Random Linkage 31/10/09

Symbiosis by Jelte van Abbema
'Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema won the €10,000 Rado Prize at the Dutch Design Awards last week for a body of work including Symbiosis, an experimental project that involved printing with bacteria.'

Detecting Life-Friendly Moons
'Forty years ago, the Apollo astronauts traipsed across our Moon, making it "inhabited" for the first time – albeit for only two and half hours. A bona-fide habitable moon has never been found, but astronomers are considering how we might find one around distant stars.'

Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy
'Mysterious radio blips that come from apparently empty regions of space may be the voices of long-dead stars.'

Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life
'The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record. However, the causes of its origin have been the subject of debate for decades, and the question of what was the trigger for the single cell microorganisms to assemble and organize into multicellular organisms has remained unanswered until now.'

Tiny banner ads attached to flies generate buzz
'A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.'

Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master?
'From fungi to flies, some parasitic species have figured out how to control their host's behavior to get what they need. See what happens when bugs go really bad.'