Co-editors Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern sold their anthology, Is Anybody Out There?, to Daw Books via Martin H. Greenberg's Tekno Books. And here's the anthology's pitch:

Our topic is the Fermi Paradox: Why is it that, in such a vast cosmos, with hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone, and no doubt billions of Earth-like planets orbiting them, we have found no evidence of intelligent alien life? No evidence that aliens have ever visited Earth (other than discredited UFO mythology), no detectable signals in all our SETI searches with radio telescopes... So: we're asking for entertaining stories that explore explanations for this enigma, looking seriously or comically at solutions to Fermi's question. Is intelligent life a fluke, arising only once or twice in the universe's long history? Does intelligence arise frequently, but with gulfs of time and distance keeping technological civilizations irretrievably apart? Do such civilizations inevitably implode or self-destruct within a few hundred years? Is our definition of intelligence fatally subjective? Are aliens among us right now, unseen? Are there aliens everywhere, but determined not to let us notice them? These, or other hypotheses, no matter how unlikely, should inform contributions to IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?

The same day NASA released this image, they also renamed the GLAST, which is now the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. It's named after Enrico Fermi - in the realm of high-energy physics, he's kind of a big deal. So what will the FGRS find? Hopefully, a better acronym. It will also spot radio quiet pulsars, supermassive black holes, and blazars, in addition to scanning the sky almost constantly so astronomers can see how gamma sources change over time.

Blazars are, with a doubt, exceptionally awesome. Not only are they incredibly energetic and violent, they're called blazars. You can see one in the gamma image - it's the orange blob down and to left of the center. That brilliant orange and red line in the middle is the center of the Milky Way. The bright spot at the far right end of the Milky Way is the Vela Pulsar. Two more pulsars are visible at the extreme right of the image. It found all that in just 95 hours. Astronomers are eager to see what else it will detect.

As for me, I'm off to create a comic book villain named Blazar. Image by: NASA.

New Space Telescope Reveals Entire Gamma-ray Sky. [Science Daily]