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Florida Today reports that 67 year-old electronics engineer Jim Hughes has been taking out classified ads in their paper saying, ?Would you pay $10,000,000 for a piece of a UFO drive mechanism? (It may contain the secret of microgravity).? His asking price has risen since he began advertising in December and is now to $9 million.

Hughes says he can?t prove that the mysterious object he keeps locked up came from a UFO. But the ads have generated interest from a metallurgist who wants to subject the object to scientific analysis.
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A virus that infects animals but was thought to be relatively harmless to humans might contribute to some cases of mental illness, according to virologist Norbert Nowotny, of the University of Veterinary Sciences in Vienna. The Borna disease virus, which causes a fatal brain disease in animals, might be linked to schizophrenia, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome in humans.

The virus infects the nervous system tissue in horses and sheep, and triggers severe brain inflammation. The animals stop eating, become depressed and in almost all cases progress to paralysis and death within 3 weeks. There is no effective treatment.
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If life is widespread on a planet, its atmosphere should show signs of its presence. The air we exhale has more carbon dioxide and less oxygen than the air we inhale, and in the same way, the combined ?breathing? of all the life on a planet will change the chemistry of its atmosphere. If life exists on the planet, these changes may be large enough for us to notice.

We need to know which gases should we search for. We know the answers for our own world, but predicting how an alien biology might interact with its atmosphere isn?t easy. ?As astrobiologists we?ve got to be sure that we?re not too Earth-centric,? says Michael Meyer, senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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Andy Thomas writes in the Swirled News website that special manmade crop circle formations will be produced for the upcoming Hollywood film ?Signs,? starring Mel Gibson and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who made ?The Sixth Sense.? The film will open in the U.S. in the summer of 2002.

In its February 2002 issue (no. 152), the English magazine ?Empire? has a photo of Mel Gibson standing in a field of corn and says, ?Disney may (or may not) be hyping the flick by planting fake crop circles in South Africa.? In the newspaper ?USA Today,? Shyamalan says, ?We actually made them all in the fields — we contracted out to some guys a couple of galaxies away.?
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