fr/spaceweather.com
JUMP: Solar activity is low, but it’s not zero. Just look at what happened yesterday. On May 20th, an enormous filament of hot plasma and magnetism reared up from the edge of the sun and …. (click on the image)
Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory [movie]
…it jumped! The magnificent leap spanned more than 200,000 km of fiery starscape. This is the sort of thing that happens routinely when a 1027ton nuclear explosion (a star) is “quiet.”
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| Zombies, the brain-craving, shambling undead, are a pop culture phenomenon. CREDIT: © Chrisharvey | Dreamstime.com |
First there was “Dawn of the Dead.” Then there was “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” (Quirk Books, 2009). Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are jumping on the zombie bandwagon.
Yes, that CDC. A post on the health agency’s blog titled “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” went viral this week, causing the blog’s servers to temporarily crash. The blog normally gets 1,000 to 3,000 hits per day, said CDC spokesperson Dave Daigle. Before the page went down on Wednesday (May 18), the post had garnered 30,000 hits. As of Thursday morning, 55,000 people had clicked on the post.
“We did not anticipate this type of reaction,” Daigle told LiveScience.
to read more go to: http://www.livescience.com/14240-cdc-zombie-apocalypse.html
Rashonda Thornton looked up at the menu on the wall, ordered a Caesar salad and dropped a $10 bill in a box. Pretty generous, considering the meal at Panera Bread Co.’s café in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton sells for less than $7.
It was a year ago that Panera converted the Clayton restaurant into a nonprofit pay-what-you-want restaurant with the idea of helping to feed the needy and raising money for charitable work. Panera founder and Chairman Ronald Shaich said the café, operated through Panera’s charitable foundation, has been a big success, largely because of people like Thornton.
“Sometimes you can give more, and sometimes you can give less,” said Thornton, a teacher’s assistant. “Today was one of my ‘more’ days.”
to read more go to: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=13612571
Fr/spaceweather.com
MAMMATUS OVER MINNESOTA: On May 10th, a severe storm captured national attention when it dumped golf-ball-sized hail on a Minnesota Twins baseball game. “I missed the hail,” reports John Rogers of New Hope, Minnesota, “but I got a nice view of the clouds that formed after the storm passed.” He snapped this picture in waning twilight at 8:30 pm local time:
These are mammatus clouds. Named for their resemblance to a cow’s underbelly, they sometimes appear at the end of severe thunderstorms when the thundercloud is breaking up. Researchers have called them an “intriguing enigma,” because no one knows exactly how and why they form. The clouds are fairly common but often go unnoticed because potential observers have been chased indoors by the rain. If you are one of them, dash outside when the downpour stops; you could witness a beautiful mystery in the sky.
fr. Linda Moulton Howe’s Earthfiles:
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1850&cateegory=Environment
There has been some information relating booms to unusual weather events.
Overall Color for the Week: Rose Red
This is a week of changes and changing. There will be little time for rest on any level as the Earth continues its movements. Discoveries will be made concerning the shifts in the crust of the Earth that were heretofore unexpected. Moreover there will be information coming out concerning the magnetics of the earth and a change regarding them. These things will be amended as footnotes to newscasts, etc., but they will be picked up by many as more and more odd Earth events take place. Continue reading
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We humans are a superstitious lot, believing that Friday the 13th is bad luck and finding a penny is good luck.
Many superstitions stem from the same human trait that causes us to believe in monsters and ghosts: When our brains can’t explain something, we make stuff up. In fact, a study last year found that superstitions can sometimes work, because believing in something can improve performance on a task.
Here, then, are 13 of the most common superstitions.
to read more go to: http://www.livescience.com/14141-13-common-silly-superstitions.html
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| This track is an example of simulated data modelled for the CMS detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Here a Higgs boson is produced and then decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue. CREDIT: CERN |
A rumor is floating around the physics community that the world’s largest atom smasher may have detected a long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle.”
The controversial rumor is based on what appears to be a leaked internal note from physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile-long particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. It’s not entirely clear at this point if the memo is authentic, or what the data it refers to might mean — but the note already has researchers talking.
to read more go to: http://www.livescience.com/13853-higgs-boson-signal-lhc-cern.html
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| In an animated version of this image, the rotation of the whole ring obscures the changing colors of the dots. See below for the video. CREDIT: Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez of Harvard University |
A mysterious illusion that illustrates how motion can render color changes invisible won the “Best Illusion of the Year” for 2011, and it also taught researchers something they didn’t know.
“It is a really beautiful effect, revealing something about how our visual system works that we didn’t know before,” said Daniel Simons, a professor at the University of Illinois
, Champaign-Urbana. Simons studies visual cognition, and did not work on this illusion. Before its creation, scientists didn’t know that motion had this effect on perception, Simons said. [Eye Tricks: Gallery of Visual Illusions]
A viewer stares at a speck at the center of a ring of colored dots, which continuously change color. When the ring begins to rotate around the speck, the color changes appear to stop. But this is an illusion. For some reason, the motion causes our visual system to ignore the color changes. (You can, however, see the color changes if you follow the rotating circles with your eyes.) [See Video of Illusion Winner]
To read more go to: http://www.livescience.com/14097-visual-illusion-contest-motion-perception-change-blindness.html
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| Here a rock etched with patterns forming a crescent moon and orb, an example of another piece of rock art discovered at Wadi Abu Dom in northern Sudan. CREDIT: Courtesy of Tim Karberg/Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. |
An archaeological team in the Bayuda Desert in northern Sudan has discovered dozens of new rock art drawings, some of which were etched more than 5,000 years ago and reveal scenes that scientists can’t explain.
The team discovered 15 new rock art sites in an arid valley known as Wadi Abu Dom, some 18 miles (29 kilometers) from the Nile River. It’s an arid valley that flows with water only during rainy periods. Many of the drawings were carved into the rock faces — no paint was used — of small stream beds known as “khors” that flow into the valley.
Some of the sites revealed just a single drawing while others have up to 30, said lead researcher Tim Karberg, of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in Germany.
to read more go to: http://www.livescience.com/14149-mysterious-ancient-rock-art-nile-river.html
