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A penguin is the natural choice. It comes from Antarctica (not next door) where NASA carries out its Mars experiments (it's better, cheaper and faster than the real thing). They're also flightless, so the rarified atmosphere would give them an advantage over any birds that had aerial ambitions.
But what should it be called? Given that a penguin is defined as a bird of the genus impennes, I think it should be called Mike.

I've stuck the picture (now a jpg, and considerably smaller) here. I hope NASA don't mind.

where's the central repository for "Stuff to read" for your typical net.geek
That's handy; a chance to plug my page.
I'm working on such a thing at the moment. It gets added to every time I think of a cool book, and reviews of some/all will follow when I can be sufficiently arsed.
For the moment, check out this.

After a report in this week's new scientist about rocky planets being formed by gamma ray bursts, I was a wee bit worried. If this is such a planet, there's no need to divide the Drake Equation by a thousand.

note: this is all dependant on whether this is actual or some disillusioned scientists. I tend to beleive it, mainly because these scientists would most likely not be the type to publish normally, but until I see it from another source I won't totally believe it, that being said, let me argue like I do.

Let's say one night you watch the results of the lottery on TV, and the numbers '1-2-3-4-5-6' come up. Is that a rare occurence? No. That sequence is as likely to occur than your birthday and your girlfriend's birthday combined into esoteric equations.

Example number 2: I'm with this girl one night. I say my astrological sign is Scorpio. "Really!" she exclaims, "I'm Scorpio too!" What are the probabilities of that happening? 1/144? No, just 1/12. At one point (and cryptos will be familiar with this) if you add people, it becomes a rare event that you do not find people with the same sign.

Both of the examples you give here are actually rare occurences, not the number series themselves, but the fact that you recognize them as special series. You note their occurence as extremely rare (the water cooler talk if the lotto was 1-2-3-4-5-6!!) thus in fact making them rare.

These guys were both looking at special curves, in fact random , that turned out to be the same. That is significant in the number of other patterns that can, or cannot, be explained. At the very least this will cause your insurance rates to go up :)

We're 6 billion on this Earth. It's bound to happen to someone. Same thing with winning the grand prize lottery once or twice.

That's what the story said, very rare occurences are more likely. Check out the Drake Equation if you think that couldn't be significant

cold fusion
this is different (so far) in that it was two totally seperate areas of study that found the same thing, not some freaks in the desert.

Cool stuff regardless.
Slashdotia
pronounced Slash-dosh-ya? :)

Which is more aesthetically pleasing; calling it a W2**10 bug or W2^10 bug? Or W1K bug, perhaps? Or Just WK?
A while ago I attempted a humourous web page, part of which enumerated some of the ways that tech was going wrong; I was surprised that my research research dug up so many ways that technology we relied on is fundamentally flawed. It seems that there isn't a technology out there that doesn't feature a fatal flaw that'll kill us all a few years hence.
It's got to the stage where I'm thinking of heading for the hills not because of Y2K, but because sooner or later something electronic is going to kill us all.

Funny you should say that...

12 Clangers Dead in Moon Crash

>and presumable still do
Yup, they do. Here's Novell's rebuttal to a similar 'independent comparison' of NT4 and Netware 5 http://www.novell.com/a dvantage/nw5/nw5-mindcraftcheck.html. The study that prompted this particular article was done by none other than mindcraft, so I wouldn't put too much faith in the results of any of their tests.
Kathryn.