Its a neat trick to send a robot to Mars to investigate the possibility of life, but scientists have long known that you can detect life by its, er-r-r, emissions.

ALIEN microbes living just below the Martian soil are responsible for a haze of methane around the Red Planet, Nasa scientists believe.

The gas, belched in vast quantities in our world by cows, was detected by orbiting spacecraft and from Earth using giant telescopes.

Nasa are today expected to confirm its presence during a briefing at their Washington HQ.

Don't blame the cows--blame the microbes in their stomachs.

Now if we can just find a few of these little critters and recover them for analysis...

Yet another failed approach to fighting the 'Aids Virus' prompts me to record my view that the HIV/AIDS model is probably wrong. The chance of HIV being the cause, repeat 'cause', of AIDS (if AIDS even exists as a disease) is about the same as the chance that manmade carbon emissions cause Global Warming (if Global Warming even exists). It's possible, but the argumentation is weak.

Immune deficiency is not a disease, it's a propensity to disease, and is predominantly caused by lifestyle choices of the rich and lousy nutrition, hygiene and water of the poor. The greatest cause of 'AIDS' is fraudulent statistics prompted by good motives and bad motives. Iatrogenic, drug induced immune deficiency seems rife among rich and poor. Re-thinking Aids is one hub for scientific arguments against the social construct of HIV/AIDS or, for a polemic, read Paglia. The vocabulary and coercive techniques of the AGW and AIDS liberal-industrial complex are remarkably similar. Would that there were a pill against them!

How about a pix. A strange green comet streaks by next Monday night, going backwards through the solar system.

There are certain phrases that once heard compel one to commit them to memory. One such is "the transformation of 2 stellated rhombic dodecahedrons from a cube":

Looks a lot like the planet animations for the original Star Trek series...

Here is a detail of the London Underground Map:

The yellow line is The Circle Line. And that gives rise to this story:

Hadron Collider II planned for Circle Line By Steve Connor.

London Underground is in talks with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) about the possibility of using the 23km tunnel of the Circle Line to house a new type of particle accelerator similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

Particle physicists believe the existing tunnel can be adapted to take a small-scale "atom smasher" alongside the passenger line at a fraction of the cost of building a new tunnel elsewhere in Europe. They are understood to have approached London Underground with a view to announcing a feasibility study later this year.

Specialist engineers commissioned by Cern have already produced a preliminary report, seen by The Independent, which proposes installing supercooled magnets and collision detectors at strategic positions on the Circle Line. The main collision experiment will be sited at the newly refurbished Westminster Station, directly below Portcullis House, the offices of more than 200 MPs.

Although there are still considerable technical problems to overcome, such as a geo-magnetic "kink" in the circuitry at Edgware Road station, Cern is quietly confident that it will be able to convince London Underground of the merits of the scheme, which should result in the first air-conditioned underground line as a spin-off of installing supercooled magnets below ground.

The idea was initially mooted in the mid-1980s as an alternative site to the 27km tunnel below Geneva but the idea was dropped. Now, with improvements in technology and miniaturisation of the equipment, Cern believes it can build a successor to the Large Hadron Collider within the Circle line by 2020.

It would mean that two beams of protons would be travelling in clockwise and counterclockwise directions at 99.999999 per cent of the speed of light, within feet of Circle line passengers stuck in perpetual immobility.

However, health and safety advisers to London Underground are understood to be concerned about the proposal, and have raised the prospect of a mini black hole being created at Westminster when the two proton beams collide to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.

A spokesman for London Underground said the proposal is not as foolish as it first seems: "It has merits."

Dateline 1 April 2010

This would be pretty convenient for a member of my tribe who is completing a Physics PhD just up the road from a Circle Line station.

"America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz (at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future) until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves. The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

"It appears that we will have wasted our current ten plus billion dollar investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature. While the President's plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space. If it does, we should institute a program which will give us the very best chance of achieving that goal.

Neil Armstrong

Commander, Apollo 11

James Lovell

Commander, Apollo 13

Eugene Cernan

Commander, Apollo 17