If there wasn't life on Mars before, there might be now. Before NASA sent Curiosity to Mars, it was thoroughly cleaned of all traces of contaminants. But swabs of rover's surfaces taken before it was sent to Mars have revealed 377 different strains of bacteria that potentially could have made the trip. Some of them may have even survived.

A study that identified 377 strains found that a surprising number resist extreme temperatures and damage caused by ultraviolet-C radiation, the most potentially harmful type. The results, presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, are a first step towards elucidating how certain bacteria might survive decontamination and space flight.

YouTube has a page that lets you switch to the HTML5 player. If you visit that page in Chrome, you'll only see the message: "The HTML5 player is currently used when possible" and you can't switch to the Flash player. In all the other browsers, the Flash player is enabled by default and you can click "request the HTML5 player" to enable that player.

Jonathan Decker just posted a list of 15 terrific movies and TV series for Sunday viewing found on Netflix.

You can read the list in the article “15 Great Sunday Movies on Netflix Streaming.”

Each generation should be wiser than the last.

What if Au Bon Pain lost this lawsuit and had to pay the plaintiff $2 undecillion?

—Kevin Underhill

The bakery-cafe chain Au Bon Pain (with a few other organizations) is being sued. This is how much money the person suing them is demanding:

This is how much sellable stuff there is in the world:

This is the estimated economic value of all goods and services produced by humanity since we first evolved:

Even if Au Bon Pain conquers the planet and puts everyone to work for them from now until the stars die, they wouldn't make a dent in the bill.

Maybe people just aren't that valuable. The EPA currently values a human life at $8.7 million, although they go to great lengths to point out that technically this is not actually the value any specific person places on another person's individual life.[1]Note that they don't say whether they assume that amount would be higher or lower. In any case, by their measure, the total value we place on all the world's humans is about $60 trillion—less than the total value we place on all the world's oil.[2]Come to think of it, that explains a lot.

But while people may be worthless,[3]I'm rounding down. we're hardly all there is on the planet. Out of all the Earth's atoms, only 1 out of every 10 trillion is part of a human.

The Earth's crust contains a bunch of atoms,^{[citation needed]} some of which are valuable. If you extracted all the elements, purified them,[4]This is just one of many reasons that this idea wouldn't make sense in practice. The reason many elements (like U-235) are valuable is that it's hard to manufacture or purify them, not just because they're rare. and sold them, the market would crash.[5]Both in the sense that the supply would cause a drop in prices, and the sense that the market is like 20 miles above the mantle and you just removed the crust supporting it. But if you somehow sold them at their current market price, they would be worth ...

Oddly, most of this value comes from potassium and calcium, and most of the rest comes from sodium and iron. If you're going to sell the Earth's crust for scrap, those are probably the ones you should sift out.

Sadly, even selling the crust for scrap doesn't get us close to the numbers we need.

We could include the core,[6]It's down there. which is iron and nickel with a dash of precious metals, but it turns out it wouldn't help. The amount demanded from Au Bon Pain is just too large. In fact, an Earth made of solid gold wouldn't be enough. The Sun's weight in platinum wouldn't be, either.

By weight, the single most valuable thing that's been bought and sold on an open market is probably the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp. There's only one known copy of it, and in 2010 it sold for \$2,300,000. That works out to about \$30 billion per kilogram of stamps. If the Earth's weight were entirely postage stamps, it would still not be enough to pay off Au Bon Pain's potential debt.[7]Also, the stamps would probably be less valuable now that there is literally an entire planet of them, but that's the least of Au Bon Pain's problems.

If Au Bon Pain & co decided to be intentionally difficult, and pay their debt entirely in pennies, they would form a sphere that would squeeze inside the orbit of Mercury.[8]The fate of this sphere of pennies is left as an exercise for the reader. The fate of Mercury is that it would fall into the pennies and disintegrate. The bottom line is that paying this settlement would be, in almost any sense of the word, impossible.

Fortunately, Au Bon Pain has a better option.

Kevin, who asked this question, is a lawyer and author of the legal humor blog that reported on the Au Bon Pain case.[9]And which we encountered in Question #90. He told me that the world's most highly-paid lawyer—on an hourly basis—is probably former Solicitor General Ted Olson, who recently disclosed in bankruptcy filings that he charges $1,800 per hour.

Suppose there are 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy, and every one of them hosts an Earth-sized population of 7 billion Ted Olsons.

If Au Bon Pain hired every Ted Olson in the galaxy to defend them in this case, and had them all work 80-hour weeks, 52 weeks a year, for a thousand generations[10]This scenario assumes that the former Solicitor General reproduces asexually....

... it would still cost them less than if they lost.

