Category Archives: Of Interest

Solar Flares Alert

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CHANCE OF FLARES: NOAA forecasters have upgraded the chance of X-class solar flares today to 20%. The source would be AR1339, one of the biggest sunspots in many years. The active region rotated over the sun’s eastern limb two days ago and now it is turning toward Earth.

The sunspot has already unleashed one X-flare on Nov. 3rd around 2027 UT. A movie from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the extreme ultraviolet flash:

The flare created waves of ionization in Earth’s upper atmosphere, altering the normal propagation of radio waves over Europe and the Americas. In Ireland, the flare’s effect was felt even after dark.

A cloud of plasma or “CME” raced away from the blast site at 1100 km/s. The CME is not heading for Earth. It is, however, heading for Mercury and Venus. Click on the arrow to view a movie of the CME’s forecast track:

Analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab say the CME will hit Mercury on Nov. 4th around 16:14 UT. NASA’s MESSENGER probe in orbit around Mercury will be monitoring the effects of the impact. If the CME overwhelms Mercury’s relatively weak magnetic field, it could scour material off the planet’s surface creating a temporary atmosphere and adding material to Mercury’s comet-like tail. The CME should hit Venus on Nov. 5th; the gossamer cloud will probably break harmlessly against the top of planet’s ultra-dense atmosphere.

fr/spaceweather.com

Record of Ancient Pilgrimages Found

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Long Pilgrimages Revealed in Ancient Sudan Art

Owen Jarus, LiveScience Contributor
Date: 03 November 2011 Time: 08:33 AM ET
Banganarti Upper Church
A 3-D reconstruction of the upper church at Banganarti. Built almost 1,000 years ago this medieval church was one of two that archaeologists excavated at the site.
CREDIT: Bogdan Zurawski

Excavations of a series of medieval churches in central Sudan have revealed a treasure trove of art, including a European-influenced work, along with evidence of journeys undertaken by travelers from western Europe that were equivalent to the distance between New York City and the Grand Canyon.

A visit by a Catalonian man named Benesec is recorded in one of the churches, along with visits from other pilgrims of the Middle Ages, according to lead researcher Bogdan Zurawski of the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The discoveries were made at Banganarti and Selib, two sites along the Nile that were part of Makuria, a Christian kingdom ruled by a dynasty of kings throughout the Middle Ages

The art there tells stories of kings, saints, pilgrims and even a female demon, said Zurawski, who presented his findings recently at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Inside medieval churches

Zurawski said the most recent of the churches uncovered in Banganarti, built nearly 1,000 years ago, is unique. “It has no parallel in Nubia and elsewhere,” he said. [See images of Banganarti church discoveries]

The church contains 18 square rooms, two staircases and, at its center, a domed area that probably contained holy relics. The team believes the building was dedicated to the archangel Raphael and was used for healing rituals. “The multitude of inscriptions addressed to this archangel are more than suggestive” that the church was dedicated to him, Zurawski said.

Beneath this building lies a structure, built about 300 years earlier, which also appears to have been dedicated to Raphael. This lower church, as the archaeologists refer to it, contains a ninth-century mural depicting “the Harrowing of Hell,” which shows Jesus visiting the underworld to rescue the firstborn. [See images of the lower church]

A Catalonian journey

The team uncovered numerous inscriptions at the two sites, many left by pilgrims visiting the churches in hopes of being healed.

One of the inscriptions at Banganartiis written in Catalonian and appears to have been inscribed sometime in the 13th or 14th century by the man named Benesec. It reads: “When Benesec came to pay homage to Raphael.”

Banganarti Lower Church
In addition to the monograms of Raphael, a prayer to the archangel, written by a King Zacharias, was found inscribed in the ruins near Banganarti.
CREDIT: Bogdan Zurawski

Zurawski told LiveScience that “Benesec” was a very popular name in 13th- and 14th-century southern France. This particular Benesec had probably traveled some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) from southern France or northern Spain.  The journey took him east across the Mediterranean Sea and far up the Nile into the interior of Africa.

