Age Old Mystery Solved

The Chicken came first.

A Sri Lanka hen has given birth to a chick without an egg, in a new twist on the age-old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first.

Instead of passing out of the hen's body and being incubated outside, the egg was incubated in the hen for 21 days and then hatched inside the hen.

The chick is fully formed and healthy, although the mother has died.

The government veterinary officer in the area said he had never seen anything like it before.

Life on Mars

There is a great paper over at IJASS titled Complexity Analysis of the Viking Labeled Release Experiments that looked at data pulled from the Viking mission and comes to the conclusion that there is a strong suggestion of some sort of biological life on Mars. That link will bring you to the abstract of the paper but if you're interested take the time to read through the actual paper. It's only 13 pages long and fascinating.

We conclude that the complexity pattern seen in active experiments strongly suggests biology while the different pattern in the control responses is more likely to be non-biological. Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly. This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars.