Physicists Working On X-Ray Vision
“Materials such as paper, paint, and biological tissue are opaque because the light that passes through them is scattered in complicated and seemingly random ways. A new experiment conducted by researchers at the City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI) has shown that it’s possible to focus light through opaque materials and detect objects hidden behind them, provided you know enough about the material.
The experiment is reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, and is the subject of Viewpoint in APS Physics by Elbert van Putten and Allard Mosk of the University of Twente.”
Read more at Science Daily
Woman grows 6cm horn on forehead
A 101-year-old woman in China has baffled doctors after growing a huge goat-like horn on her forehead.
Zhang Ruifang claims the growth first appeared only last year and has since expanded to be more than 6cm long. Now her family in Linlou, Henan province, are concerned about a second mark on the other side of her forehead.
“[At first] we didn’t pay too much attention to it,” said Mrs Zhang’s youngest son Zhang Guozheng. ”Now something is also growing on the right side of her forehead — it’s quite possible that it’s another horn.”
Romanian street sign warns drivers of ‘drunk pedestrians’
Street signs warning Romanian drivers to be careful of drunken pedestrians lying on roads were erected by road safety chiefs worried about the “despairing” levels of accidents.
Officials in Pecica, a village town about 13 miles from the Hungarian border in the country’s west, ordered the bright red signs, complete with the phrase “Attention – Drunks”. The 10 road signs, which also show a person crawling on their knees while clutching a glass in one hand, were erected in popular nightspot areas close to the city’s bars and restaurants.
Japanese Town Baffled By ‘Kangaroo’ Sightings
“It may seem odd, but the locals swear it’s true. People in a Japanese mountain region have reported a number of kangaroo sightings, and journalists are now trying to stalk the marsupials.
The descriptions given by the apparent eyewitnesses seem close enough. For years they have spoken of a beige animal with large ears, one to 1.5 metres (three to five feet) tall, that stands by the roadside and then hops away.
The sightings were all reported in the Mayama mountain district of Osaki city in Miyagi prefecture, a community of 441 households, located about 350 kilometers (220 miles) north of Tokyo.
The city has received about 30 reports of ‘kangaroo-like animals,’ including three cases since December, when the mountain area was often covered in snow, said local official Tetsuya Sasaki.”
Read more at Yahoo
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)
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
‘New’ Secret Ingredient that Makes Everything Taste Better?
“You know about the four basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, bitterness and saltiness. Even if that list doesn’t roll off of your tongue, you can certainly imagine how each of these tastes flavors your mouth.
Well, it turns out there is fifth taste, called Umami. Umami was first isolated by Japanese chemists Kikunae Ikeda in 1908, yet only recently has the concept of umami made it out of Asia.
The chances are that you are already a big fan of umami but just don’t know it yet. That’s what happened to Carolyn Cope, who now runs a blog called Umami Girl.
‘I’d always known that I liked foods that were a little funky — certain aged cheeses, cured meats, mushrooms, anchovies,’ Cope told Asylum. ‘Shortly after college I got really into sushi. Like, really into it. Just when I was starting to seriously wonder whether my favorite sushi rolls were laced with some illicit, addictive substance, I learned about umami, the taste that literally stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers.’”
Read more at Asylum
Massive Chile Earthquake May Have Shortened Earth’s Day
“Earth’s days may have gotten a little bit shorter since the massive earthquake in Chile, but don’t feel bad if you haven’t noticed.
The difference would be only about one-millionth of a second.
Richard Gross, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues calculated that Saturday’s quake shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one rotation – 86,400 seconds or 24 hours.
An earthquake can make Earth rotate faster by nudging some of its mass closer to the planet’s axis, just as ice skaters can speed up their spins by pulling in their arms. Conversely, a quake can slow the rotation and lengthen the day if it redistributes mass away from that axis, Gross said Tuesday.”
Read more at Yahoo News (Thanks Tyler)
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