The inscription and a Catalonian playing card found downriver by another team, which may or may not have been left by Benesec, were the only traces found of these visitors from Europe.

Zurawski said Benesec may have been a trader who, along with other Catalonians, received permission from the Mamluk rulers of Egypt to pass through their territory. “The Catalonians were granted trade privileges, trade rights, to exchange goods and to trade with Egypt, and apparently they also came to Nubia,” he said

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/16854-sudan-yields-medieval-art-signs-long-pilgrimages.html

 

 

Levis New Twist on Water Conservation

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CHANGES IN THE AIR

Stone-Washed Blue Jeans (Minus the Washed)

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A line of Levis jeans was made with world water shortages in mind.

By 
Published: November 1, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO   —  From the cotton field in rural India to the local rag bin, a typical pair of blue jeans consumes 919 gallons of water during its life cycle, Levi Strauss & Company says, or enough to fill about 15 spa-size bathtubs. That includes the water that goes into irrigating the cotton crop, stitching the jeans together and washing them scores of times at home

The company wants to reduce that number any way it can, and not just to project environmental responsibility. It fears that water shortages caused by climate changemay jeopardize the company’s very existence in the coming decades by making cotton too expensive or scarce.

So to protect its bottom line, Levi Strauss has helped underwrite and champion a nonprofit program that teaches farmers in India, Pakistan, Brazil and West and Central Africa the latest irrigation and rainwater-capture techniques.  It has introduced a brand featuring stone-washed denim smoothed with rocks but no water. It is sewing tags into all of its jeans urging customers to wash less and use only cold water.

To customers seeking further advice, Levi Strauss suggests washing jeans rarely, if at all — the theory being that putting them in the freezer will kill germs that cause them to smell.

Conservation worries are not limited to the clothing giants: food and beverage conglomerates, tobacco companies and metal and mining companies are all starting to reckon with their heavy dependence on water. Pepsico, for example, has embraced a method of sanitizing plastic bottles with purified air instead of water at a plant in Georgia. For its Frito-Lay brands, it has identified drought-resistant potato strains that it provides to farmers along with a soil-monitoring method so that crops are watered only when necessary.

The Carbon Disclosure Project, a group that monitors corporations’ greenhouse gas emissions, recently added water security to its priorities. Of the 150 companies that responded last year to a questionnaire that it sent to the world’s largest corporations, nearly 40 percent reported that water problems had already resulted in “detrimental impacts” to their businesses.

The threat of water shortages was brought home to Levi Strauss last year when floods in Pakistan and parched fields in China destroyed cotton crops and sent prices soaring. Roughly two pounds of cotton go into every pair of jeans that the company manufactures. Although scientists are wary of linking specific extreme weather events to climate change, recent increases in floods and droughts are in line with patterns that experts have long projected would result from global warming. The general rule of thumb is that wet regions will get wetter and dry regions will become even more arid.

Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said that the local implications of those changes were still being sorted out but that “agriculture, which does best with a relatively consistent supply of water, will be impacted the most.”

That is particularly the case for cotton, the world’s biggest nonfood crop. Many big cotton-producing countries like India, which has tens of thousands of small cotton farmers, lack the reservoirs to store water, heightening the risk of shortages.

Companies doing business overseas are also contending with rising water costs or water that is not clean enough. Then there is the threat of bad publicity if a corporation is perceived to be squandering precious local water.

“The total volume of water used by a single beverage business, for example, may not be much,” Dr. Lall said. “But they are often the most visible users in a locality, depleting groundwater much more quickly than, say, a small farmer.”

It is not lost on American and European manufacturers that cotton already competes with grain for what arable land exists in some regions, a tension that will only grow as the world seeks to feed its growing population in coming decades.

Making ‘Better Cotton’

Because cotton is mostly grown by a diffuse network of very small farmers in more than 70 countries, encouraging water-efficient practices is a formidable challenge. Cotton cultivation accounts for more than 3 percent of the world’s agricultural water use and 6 percent of all pesticide purchases. Outmoded practices like field flooding contribute to overconsumption.

