Political leaders have ‘no plan’ for alien contact

(Image credit: Martina Badini/Shutterstock)

A leading space expert has claimed that political leaders have no plan for what to do if aliens make contact. Professor Fred Watson, Australia’s astronomer at large, said that although “there’s a well-established chain of boxes that need to be ticked” in such a scenario, “once scientists identified what had happened, it’d then be up to the political leaders of the world to decide what to do about it, and as far as I’m aware, there’s no plan in place.’’

Man breaks alphabet soup record

A man in the US broke a Guinness World Record when he found and put into alphabetical order all 26 letters in a can of alphabet soup in two minutes and 8.6 seconds. Jacob Chandler said the “most difficult part” was “not being able to know what was going to be in the can at the time of the attempt”. He said he hoped his feat would inspire his son to achieve his own dreams. "When he was born I learned to love unconditionally,” Chandler said.

Ice age mammoth found in Canada

A whole baby woolly mammoth has been found frozen in the permafrost of north-western Canada. The mummified mammoth, which is thought to be more than 30,000 years old, was found by gold miners in Yukon’s Klondike region. The baby, thought to be female, has been named Nun cho ga, meaning “big baby animal” in the Han language spoken by Native Americans in the area.