Linketies: Science Friday

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  From mussels covering the bottoms of the great lakes to Burmese pythons running rampant in the Florida swamps to the creepy-looking snakehead fish, America's environment is under a widespread attack from invasive species that's only getting worse. In the latest installment, Florida is being overrun by giant African land snails. The snails can grow as big as a rat, have an insatiable appetite for hundreds of plant species, gnaw through stucco and plaster, blow out car tires if you run over them, and, as if all that's not bad enough, also carry a parasitic lungworm that can cause illness in humans.
  


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  Wired magazine interviews inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who touches on a wide range of topics, including his views on science fiction, the progress of artificial intelligence research, and his new high-profile gig working for Google.
  


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  A Dutch organization known as Mars One is seeking applicants for a one-way mission to build a human colony on Mars and put the whole thing on reality TV. It is worth noting that a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist is involved with Mars One. It's also worth noting that the organization fully admits there may be unknown health risks associated with the mission. While confident of overcoming the technical challenges of putting humans on Mars, they seem far less certain about the ability of humans to survive on Mars over the long term.
  


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  There's been another milestone for private space exploration as the Antares rocket, built by SpaceX, aced an important test flight.
  


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  The Kepler Space Telescope, a NASA mission tasked with helping in the search for far-flung exoplanets, has discovered the most Earth-like extra-solar planets yet found. These new planets are located in the habitable zones of their stars and are not much larger than Earth. Previous discoveries have been of massive exoplanets thought to be incapable of supporting life. Of course, this doesn't rule the possibility of life-supporting moons orbiting those planets, which we wouldn't be able to detect.
  


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  With the discoveries of hundreds of new exoplanets, along with the likelihood of finding more in the near future, comes the intriguing problem of naming them all. Exoplanets don't have names as such. Instead, they have designations developed and cataloged by international astronomers' groups. But at least one private company has tried charging people a fee to submit a name for an exoplanet as part of their efforts to raise money for space research -- to the severe disapproval of the professional astronomers.
  


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  And finally, a couple of items from the "One Nation Under Surveillance" Department. After Wired posted an article wondering what Apple does with all the inquiries its customers make through Siri, the company admitted that it stores all of those queries for two years. And in what could be a landmark case, the ACLU recently argued before the Supreme Court against allowing universities or private corporations to hold patents for genes. A decision in the case is expected in June when the Court wraps up its current term.