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This past weekend, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking joined what seems to be a growing chorus of cautious naysayers--or nervous nellies?--when it comes to possible contact with intelligent aliens from other worlds. He warned viewers of his Discovery Channel program that contact would be unwise, because the aliens might be seeking new resources and could prove hostile, the way Europeans were to the natives of the New World.   [More]

By Alla Katsnelson

Researchers looking for the genetic roots of disease have long dreamed of inspecting a patient's entire DNA sequence for telltale changes--now achievable thanks to the falling cost of sequencing. [More]

An asteroid circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has for the first time been shown to harbor water ice and organic compounds. Those traits had been associated with comets, which spring from colder, more distant reservoirs in the outer solar system, but not their asteroidal cousins. The finding supports the notion that asteroids could have provided early Earth with water for its oceans as well as some of the prebiotic compounds that allowed life to develop. [More]

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced a federal blessing for the controversial Cape Wind project today--clearing a path for mammoth wind turbines to be built offshore of the Massachusetts vacation destination, the first such offshore wind farm in the U.S. Given that the United Kingdom (alone) has 1 gigawatt of such offshore wind as of 2010 and Denmark has been building offshore since 1990 , you might wonder what's taken so long? After all, the project was first proposed nearly a decade ago. [More]

The U.S. electrical grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses. The National Academy of Engineering ranks it as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. What it cannot do is support the massive shift to low-carbon power that scientists warn will be needed to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts. [More]

A rare fossil find of two young feathered theropods has revealed that these animals sprouted a much wider range of plumage as they matured than contemporary birds do. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: I work for an office equipment company selling copiers, fax machines, computers and printers. Each year new models come out making old ones obsolete. As a result, we have loads of trade-ins with nowhere to go. What can we do with this old equipment? --Jeff P., Worcester, Mass.

By Chris Baltimore

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The Coast Guard said it will start a "controlled burn" on Wednesday to battle a giant oil slick from last week's deadly offshore drilling rig explosion, as the spill threatened wide-scale coastal damage for four U.S. Gulf Coast states.