The Biggest Crop Circle Ever: The Reality Show
“Almost 60 acres. 530 x 450 meters in size. Created in an evening of August, 2009, at the province of Zeeland, Netherlands, it’s the biggest “crop circle” ever created. And with a twist.
Everything was recorded in video, as this was definitely a very human creation. To be more exact, a creation of 60 humans captured in its process from concept to realization by the cameras of the reality TV show “Try Before You Die”.
The culprits are the members of XL D-Sign team, which has been creating fantastic formations for more than ten years – many of which are promoted as “mysterious” to this day. This latest one, the biggest one to date, was properly named project Atlas, and aimed not only to break the size record but also depict “a message of both the beauty and vulnerability of man”.
The gigantic formation can be interpreted in several ways, from the metamorphosis of a butterfly, to the Vitruvian Man, to Mothman and perhaps even chakras. All part of a human symbology, with a human message, created by humans to humans, surpassing in size every crop circle ever created.”
Read more at Forgetomori (thanks, DG)
Da Vinci’s Huge Horse Statue Proven Feasible
“‘Il Cavallo,’ the huge equine statue Leonardo Da Vinci never got to make, wasn’t plagued by technical problems as was widely believed, a new multidisciplinary research has revealed.
On the contrary, Da Vinci’s plan for the largest equestrian statue in the world was a perfectly feasible project which, if completed, would have probably been his greatest legacy, more than ”The Last Supper” or any other work.
Commissioned in 1482 by Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, in honor of his father Francesco, the massive bronze horse took Leonardo 17 years of research, but was never completed.
Indeed, when the full-scale clay model was finally ready to be cast in a single operation in 1499, all the needed bronze was used to make cannons for an imminent war against the King of France.
The molds were lost and the clay model was reduced to rubble by the invading French soldiers.
Although Leonardo never stopped mourning the ‘horse-that-never-was,’ engineers have always believed the daring plan to make the largest single-pouring cast ever would have failed because of technical problems.”
Read more at Discovery News (thanks, ReliegiousMarie)
Extreme Weirdness: Antarctica’s “Blood Falls”
“There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts.
A bleeding glacier. Discovered in 1911 by a member of Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition team, its rusty color was at first theorized to be caused by some sort of algae growth. Later, however, it was proven to be due to iron oxidation. Every so often, the glacier spews forth a clear, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns a deep shade of red. According to Discover Magazine –
The source of that water is an intensely salty lake trapped beneath 1,300 feet of ice, and a new study has now found that microbes have carved out a niche for themselves in that inhospitable environment, living on sulfur and iron compounds. The bacteria colony has been isolated there for about 1.5 million years, researchers say, ever since the glacier rolled over the lake and created a cold, dark, oxygen-poor ecosystem.
Even weirder: scientists think that the bacteria responsible for Blood Falls might be an Earth-bound approximation of the kind of alien life that might exist elsewhere in the solar system, like beneath the polar ice caps of Mars and Europa.”
Read more at Mental Floss
Dark, dangerous asteroids found lurking near Earth
“An infrared space telescope has spotted several very dark asteroids that have been lurking unseen near Earth’s orbit. Their obscurity and tilted orbits have kept them hidden from surveys designed to detect things that might hit our planet.
Called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the new NASA telescope launched on 14 December on a mission to map the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. It began its survey in mid-January.
In its first six weeks of observations, it has discovered 16 previously unknown asteroids with orbits close to Earth’s. Of these, 55 per cent reflect less than one-tenth of the sunlight that falls on them, which makes them difficult to spot with visible-light telescopes. One of these objects is as dark as fresh asphalt, reflecting less than 5 per cent of the light it receives.
Many of these dark asteroids have orbits that are steeply tilted relative to the plane in which all the planets and most asteroids orbit. This means telescopes surveying for asteroids may be missing many other objects with tilted orbits, because they spend most of their time looking in this plane.
Fortunately, the new objects are bright in infrared radiation, because they absorb a lot of sunlight and heat up. This makes them relatively easy for WISE to spot.”
Read more at New Scientist
‘Near-Perfect’ Hydrophobic Surface Inspired By Spiders
“Engineering researchers have crafted a flat surface that refuses to get wet. Water droplets skitter across it like ball bearings tossed on ice.
The inspiration? Not wax. Not glass. Not even Teflon.
Instead, University of Florida engineers have achieved what they label in a new paper a “nearly perfect hydrophobic interface” by reproducing, on small bits of flat plastic, the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on the bodies of spiders.
“They have short hairs and longer hairs, and they vary a lot. And that is what we mimic,” said Wolfgang Sigmund, a professor of materials science and engineering.