Enid v. 2:00 AM

5/15/2014

shoomlah:

14th century Harley Quinn for Sketch_Dailies' #harlequin prompt over on twitter!  I am nothing if not predictable.

In a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic, a woman with a type of blood cancer called myeloma was given an injection of measles virus large enough to innoculate 10 million people and has been "completely cleared" of her cancer.

So, as part of a two-patient clinical trial, doctors at the Mayo Clinic injected Erholtz with 100 billion units of the measles virus -- enough to inoculate 10 million people.

Her doctor said they were entering the unknown.

Five minutes into the hour-long process, Erholtz got a terrible headache. Two hours later, she started shaking and vomiting. Her temperature hit 105 degrees, Stephen Russell, the lead researcher on the case, told The Washington Post early Thursday morning.

"Thirty-six hours after the virus infusion was finished, she told me, 'Evan has started shrinking,'" Russell said. Over the next several weeks, the tumor on her forehead disappeared completely and, over time, the other tumors in her body did, too.

The cancer of the other person in the trial was unaffected and larger randomized trials still have to be performed, but this is encouraging news. Between this and the remission of cancer using HIV, it looks like viral therapy has a real shot at being a powerful weapon in fighting cancer.

A shipwreck believed to be Christopher Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, has been found off the coast of Haiti.

The evidence so far is substantial. It is the right location in terms of how Christopher Columbus, writing in his diary, described the wreck in relation to his fort.

The site is also an exact match in terms of historical knowledge about the underwater topography associated with the loss of the Santa Maria. The local currents are also consistent with what is known historically about the way the vessel drifted immediately prior to its demise.

The footprint of the wreck, represented by the pile of ship's ballast, is also exactly what one would expect from a vessel the size of the Santa Maria.

Using marine magnetometers, side-scan sonar equipment and divers, Mr. Clifford's team has, over several years, investigated more than 400 seabed anomalies off the north coast of Haiti and has narrowed the search for the Santa Maria down to the tiny area where the wreck, which the team thinks may well be Columbus' lost vessel, has been found.

Those readers who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know that the Word of Wisdom

Enid v. Her New Goal

5/13/2014

This is odd: Gary Stewart has written a book about the search for his biological father and through the process discovered his father is the still-uncaught Zodiac Killer. The book's description promises new "forensic evidence".

An explosive and historic book of true crime and an emotionally powerful and revelatory memoir of a man whose ten-year search for his biological father leads to a chilling discovery: His father is one of the most notorious-and still at large-serial killers in America.

Soon after his birth mother contacted him for the first time at the age of thirty-nine, adoptee Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father. It was a quest that would lead him to a horrifying truth and force him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about himself and his world.

The book is out today and was kept secret until yesterday. This sounds about as plausible as Jesus's wife, but who knows?

Tyler Vigen is collecting examples of data that correlate closely but are (probably) otherwise unrelated.

Remember kids, correlation != causation.

Remember just last week when we were talking about Half-Life 2 coming out for Android and Nvidia Shield shortly after Portal 2, which is set to launch today? We have great news if that piqued your interests. Not only is Portal totally available right now in Google Play, so is Half-Life 2. Double whammy!

For $9.99 each, if you have a Shield and have never played either of these games, you owe it to yourself to pick them up and fall in love. Even if you already have played them, you know you want to play them again. For a quick summary of the games: Portal is a first person puzzle-platformer that has spawned approximately ten billion memes (the cake is a lie!) and Half-Life 2 is a first person shooter with an awesome in-depth storyline. There’s a reason both of these games are considered instant modern classics. They really are that good.

If you have an Nvidia Shield, head on over to Google Play and grab both Portal and Half-Life 2 now. If you don’t, well then head over to Amazon first, buy a Shield and then head on over to Google Play.

So, this showed up on Vimeo last night and will likely be pulled soon (so hit that "download" button while you can), but here's the deal. In 2012, actor Topher Grace showed an edit he'd done of episodes I-III of Star Wars to a bunch of friends, trimming the 7 hours of prequels down into 85 action-packed minutes of pure story. This Vimeo edit is longer (2:45) and is "based on the structure conceived by actor Topher Grace", which you can read about here.

Grace's version of the film(s) centers on Anakin's training and friendship with Obi-Wan, and his relationship with Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman). Gone are Trade Federation blockades, the Gungan city, the whole Padmé handmaiden storyline, the explanation of midichlorians, the galactic senate and the boring politics, Anakin's origins (a backstory which never really needed to be seen in the first place), the droid army's attack on Naboo, and Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) appears only briefly for only one line of dialogue, used as a set-up to introduce us to the Queen.

(via @bursts)