Apart from annoying Trek toy noise and depressing Doctor Who news, and war stories masquerading as science fiction for fans lost in MySpace, there's interesting stuff happening in real space. An intriguing guess at the quantity of intelligent life in those billions and billions of stars (361 to 38,000 civilizations), but a certain anxiety that we'll never get off this rock again due to an orbiting blanket of spaceship-destroying debris...Plus a lot of fascinating stuff about, of all places, Mars: the planet most fantasized from the 19th through half of the 20th centuries as the prime site for alien civilizations, but very unfashionable lately. Now all kinds of signs of life are popping up, from leaking methane (possibly indicating subsurface life right now) to the presence of snow in the atmosphere and evidence of hot springs on the surface in the past. These and other bits of evidence suggest that Mars once had the conditions of life, and may have life now. If those hot springs areas can be located, future probes could look for fossils there, because such areas on Earth are often fossil-rich.