In 2005, nongovernmental and cotton industry organizations and some giant retailers, including Ikea, the Gap and Adidas, founded the international nonprofit Better Cotton Initiative to promote water conservation and reduce pesticide use and child-labor practices in the industry.

Levi Strauss joined in 2009. Partners include groups like Cotton Inc., an American industry association that has provided technical know-how. A three-year independent study of Indian farms found those adopting the new techniques reduced water and pesticide use by an average of 32 percent, the initiative says. The profit was 20 percent higher than that of a control group using traditional methods

to read more, go to:    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/science/earth/levi-strauss-tries-to-minimize-water-use.html?ref=science

Healing Benefits — People and Animals

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In the Company of Animals, Healing for Humans

By KAREN JONES
Published: November 1, 2011

SOPHIE is a goat whose taste in books leans toward popular best sellers, says Solana Mejia-Schnaufer, who reads aloud to her several times a week. “I know she likes ‘The Hunger Games’ because she didn’t try to eat it. That wasn’t true of ‘Animal Liberation.’ ”

Ann Johansson for The New York Times

A FRIEND Solana Mejia-Schnaufer, who has battled depression, said Sophie, a goat, had helped with her recovery.

Miss Mejia-Schnaufer, 21, and Sophie met at the Gentle Barn, a six-acre ranch in Santa Clarita, Calif. The facility heals and rehabilitates abused farm animals and invites visitors with emotional and physical challenges to interact with them. Bonding with Sophie was “a life-changing experience,” says Miss Mejia-Schnaufer, whose battle withdepression and eating disorders led to a suicide attempt this year. She credits Sophie, a rescue from an abusive petting zoo, with making her recovery possible.

“Before I came to the Gentle Barn, nothing gave me hope that life was worth living,” she says. “But when I met Sophie, I thought she had the most incredible calm and open energy. There was this flow of love back and forth between us that I was feeling so in need of.”

Today Miss Mejia-Schnaufer volunteers at the Gentle Barn and has also become Sophie’s “special person,” visiting her at least twice a week to share companionship and a good book. “Sophie is like my totem that I carry around with me all the time,” she says. “Knowing I can see her has kept me alive.”

The Gentle Barn is the fulfillment of a childhood dream, says its founder, Ellie Weiner: “I was one of those children that brought stray and injured animals home. My parents were not amused.” She adds that it was her love of animals that helped her through her own abusive childhood. “The animals saved me and healed me. If they could do that for me, then they could do it for others.”

In 1999, Ms. Weiner opened the barn doors to visitors, and she is well known for her programs for “at risk” youth, arranged through local family and children’s services. Here, inner-city gang members, drug addicts and abused youngsters can feed a cow, hug a pig or just try to find peace in a pastoral setting. Before groups meet the animals, Ms. Weiner, or her husband, Jay Weiner, tell their stories of abuse and recovery.

This is critical to reaching troubled children, says Jamie Lynn Cantor, children’s services administrator for the Department of Children and Family Services in northwest Los Angeles County. “They hear the recovery stories of these animals who, after their horrific abuse, have learned to love and trust again. More important, they learn there is hope for the future, and they can have a life filled with love and people to love them. They are not hopeless anymore.” Ms. Cantor has been bringing groups of children in foster care to the Gentle Barn since 2008. She has seen many of them bond with a miniature pony named Bonsai, whose former owner, an alcoholic, beat him brutally.

“I can’t tell you how many kids would identify with this and say, ‘My mom used to do that.’ ” She adds that, though it took three years before Bonsai would trust people again, today he is a playful pony with a particular affinity for children with special needs.

“This is very unlike traditional therapy. There is no probing or rules,” says Ms. Cantor, who recalls a young boy who befriended an enormous pig named Biscuit. “The boy had been sexually abused and was very withdrawn. As soon as he saw this pig, he started to open up a bit. He laid there next to Biscuit for two hours, hugging him and talking to him. This sad little boy experienced some healing and left smiling.”

Ms. Cantor is compiling information for a survey she calls “Healing Youth Through Animals.” So far, she says, the results of one visit to the Gentle Barn “reflect significant improvement in the youth’s happiness, self-esteem, as well as decreases in anger, anxiety, hopelessness, depression and loneliness.”

