When not being swallowed by a lesser species, extraterrestrials have taken to spreading their love for the Firefox web browser throughout the United States. A recent Google Maps find going all over the internet appears to show the famous browser’s logo, crop-circled into a row of corn in what looks to be like the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Northwest. Ignore the plane, cars and people forming the ‘FX’ just below the field, this was done by real live aliens, man. Aliens!

See more: Mozilla Firefox crop-circle | Mozilla

How on Earth could I have missed this!? Back in June a wounded duck died in the care of the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia, California. Upon performing an X-ray of the wounded fowl, an uncanny image of an alien’s face appeared within the birds stomach, as if it had swallowed the little space traveler before he could make contact with the people of Earth! Naturally, what else could one do but place the original X-ray film on eBay! That’s exactly what the Bird Rescue Center did, with all proceeds from the sale going to fund their continuing efforts to rescue and rehabilitate wounded waterfowl and aquatic birds. The X-ray was purchased by online casino and purchasers of all things pertaining to wacky pop culture, GoldenPalace.com for $9600.

Read more: “ET” Duck x-ray sold for $9600

Guess we won’t get an answer to that one! Har har har har har har. Google yesterday announced that their first Labs project, Answers, is being axed. Google will stop accepting new questions by the end of this week, with answers being accepted until the end of the year. An interesting note is that over the past 4 years, the participating users numbers less than 1000, a shockingly low amount for a Google product.

Read more: Google announces Answers shutdown | Google Answers

Not that half of you even want to know about Lost anymore with the dismal reception the show has been receiving from old and new fans alike. I still believe, once this soap opera mess is over and Kate figures out she really loves Jack, we can move on with some serious mystery solving and Lost will return to it’s suspenseful glory (hopefully without Pualo and Nikki). Sigh. So yeah, Lost is currently on it’s fall break and those of us who are bored of reruns already should take this time to polish up our Lost knowledge. What better way is there than by visiting the Lost wiki page, a treasure-trove of hints, trivia, small details and lots of nerdy folk we can all relate to.

Read more: Lostpedia

Astra, the upcoming sequel to what was once everyone’s favorite universal messenger, is currently undergoing closed testing within Cerulean Studios. But that’s changing. Development of the app has reached the alpha state, and signups are now open for anyone wanting to get a chance to help Cerulean test Astra into submission. Approved testers will of course have to be involved in the testing community and submit their bugs to cerulean, this isn’t just a preview of some new software.

Read more: Trillian Astra alpha-testing signups

Those daring bloggers over at underGoogle has put up an amazingly funny little Google Maps mash-up, featuring an extremely extremely long white board documenting Google’s plan for world domination as dictated to us via a free-for-all board hidden deep within a Google lair somewhere. Warning, this quite a time waster for the hardcore nerds, so, look at it off of company time (har har).

See more: Google master plan revealed!

Over at Flickr (where I’ve wasted my whole morning trying to retrieve a password from an old account thanks to their pile of crap system which has been integrated into Yahoo’s pile of crap system) I just noticed a brilliant photo of someone’s Star Trek memorabilia score. In the 80s, Flickr user “The Rocketeer” found a collection of business cards for some of the characters of the original Star Trek. From Captain Kirk to Cyrano Jones, there are nifty little quotes and everything attributed to each character. Would be a perfect gift for the Star Trek nerd in your family, if only they were still available.

See more: Star Trek business card collection

Forget the Heroes wiki (ok don’t, not really), Greg Beeman, one of the directors and producers of everyone’s favorite new sci-fi tv series Heroes, has a wonderful blog up discussing his experiences during the production of his episodes. Though sometimes containing a few spoilers, Beeman is offering up TONS of great information and insight, including lots of great behind the scenes photos, brief interviews with the many people involved in the show, and giving his first-hand explanations of decisions he and other’s have made about the show’s direction. Now this is the type of fan-interaction I *love* to see with some of my favorite shows, less intern-backed official blogs and more blogs directly from those who have their hands on the switch. Thanks Greg and keep up the great work!

Read more: Heroes production blog (Potential spoilers alert!)

CogMap is the Wikipedia of organizational charts, meaning, a collection of charts online that anyone can create, edit, maintain or contribute to. A handy tool for businesses and organizational nerds alike, CogMap is a brilliant exercise in next-gen web design.

Read more: CogMap

Several years ago, Trillian was the end all be all for Windows messengers. Not the first, but certainly one of the most stylish and attractive universal messengers, Trillian was an instant web-success. Then things started to go wrong. Development was split into a free version and a pro (commercial) version. Both started getting bloated and performance suffered. But, Trillian appears to be making a comeback. With the newest version, Astra, Cerulean Studios are attacking the performance issues by updating the rendering times as well as chasing down the many memory leaks that have been plaguing them for years now. Many new enhancements are coming, including a widget system, support for MySpace Messenger, and many other new features. But enough blah blah blah, go take a look and see if you’re willing to give old faithful another shot.

Read more: Cerulean Studios offers preview of Astra