But astonishingly, the arthropod - which measures a staggering 10ft from claw to claw - is still growing, and could live until it is 100.

Nicknamed 'Crabzilla' after the fictional giant monster, the Japanese Spider Crab has a body the size of a basketball and its legs can straddle a car. They will eventually measure a massive 15ft.

The crab, called Macrocheira kaempferi in Latin, was caught by fishermen in the Pacific Ocean and has now been imported to Britain where it has gone on display at the National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham.

Out of the water, the crab looks limp and languid because it cannot support its heavy limbs.

But in its own habitat - up to 2,500ft down in the cold seas of the ocean - it is a lethal predator.

However, it also has predators of its own - humans - as it is considered a delicacy in Japan.

Graham Burrows, curator of the National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham, said: 'It is rumoured these crabs can grow to four metres across.

'Our open-topped ray tank has the icy cold waters Crabzilla needs, and will be his home until the end of March.

'He absolutely dwarfs the other crabs in there, but he's not aggressive and they should have nothing to worry about.'

'He has already spent time in quarantine and ultimately will be moved to the Sea Life centre in Blankenberge in Belgium.'

He added: 'The Japanese Spider Crab is the largest known member of the arthropod family, which includes all invertebrates with jointed limbs.

'Crabzilla's front limbs are his feeding arms, each over five feet long and ending in sizeable claws.

'They are a Japanese delicacy and are usually salted and steamed, but eating them in the spring is banned because that is when they lay their eggs.'

MOST dogs are not that fond of cats, but they really make five-year-old Joey sick.

The pooch is allergic to cat mites and moggies bring him out in a rash.

And he also has allergies to grass, daisies, dandelions, trees - and MEAT. Vets have found the only foods which don't make Joey ill are potatoes, oats and barley.

Joey's family took him to the vet because he was suffering from fur loss and rashes and seemed irritated all the time.

And blood tests revealed that the Alsatian cross has a bewildering range of allergies.

Owner Lisa McCormack, 25, said: "It was a real shock when his blood tests came back and we found out he is allergic to just about everything. It's almost as if he's allergic to the world.

"That includes all types of meats, which is obviously not good for a dog. He can't have beef, lamb, pork, chicken or anything."

Lisa, of Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and partner Scott Muirhead got Joey when he was a five-week-old pup and have been desperately worried about his health.

But he's getting back to his old self after vets at the Taylor practice in Cathcart, Glasgow, put him on a special diet and anti-allergy pills.

"Joey's looking much better," said Lisa, who works in a nursery.

"He's coming around all right now and his skin condition is improving."

Joey's pills normally cost £6 a day but the firm who make them have offered Lisa and Scott a two-month free supply.

Lisa said: "We're grateful to the vet and drug company for all they've done.

"You would think being allergic to meat would make Joey the saddest dog in Scotland, but he's really coming round."

Always one to make a scene, Lady Gaga hits the red carpet in her own unique style at the amfAR New York Gala co-sponsored by MAC Cosmetics at Cipriani 42nd Street on Wednesday (February 11) in New York City.

The 23-year-old singer, who helped kick off Fashion Week with fellow fashionistas, posed on the red carpet with Cyndi Lauper - the two even wore the shades of lipstick that they created to benefit the MAC AIDS Fund!

Gaga and Cyndi made appearances on Good Morning America and The Today Show this morning to speak about the importance of AIDS awareness and how critical prevention measures are.

WHAT DO YOU THINK of Lady Gaga wearing pearl-like balls on her face? They look like Dippin’ Dots Ice Cream!

Scientists working on the Cassini mission to Saturn have found evidence of liquid water on the planet's icy moon Enceladus, suggesting the possibility of life below its surface.

Scientists working on the Cassini space mission have found negatively charged water ions in the ice plume of Enceladus. Their findings, based on analysis from data taken in plume fly-throughs in 2008 and reported in the journal Icarus, provide evidence for the presence of liquid water, which suggests the ingredients for life inside the icy moon. The Cassini plasma spectrometer, used to gather this data, also found other species of negatively charged ions including hydrocarbons.

“While it’s no surprise that there is water there, these short-lived ions are extra evidence for sub-surface water and where there’s water, carbon and energy, some of the major ingredients for life are present,” said lead author Andrew Coates from University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

“The surprise for us was to look at the mass of these ions. There were several peaks in the spectrum, and when we analysed them we saw the effect of water molecules clustering together one after the other.” The measurements were made as Cassini plunged through Enceladus’ plume on March 12, 2008.

Enceladus thus joins Earth, Titan and comets where negatively charged ions are known to exist in the solar system. Negative oxygen ions were discovered in Earth’s ionosphere at the dawn of the space age. At Earth’s surface, negative water ions are present where liquid water is in motion, such as waterfalls or crashing ocean waves.

The Cassini plasma spectrometer, originally designed to take data in Saturn’s magnetic environment, measures the density, flow velocity and temperature of ions and electrons that enter the instrument. But since the discovery of Enceladus’ water ice plume, the instrument has also successfully captured and analysed samples of material in the jets.

