The Alien in the Comic Book Store

You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to identify an alien. They don't simply trot out before you in their natural form, green, three-fingered, and slimy, with heads measuring at least as tall as their trunks. Last week, for instance, I saw one in a comic book store and he totally looked human. Average height. Sandy, messy hair. Wire-rim glasses. White. Early twenties.

So how did I know he was from another planet? He was moving around a little oddly, stopping and pretending to stare with interest at various items, but none of these behaviors really raised an alarm. Then he walked to the register with a box set DVD collection of the once popular television series Friends. That's when I knew.

Why would a fairly normal-looking young man buy the entire run of Friends? And why now, so long after its cultural moment has passed? Because he's an alien. And I can even tell you where he's from.

Last week, scientists also announced that they'd discovered the two closest habitable planets on record. A habitable planet is one that appears to have a reasonably friendly environment. So, for instance, Venus doesn't count. We'd burn if we tried to hang out there. And it wouldn't be terribly fun to breathe the air. These new planets, on the other hand, appear to be a little more human friendly. And they are roughly thirteen light years away. Which, as you know, is the distance covered by a beam of light traveling for thirteen years.

So here's what I think happened. Right around 2001, or the peak years of Friends, some of the NBC broadcast leaked out into space, racing right along at the speed of light. Thirteen years later, these broadcast waves struck the just discovered twin planets. The aliens, using inconceivably advanced technology, decoded the signals and converted them back into a view-able format. I don't know if they caught an entire episode, a whole season, or just a particularly moving or hilarious scene. My guess, though, is that the entire civilization was mesmerized. Immediately they needed to know what happened to Ross and Rachel, the former stars of the show. So they chose one brave explorer, programmed their wormhole for Earth, and tossed him inside. A few seconds or perhaps even days later I saw him, disguised as a young man, in the comic store. Disoriented, maybe. But focused. He did not wait long to grab that box set.

Soul Surfer

In April 2005, my wife and I were bodysurfing on a beach in Kauai when a bunch of kids paddled out on their boards. The water was clear, clean, aquamarine, and the wind was down, so the surface was glassy and smooth. I was jealous, not having a surfboard with me, and thinking about the fact that these kids probably just got out of school and ran straight to the beach for a surf. Not a bad life. Anyway, there were girls and boys out on their boards, and one of them was paddling a little strangely. Something just didn't seem right about the way she was pulling through the water. It hardly stopped her, though: A nice, waist-high wave rolled in, she turned, jumped to her feet, and coasted our way.

That's when we saw the stump and realized this was the famous local girl, Bethany Hamilton. A year earlier, she'd been surfing at this very beach when a shark attacked her, biting off her arm. Now she was back, playing in the surf with her friends, clearly fearless. Needless to say, watching her surf was an incredible experience. Even with one arm, she was probably the best one out there.

She also has a book out now, and a movie coming out this weekend. Scholastic Book Talk posted an interview with her the other day. It's a good one, but this quote stood out above the rest:

BT: If you could go back to that day and choose not to go surfing, would you?

BH: No. If I could go back to that day, I would go surfing. It may seem like such a terrible thing that happened, but I can see now that there has been so much good that has come out of it. And I wouldn’t change that. Losing my arm was not the end of the world.

Beneath the Oil Slick

Since the oil spill began three weeks ago, most eyes and cameras have been focused on the widening, orange slick. But now, as experts argue that the flow rate could far exceed the government's estimate of 210,000 gallons a day, a team of independent scientists studying the water in and around the disaster zone have found another problem: stores of leaked oil lingering beneath the surface in long, stringy filaments and snowflake-like collections.

"It doesn't float right up on top as you would think," Raymond Highsmith of NIUST tells AOL News. "Some of it floats right under the surface, and some of it now looks like it's quite a ways down."

This is the start of a piece I just wrote for AOL News. What these scientists are doing is amazing, and important. Read the rest here.