Also, everything he knows about politics he learned from John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate."

Commenting on a story about scientists who recovered a piece of a Japanese spaceship that may have collected dust samples from an asteroid, alert reader "Pixelfix" says,

I wonder what sort of contamination screening they have for this. Did they all watch and pay close attention to The Andromeda Strain ( the original not the stupid remake ). Who knows what might be lying dormant, frozen in that dust.

Having not seen the "stupid remake" I can't hazard a guess as to the deeply flawed contamination screening procedures that might have been employed in that two-part made-for-tv movie, but no doubt Robert Wise's 1971 feature employed the sort of rigorous testing that will protect modern Earthlings from the kind of alien-microbe-slash-Japanese-movie-monster that might spring forth from Hayabusa's sample collection chamber.

Are there any other things from the science fiction of forty years ago you'd like to bring to bear on the problem, Pixelfix? Maybe have HAL9000 run through the data - oh, no, wait - wait - he's just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours - so we can't do that. Maybe we could ship it up to Moonbase Alpha and - what? You don't say. Sonofagun.