europa has long been thought of as one of the most habitable worlds in the Solar System. Now the Juno mission to Jupiter has directly sampled its atmosphere in detail for the first time.The results, published in Nature Astronomy, show that Europa's icy surface produces less oxygen than we thought.There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the possibility of finding microbial life on Europa. Evidence from the Galileo mission has shown that the moon has an ocean below its icy surface containing…

UFOs are back in the news this week with the release of a long-awaited Pentagon report that was designed to address public interest in the topic. What Should Fans Take Away from Imaginary?UFOs (or, rather, UAP, as they’re now known), were injected back into public consciousness last year thanks largely to a former high-ranking intelligence official, David Grusch, who, after quitting his post at a prominent defense agency, went public with a variety of weird claims about aliens and spacecraft. Specifically, Grusch claimed…

In January 2014, a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere in the Western Pacific, as evidenced by apparent vibrational signatures of the event in a seismic station in Papua New Guinea. Last year, scientists declared rubble recovered from the ocean floor as the rejectamenta of that event (and some even speculated it was a form of alien technology). But now, another team offers a different interpretation: the vibrations were caused by a truck on a nearby road, driving by at the same time the meteor plummeted through the…

The live-action How to Train Your Dragon cast keeps expanding. Get a sneak peek at Monsters at Work season two. MaXXXine finds itself a new release date. Plus, what’s coming on Ghosts and Resident Alien. Spoilers, away!Spoilers of the Week: July 1stHow to Train Your DragonTHR reports Ruth Codd (Fall of the House of Usher) has joined the cast of Universal’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake as Phlegma the Fierce. MinecraftDuring a recent interview with Variety, Jack Black revealed he sings a duet with Danielle…

Some 100 light-years from the Solar System dwells the most mathematically perfect planetary system we've ever seen.The star at its center – a temperate orange dwarf called HD 110067 – is orbited by six exoplanets, each of which travels in harmony with its adjacent worlds. Such a perfect chain of orbital resonances is extremely rare, and it means that the system has remained relatively stable and undisturbed since it formed, around a billion years ago.This is interesting in its own right, and scientists are studying it…

It is far from his best album, and not even his best album of the 1990s, but Hours... is David Bowie’s most significant album that decade. Not because of the music, however, but how it was released: the first album by a major artist on a major label to emerge as a download before it arrived physically.Writing about the album in August 1999 ahead of its September release, Rolling Stone called Hours… a “cyber-coup”: a continuation of Bowie’s fascination with releasing music online, which he started with the Telling Lies…

In the search for extraterrestrial life, MIT scientists say a planet’s carbon-lite atmosphere, relative to its neighbors, could be a sure and detectable signal of habitability. Credit: SciTechDaily.comA low carbon abundance in planetary atmospheres, which the James Webb Space Telescope can detect, could be a signature of habitability.Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers’ best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather…

Evil Dead Trap - Official TrailerThe English-language title evokes a certain popular horror series (Evil Dead II was released just a year prior), but this Japanese slasher/ghost story/giallo is its own ghoulish beast. A TV crew investigating the filming location of what appears to be a snuff film finds something maliciously sinister waiting for them... and things get ever-squishier from there. (Free with ads on Freevee) Evil Dead Trap - Official TrailerThe English-language title evokes a certain popular horror series…