UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

A robot zaps and vacuums up venomous lionfish in Bermuda. A helicopter pelts Guam's trees with poison-baited dead mice to fight the voracious brown tree snake. A special boat with giant winglike nets stuns and catches Asian carp in the U.S. Midwest.

In the fight against alien animals that invade and overrun native species, the weird and wired wins.

"Critters are smart — they survive," said biologist Rob "Goose" Gosnell, head of U.S. Department of Agriculture's wildlife services in Guam, where brown tree snakes have gobbled up nearly all the native birds. "Trying to outsmart them is hard to do."

Invasive species are plants and animals that thrive in areas where they don't naturally live, usually brought there by humans, either accidentally or intentionally. Sometimes, with no natural predators, they multiply and take over, crowding out and at times killing native species.

'We have totally new tools that were just unthinkable a few years ago.'

- Piero Genovesi, scientist

Now, new technology is being combined with the old methods — weed pulling, trapping and pesticides. Finding new weapons is crucial because invasive species are costly — $314 billion per year in damages in just the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, India and Brazil. It's also one of the leading causes of extinction on islands, such as Guam, according to Piero Genovesi, an Italian scientist who chairs the invasive species task force for an international organization.

"We have totally new tools that were just unthinkable a few years ago," Genovesi said.

Case in point: There are companies that now market traps for wild pigs that are triggered by cellphones.

"There's enough activity that there's starting to be an industry," said University of California, Santa Cruz research biologist Bernie Tershy.

Lionfish

A new underwater robot is targeting the stunning but dangerous lionfish, which has spread over the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and up the U.S. East Coast as far north as New York's Long Island, with its venomous spines that are dangerous to touch. With no natural predator in the Atlantic, the voracious aquarium fish devour large amounts of other fish including key commercial fish species such as snapper and grouper. The robot is the creation of Colin Angle, chief executive officer of iRobot, which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Along with his wife, Erika, and colleagues, he created a new nonprofit to turn automation into environmental tools.

In this artist photo provided by Robots in Service of the Environment shows the first day a new robot was used to hunt dangerous and invasive lionfish in Bermuda. It stuns lionfish with an electric current and then the fish is vacuumed into a container alive and it can later be sold for food.

(Dr. Philippe Rouja/Robots in Service of the Environment via Associated Press)

The robot, called Guardian LF1, uses what Angle says is a gentle shock to immobilize the lionfish before they are sucked alive into a tube. In its first public outing this month, the robot caught 15 lionfish during two days of testing in Bermuda. Top chefs competed in a cook-off of the captured lionfish. Lionfish go for nearly $10 a pound and Angle is hoping to get the price of the robot down from tens of thousands of dollars to about $500.

"What's next?" Angle said. "Our ambition is much larger than lionfish."

Brown tree snakes

A few decades ago, native birds started disappearing from the Pacific island of Guam, baffling scientists until they found that non-native brown tree snakes were eating all the birds and their eggs. The snakes, which live in the trees, had no natural enemies and just trapping them wasn't working, Gosnell said. The snakes did prove to have one enemy: the painkiller acetaminophen, a generic form of Tylenol.

Fighting Invasive Species

Newly designed aerial bait cartridges containing dead mice are seen here with 80-mg acetaminophen tablets and a biodegradable streamer-like cartridge.

(USDA/APHIS Wildlife Services via Associated Press)

So biologists came up with a plan: Use a painkiller pill glued to dead fetal mice as bait. The mice are put in tubes, and dropped by helicopter in batches of 3,000. The mice pop out, and the whole contraption dangles in the trees. It's still experimental, but it will soon go to more regular use. There is one problem, however. Using dead fetal mice as bait is expensive and they have to be kept cold. But biologists are working on a solution: mouse butter. A new bait mixture smells like mice to snakes, but minus the expense and logistical problems.

Asian carp

U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials are using souped-up old technology to catch Asian carp, a fish that's taken over rivers and lakes in the Midwest and are making their way towards the Great Lakes. They use a specialized boat — the Magna Carpa — with giant wing-like nets that essentially uses electric current as an underwater Taser to stun the fish, said biologist Emily Pherigo. At higher doses, the fish are killed and float to the surface. In just five minutes, they can collect 500 fish, and later turn them into fertilizer. Using electro-fishing was written about as a possible conservation technique back in 1933, said biologist Wyatt Doyle.

Asian carp, jolted by an electric current from a research boat, jump from the Illinois River near Havana, Ill.

(John Flesher/Associated Press)

Wild goats

On the Galapagos islands, wild goats were a major problem. In less than five years, scientists wiped out tens of thousands with sterile "Mata Hari" females. Biologist Karl Campbell of the nonprofit Island Conservation introduced specialized female goats that researchers sterilized and chemically altered into a permanent state of heat, to lure the male goats into fruitless goat sex. Santiago Island, once home to 80,000 goats, is now goat free and larger Isabella Island is getting close, he said.