Early in its mission, Cassini discovered the plume that fountains water vapour and ice particles above Enceladus. Since then, scientists have found that these water products dominate Saturn’s magnetic environment and create Saturn’s huge E-ring.

At Titan, the same instrument detected extremely large negative hydrocarbon ions with masses up to 13,800 times that of hydrogen. A paper in Planetary and Space Science by Coates and colleagues in December 2009 showed that, at Titan, the largest hydrocarbon or nitrile ions are seen at the lowest altitudes of the atmosphere that Cassini flew (950 kilometers (590 miles). They suggest these large ions are the source of the smog-like haze that blocks most of Titan’s surface from view. They may be representative of the organic mix called “tholins” by Carl Sagan when he produced the reddish brew of prebiotic chemicals in the lab from gases that were known to be present in Titan’s atmosphere. Tholins that may be produced in Titan’s atmosphere could fall to the moon’s surface and may even make up the sand grains of the dunes that dominate part of Titan’s equatorial region.

The new findings add to our growing knowledge about the detailed chemistry of Enceladus’ plume and Titan’s atmosphere, giving new understanding of environments beyond Earth where prebiotic or life-sustaining environments might exist.

More information: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

If you had the chance to send a message into space, what would it say? "Greetings, fellow sentient beings"? "We come in peace"? "Hi… we've kind of messed up our planet, and we wondered if by chance anyone out there had a spare one?"

The subject of alien life – and its presence or absence in the universe – has been moving up the agenda recently, thanks to the approaching anniversary of the day in April 1960 when Frank Drake, an astronomer at Cornell University, pointed a radio telescope towards Tau Ceti, a suitably Sun-like star in our galactic neighbourhood. Drake was looking for unusual radio transmissions, which could indicate the presence of intelligent life. And even though the search came up empty, it was a good enough idea to kickstart the SETI programme – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Fifty years later, the team at SETI are still looking, and still puzzled by what is known as the Fermi paradox (first put forward by Enrico Fermi, the atomic scientist): the universe is large enough that there should be a host of advanced civilisations out there, so why haven't they been in touch?

Some have suggested that, while life may be abundant, complex and intelligent life may be exceedingly rare. Others think that bursts of gamma rays periodically sterilise the stars, forcing the process to begin again, or that any species which comes to dominate its planet will exhaust its resources long before it steps into the stars.

Then there is the problem of detection: SETI has spent decades looking for radio signals, but the equivalent emissions from our own planet are becoming harder to detect, as we graduate from radio broadcasts to digital distribution. "The trouble," says Dr Drake, "is that we are making ourselves more and more difficult to be heard. We are broadcasting in much more efficient ways today and are making our signals fainter and fainter."

Rather than sitting and waiting for ET to say hello, then, it may be better to go out and grab his attention. Nasa's Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin. The Voyager message, carried on a 12-inch, gold-plated copper disk, contained sounds and images "selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth": music, animal noises, spoken greetings in 55 languages, as well as messages from President Carter and the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Yet given that it will take this message in a celestial bottle 40,000 years to reach another planetary system, it seems most sensible to send signals by radio – which is where you come in. To mark the SETI anniversary, as well as the publication of Paul Davies's The Eerie Silence, a new book about our search for extraterrestrial life, Penguin UK and National Science and Engineering Week will be firing off up to 5,000 messages into space via a radio telescope. The messages can be up to 40 words, and can say anything you like – greetings, warnings, confessions, jokes. The 50 best will be revealed in The Daily Telegraph in March, with each of the winners receiving a copy of Davies's book.

Among the entries already submitted is the following from Andy Hamilton, writer of the hit sitcom Outnumbered: "Attractive, fun-loving lifeform, blessed (and cursed) with a hungry mind, and wondering if it is alone in the Universe, would like to meet other lifeforms with view to meaningful relationship. Must have good sense of humour."

Quentin Cooper, the presenter of Radio 4's Material World, is responsible for the plea at the start of this piece for another planet to despoil, while Paul Davies has opted for the slightly more obscure "10001001.00001001001101110011110001101000011101110100100011110010111101", an expression of the strength of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation, as expressed in binary arithmetic. (Given our neurological and biological differences, the best way to communicate with alien life could be through the universal constants of maths and physics.) Comedian and QI panellist Alan Davies has a more pressing concern on his mind: "How do you address the issue of landfill on your planet, particularly with regard to disposable nappies…?"

It may be that we are firing these messages into an empty sky – that a better technique for hunting aliens would be to hunt for microbes here that may have come from Mars. Or, as Paul Davies has suggested, we could look for alien life in the history of our own planet: species which came and went before we evolved, or are lurking in the planet's most inhospitable corners.

It may also be, as Professor Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University warned at a Royal Society seminar last month, that alien species will be as rapacious and aggressive as our own – that such a meeting would be more War of the Worlds than Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we would do better to keep our cosmic heads down. In other words, by entering our competition, you may well doom the human race. Still, it's worth a shot, isn't it?

To enter the competition, submit your message of no more than 40 words at www.penguin.co.uk/eeriesilence Entries will be accepted until February 28, with the winners being announced in March. For full details and terms and conditions, see the website.