ABC Family’s new science-fiction comedy The Middleman (the pilot is available for free on iTunes) has a good shot at being a cult hit, or a least a guilty pleasure—it’s rapid-fire cultural references, charming cast, and tongue-jammed-firmly-in-cheek tone overwhelm the cheesiness of the low-budget sets and deliberately over-the-top scripts.

The central premise is that a Men-in-Black-style superhero, the Middleman, has recruited Wendy Watson, a struggling artist working temp jobs, to be his sidekick.

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Researchers recently recovered fragments of genetic material from some of the very first humans to live on the North American continent. Sadly for scientists, the material wasn’t found in some pretty piece of amber, but rather in fossilized faeces discovered in Oregon.

In both A&E’s recent remake of The Andromeda Strain, and the 1971 version of the Micheal Crichton novel, scientists are confronted with a microscopic invader, Andromeda, that has none of the trappings that we associated with life, but which is definitely alive. It grows, reproduces and evolves—all without the benefit of DNA, amino acids, water, or the complex carbon-based proteins that make all life as we know it tick. Instead, Andromeda appears to be crystalline in nature.

Is such a lifeform possible? (more…)