And now, Campbell and others are going one step further: Tinkering with the genes of mosquitoes and mice to make them sterile or only have male offspring. That would eventually cause a species to die off on an island because of lack of females to mate with. There are worries about regulating and controlling this technology, along with actually being able to get it done, so it is years away, Campbell said.

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SETI Scientists Could Survey a Million Star Systems by 2037, Lawmakers Are Told — **The Allen Telescope Array, part of the SETI Institute, searches star systems for signs of alien communications.**
**Credit: Seti Institute**

The search for intelligent life in the universe will see rapid advancements over the next two decades, thanks largely to improvements in computing power that could make it possible to survey at least a million star systems, according to Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.

Shostak discussed the state of SETI efforts (SETI stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence) during a hearing Wednesday (April 26) before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He was on Capitol Hill with three other scientists to testify on the subject of advances in the search for alien life.

Among other initiatives, the SETI Institute is searching for signs of artificial radio signals in the universe that may have been produced by an alien civilization. [Are We Alone? The Search for Life & Odds of E.T.]

**Seth Shostak, senior astornomer at the SETI Institute.**
**Credit: Frederick M. Brown/Getty**

"This experiment will only succeed if we can look at about a million or so star systems," Shostak told the committee. "That would have taken thousands of years with the current technology. Thanks to improvements, mostly in computers, that is speeding up by orders of magnitude. Over next 20 years we will be able to look at about a million other star systems."

How likely is it that scientists will find signs of life in those million star systems? Shostak's response reflected both an optimistic and a realistic outlook: "I bet everyone a cup of coffee that we will find something," he said, before quickly adding, "I may have to buy a lot of coffee."

Shostak has said previously he thinks signs of intelligent life will be found by 2040.

**Are we the only intelligent life in the universe? See how we intend to find out in this full infographic.**
**Credit: By Ka**

The improvements that will so greatly advance scientists' ability to search for signs of intelligent beings in the universe are largely twofold, Shostak said. First, as computer processors continue to follow Moore's law, computer processors will steadily get smaller, cheaper and faster. Thus, SETI scientists will be able to write computer software that simultaneously sifts through data collected by radio antennas as the antennas capture signals from multiple star systems.

"Instead of looking at one star at a time, which is what we've done … you could look at tens, hundreds, even thousands of stars at a time with enough computer-processing capability," he said. "And of course that capability is coming down the pipe."

The second improvement Shostak noted is that SETI scientists are working on using machine learning in their search for extraterrestrial communication signals. Now, scientists program computers to search for "one kind of pattern" in the radio data that could indicate an artificially created radio signal, he said. But that approach is extremely limiting — like a person who can hear only one note while listening to a symphony. Machine learning could "broaden the kind of thing [we] can recognize" in the radio signals, which would "speed up the search," he said.

Shostak also discussed the SETI Institute's efforts to search for artificial radio signals among the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the discovery of which was announced in February. The seven planets orbit a single red dwarf star, and all of them orbit closer to the star than Mercury orbits the sun. As many as three of the seven planets could be habitable, according to Adam Burgasser, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the team that discovered the seven planets. Burgasser also appeared before the committee with Shostak.

The short distance between the worlds in the TRAPPIST-1 system means that if life emerged on one planet, it could have been spread to the other planets via meteoroids. What's more, if intelligent life formed there, it would have likely colonized the other planets, so the SETI scientists are looking for communications sent between planets.

"This could be a mini federation of planets, if you will," he said. "We are using our Allen Telescope Array to look at the Trappist-1 system and we … wait for planets to line up and then see if there's any difference in the amount of radio radiation coming our way. Because at that point, you're looking down a communication pipeline between these planets."

The other three panelists focused mainly on efforts to search for "simple life" in the universe, meaning life-forms that aren't identified based on their technology. Scientists are now eager to study the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system using telescopes set to come online in the next five to 10 years. Those telescopes could find chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of those planets. The TRAPPIST-1 planets, Burgasser said, are just a few examples of recently discovered, potentially habitable planets located relatively close to Earth, that will provide excellent subjects for those studies.

"This and other recent discoveries represent the beginning of an era of exoplanet exploration that, in the next five to 10 years, will allow us to identify truly habitable worlds and possibly life beyond Earth," Burgasser said. "These transformative advances, addressing one of humanity's most persistent questions — 'Are we alone?'— are fully achievable through a diverse portfolio of research programs led by U.S. scientists and supported by federal funding to NASA, [the National Science Foundation] and other science agencies."

The four members of the panel as well as the committee members also discussed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope, set to launch in 2018, could analyze the atmospheres of some alien planets in greater detail than any current telescopes. Beyond JWST, the panelists mentioned the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is expected to identify hundreds to thousands of new planets around other stars, Burgasser said. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) and large ground-based telescopes set to come online in the 2020s, will also improve the study of exoplanet atmospheres, the panelists said.

"Our generation is the first in human history to know that there are worlds beyond our solar system. Will the next generation know whether life exists on those worlds?" Burgasser said. "We have the opportunity and the responsibility to continue our nation's legacy of discovery so that our children and grandchildren can search for life in new ways."

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield.

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