A paper about the surface, which works equally well with hot or cold water, appears in this month’s edition of the journal Langmuir.”
Read more at Science Daily
Earth’s Magnetic Field Older Than Previously Thought
“Evidence for the existence of Earth’s magnetic field has been pushed back about 250 million years, new research suggests. The field may therefore be old enough to have shielded some of the planet’s earliest life from the sun’s most harmful cosmic radiation.
Earth’s magnetic field was born by 3.45 billion years ago, a team including researchers from the University of Rochester in New York and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa report in the March 5 issue of Science.
That date falls during life’s earliest stages of development, between the period when the Earth was pummeled by interplanetary debris and when the atmosphere filled with oxygen. Several earlier studies had suggested that a magnetic field is a necessary shield against deadly solar radiation that can strip away a planet’s atmosphere, evaporate water and snuff out life on its surface.”
Read more at Wired (thanks, ReliegiousMarie)
The Mystery Of The Missing Gorilla from Bristol Museum
“When the stuffed body of Alfred, a 7ft gorilla, disappeared from Bristol Museum in March 1956 it sparked one of the more unusual police investigations.
Alfred had been one of the prize attractions at Bristol Zoo during his 18 years in captivity. Such was his appeal that after his death in 1946 he was stuffed and mounted in a glass case at the museum.
Police appealed for information, scoured the local university campus and interviewed leaders of the student union in an attempt to find him, but to no avail. They suspected he may have been stolen by rival students.
For nearly three days there was no sign of Alfred, until Donald Boulton, the university caretaker, found him in a doctor’s waiting room.
But the mystery of who took Alfred and where he went has remained a mystery for more than 50 years.
Now, after the death of one of the culprits, Ron Morgan, 79, a former estate agent in Bristol, the secret behind the `escape’ from the museum has been revealed.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, Tammy)
Where Do Atheists Come From?
“HERE’s a fact to flatter the unbelievers among you: the bright young things at the University of Oxford are among the most godless groups ever studied in the UK. Of 728 students surveyed in 2007, 48.9 per cent claimed not to believe in any god, with 49.6 per cent claiming no religious affiliation. And while a very small number of Britons typically label themselves as “atheist” or “agnostic” (most surveys put it at about 5 per cent), an astonishing 57.3 per cent of the Oxford sample did.
This may come as no surprise. After all, atheism is the natural stance of the educated and the informed, is it not? It is only to be expected that Oxford students should be wise to what their own professor Richard Dawkins calls “self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery” – and others call “faith”. The old Enlightenment caricature, it seems, is true after all: where Reason reigns, God retires.
Of course, things are never quite that simple. Within the sample, for instance, the postgraduates (that is, the even-better educated) were notably more religious than the undergraduates, in terms of both belief in God and self-description. Although the greater number of non-Europeans in the postgraduate population is almost certainly a significant factor here, evidence from elsewhere backs the idea that there is no straightforward relationship between atheism and education.”
Read more at New Scientist (thanks, Tiram)
Asteroid Probably Did Kill The Dinosaurs
“The Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and more than half of species on Earth, was caused by an asteroid colliding with Earth and not massive volcanic activity, according to a comprehensive review of all the available evidence, published in the journal Science.
A panel of 41 international experts, including UK researchers from Imperial College London, the University of Cambridge, University College London and the Open University, reviewed 20 years’ worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which happened around 65 million years ago. The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet, including the dinosaurs, bird-like pterosaurs and large marine reptiles, clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.”
Read more at Science Daily (thanks, ReliegiousMarie)
Oldest Writing, And Oldest English Writing
“COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?
Until recently, the first consistent evidence of symbolic communication came from the geometric shapes that appear alongside rock art all over the world, which date to 40,000 years ago (New Scientist, 20 February, p 30). Older finds, like the 75,000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from the Blombos cave in South Africa, have mostly been one-offs and difficult to tell apart from meaningless doodles.
The engraved ostrich eggshells may change that. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.”
Read more at New Scientist
And (possibly) in English:
“What is believed to be the first ever example of English written in a British church has been discovered. Problem is, no-one can read it.
The 500-year-old inscription was found on a wall in Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire, hidden behind a monument dedicated to an aristocrat.
The faded black lettering was discovered in January but experts have now asked for help from the public in a bid to make sense of the inscription.
Conservators came across the writing when they were preparing to clean a 350-year-old monument to Henry Hyde, a local aristocrat who was ‘martyred’ in the English Civil War for his support of King Charles I.
The text on the cathedral’s south aisle wall had been whitewashed over with lime, which is why it is hard to read.
Read more at the Daily Mail
