Item:1962 — John Glenn orbits the earth in a Volkswagen Beetle.
    Item: 1998 — John Glenn orbits the earth in a Dodge Minivan.
    Item: 2034 — John Glenn orbits the earth in a Rolls Royce.
    If this doesn’t make your blood race with the thrill of exploring the universe, physicists at the California Institute of Technology say they have completed the first full experiment with quantum teleportation. This phenomenon depends on an equally nebulous event called entanglement, once described by Albert Einstein as "spooky action at a distance." Everyone thought he was talking about blind dating. Right now, the quantum crowd is just throwing beams of light from one place to another, without even the benefit of a Mag light.
    This trick will come in handy to impress the aliens which scientists at the University of Colorado assure us are out there, just beyond the reach of John Glenn's Subaru. "There have been key discoveries that suggest life is simple, straightforward and easy if you have the right conditions," says Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist. Perhaps this is where Einstein was headed with his blind dating theory.
    Looking to the past to study how life may yet develop elsewhere, scientists note that 30 million years ago, when John Glenn orbited the earth in a rickshaw, the dolphin had more brainpower than our human ancestors. What happened to allow humans, rather than dolphins, to develop intellectually is not known, but you don’t see dolphins waiting a half-hour for a table in a restaurant, do you?
    All this and more may not matter if British scientists are correct in recent reports finding that the sky is falling. Known as the Chicken Little Effect, the Earth's upper atmosphere has contracted or dropped by nearly five miles in the past four decades, attributable in part to global warming. For those not practiced in blind dating or quantum physics, this development could be cause for concern, but scientist Martin Jarvis called the finding "not a shattering result, but an indication things are changing."
    How we can best respond to these changes, real or imagined, is unclear. But for now, scientists are urging caution before telejumping to intergalactic conclusions. As an physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. says, "We’re still not 100 percent sure we’ve pinned down the science."