Word: alien
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...McKay, in an article in this week's Science, suggests the need for a stronger policy that ensures all exploration of Mars be "biologically reversible" - meaning we would be required to effectively wipe away our footprints and remove any possibility of contamination, by leaving behind nothing that could foster alien microbial growth. Such a policy would be especially necessary if we discover that life on Mars has emerged independently of life on Earth - what McKay calls a "second genesis" - as opposed to Martian life that arose through the exchange of meteorites between Mars and a hospitable Earth, a condition...
...that is this compulsively readable while at the same time being almost entirely devoid of substance of any kind. When you read Michael Crichton or Scott Turow, their books wrestle with actual issues - the dangers of technology, the agonizing ambiguities of legal decision-making, what to do with underwater alien spheres, etc. The Associate is as close to being about nothing as a book can be - it's a masterpiece of almost ghostly narrative minimalism, a book of names without characters, a book with plot points but no plot...
...Given the ongoing war, there is every reason to believe that our military mission in Afghanistan would be compromised if the writ is extended to Bagram," the government said in its court filing. "To provide alien enemy combatants detained in a theater of war the privilege of access to our civil courts is unthinkable both legally and practically." But Foster, one of the lawyers representing al-Najar, sees the case from another angle. "Does Obama," she asks, "really want to have Bagram be his Guantánamo for the next four years...
That evening, as families finished their Christmas Eve dinners, the astronauts pointed their camera out the window and beamed home a grainy, gray view of the alien world they were circling. Everywhere on the planet, viewers tuned in, making up what was then the largest TV audience in history. Borman, Lovell and Anders had been instructed to do whatever they felt was appropriate to mark the moment. A friend of Borman's had suggested they read from the book of Genesis, and so its first 10 verses had been typed up on a piece of fireproof paper before the crew...
...wind—or a microscopic—singular grains tumbling one over the other—perspective of sand. The grains themselves complement and enrich the grain-like quality of film, and the bluish filtering that Dorsky builds through use of internegatives gives each frame an alien, otherworldly quality.“Winter,” the companion piece to “Sarabande,” is a meditation on San Francisco (home both to Dorsky and the Canyon Cinema collective he’s a member of) in winter. The San Francisco winter is a period...