Wish I could go to London to research the story I'm currently writing, but alas as an American my knowledge of the locations involved comes from Google Earth (fortunately the post-apocalyptic/alien invasion setting provides a ready explanation for discrepancies) and my knowledge of the local dialects comes from books…

@reed: Gah. The fact that some crackpots turn out to be right doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of them don't.

I'll believe it when I see it.

@Dirk Anger: (in creepy voice) It does now.

@Bill-Lee: I've never watched Supernatural, though I'll probably start now I'm getting Netflix, but seems there's a neat parallel in the cover of such a quintessentially American band by a Japanese group being used in the trailer.

@BubbaZanetti: Fans of scifi and metal should also check out Ayreon, Arjen Lucassen's other project. Ayreon's best album, The Human Equation, doesn't have a lot less scifi elements (though IMO it has the most compelling story of all Arjen's works), but Into the Electric Castle and 01011001 are both excellent scifi…

@syafiqjabar of Mars: Jennifer Hale has a sexy, sexy command voice.

@skywalker24: So long as it's tested better than Raoultella planticola was, and so long as they pick a species that doesn't spread really quickly in case something goes wrong (like with the aforementioned bacterium), and so long as Monsanto doesn't get a patent on it, I don't have an objection. Though I'm still scared…

Ok, this is something I don't get- why do so many people think Let the Right One In didn't make it clear whether Eli is male or female? It's brief, but ***SPOILER*** there's a shot of her groin when she's changing into Oscar's mother's dress, and it's just a huge scar. Eli is a castrated boy. There's lots of gender…

@Harrison_Bergeron: Well nukes ARE bad, at least when used as weapons, and I'm not sold on their civilian use on Earth either. What we'd really have to do is mine fissile material from asteroids, thus negating the risk of fallout raining back on the planet if a launch went bad, and have the mission be an international…

@icelight: Orion?

@VoltCruelerz: Also, there's another planet in the same system that's only twice the mass of Earth- masswise, the smallest exoplanet we've found so far; yet another planet in the same system has five Earth masses but only 1.5 times Earth's radius, making it the smallest we've found volume-wise. It's really difficult…

@Nivenus: It's volume is somewhere around three or four times Earth's, but Jupiter is much less dense than the Earth, and since the Spot is in Jupiter's outer atmosphere it would be even less dense than the planet's mean, so it probably has roughly the mass of one Earth.

@Evdor: Yeah, this is unusual credulity on this subject for io9. None of this exactly constitutes a sea change. We've seen plenty of similar reports from military personnel over the past fifty or sixty years. The UN appointment is new, but various government officials over the years have spoken out on the subject, and…

@HidingInCanada: I really, really, hope they aren't. First, if aliens are actually like the ones depicted by the conspiracy nuts, we're all screwed (possibly literally, up the butt, with scientific implements), but much more importantly, all the conspiracy nuts will get to tell us skeptics "I TOLD you so!"

@Starlionblue: It takes a while to get into, but it's really a very good book, and meticulously researched. The titular 'radio' is extremely farfetched, but the details are mostly accurate. The weird thing is that to Bear, this isn't just a scifi what-if; he actually believes, or did at the time he wrote the…

@Gaudy Mouse Muad'Dib: I'm the same, reading almost entirely scifi and nonfiction (which is almost always science nonfiction), only occasionally branching out to horror and alternate history, or the 'mainstream' works of multi-genre authors like Iain Banks or Mary Doria Russell.

@99TelepodProblems: The human eye and brain are easily fooled, even when the humans they belong to are trained, experienced, competent, and reliable. Perception of size and distance breaks down at distances over a few hundred yards, especially at night, especially when there's no context or frame of reference.…

@tetracycloide: But Card votes Democrat anyway, because he considers the Republican party to be racist and feels that is a more important issue, so (presuming you're saying you don't want to be supporting political contributions to Republicans and other anti-gay politicians) you don't have to worry about where your…

@William Henry Harrison: Day After Tomorrow could take place before either ID4 or 2012, but since the latter two both involve the total destruction of the same cities I don't see how they could be in the same universe, unless Independence Day took place about half a century after 2012 and we'd rebuilt everything to…