Dan McCollister is community relations director of Pacific Lodge Youth Services in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nonprofit facility that offers treatment for teenage males on probation. Most residents are gang members “on the cusp of a major life decision,” says Mr. McCollister. “If they don’t change a few key things, they might end up spending their life in jail.”

He adds that because boys join gangs at a young age, his organization faces years of negative conditioning. Twice a month, he brings groups to the Gentle Barn as part of his activities schedule. “We have between six and nine months with them to make something positive click. The Gentle Barn is a great catalyst for that.”

During one visit, there was a “very tough, very hard” gang member who stood silent while hearing the story of a horse that had suffered repeated beatings, says Mr. McCollister. It was later learned that the youth’s arms had been broken repeatedly by his father while growing up. “The young man in question was later spotted in the back of the stable crying and softly petting the horse on the head, saying over and over, ‘No one is going to hurt you now.’ ”

Mr. McCollister emphasizes that a visit to the Gentle Barn “can blow a kid’s mind, show them compassion and empathy and, best of all, let them know that their story isn’t fully written. They can still change and lead a happy, meaningful life.”

According to Mr. Weiner, it takes about $50,000 a month to operate the Gentle Barn. Financing comes from individual donations, through the Web site, private family donations, corporate grants and foundations. Major donors include Ellen DeGeneres, Toyota, CBS, William Morris Endeavor and Princess Cruises.

In addition, the Gentle Barn is developing a reality television show with Ms. DeGeneres. Ms. Weiner says her goal is “to see a Gentle Barn in every major city around the world.” She adds, “I would love to give people a chance to hug a cow, give a pig a tummy rub, snuggle with a turkey and see that we are really all the same. Every day I do this work, I get to witness a miracle.”

from:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/giving/at-the-gentle-barn-animals-and-people-find-healing-together.html?_r=1&ref=health

11/02/2011 Palindrome

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Rare Date: Today Is Once-in-10,000-Years Palindrome

by Bjorn Carey
Date: 02 November 2011 Time: 01:57 PM ET

Today might not seem any more special than yesterday or the day before, but it is a once-in-10,000-years event. Nov. 2, 2011, written out numerically, is 11/02/2011, which on its own makes it a very rare eight-digit palindrome date, meaning that it can be read the same way frontward and backward.

But, as one scientist has found, there’s much more to this date that makes it truly one of a kind.

This century features a relative wealth of eight-digit palindrome dates; today is the third date so far, and there will be nine more. In fact, we live in a relative golden age of palindrome dates: Before 10/02/2001, the last eight-digit palindrome date was Aug. 31, 1380 (08/31/1380)

“Eight-digit palindrome dates are very rare, and are clustered in the first three or so centuries at the beginning of a millennial, and then don’t show up for 600 to 700 years, until they appear as a cluster in the next millennium,” said Aziz Inan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Portland who crunches palindrome dates in his spare time.

The reason these dates are so rare is that the day number can’t exceed 31. Consider, for example, a date in the year 1401. When you flip around that year, you get 1041, which is problematic because the day number, 41, exceeds the number of days in a month. That pattern carries on for the next several centuries, and is why a similar drought of eight-digit palindrome dates will set in after the year 2380. [Is Pi ‘Wrong’? Mathematicians Say ‘Yes’]

And while eight-digit palindrome days are rare,  Inan said that no date this century, or even until the year A.D. 10,000, will be quite as special as today.

“If you look at the date as a number, 11022011, it has very special properties,” Inan explained. “It is the product of 7 squared times 11 cubed times 13 squared. That is impressive because those are three consecutive prime numbers. No other palindrome date, up to A.D. 10,000, is like that.

“Not only that, if you write it out  as 72 x 113 x 132, you’ll notice that even the superscript power numbers – 232 – are a palindrome.”

Inan also charts seven-digit palindrome dates, which aren’t quite as rare: 26 of these fall within this century. Some people think this is cheating, he said, because it allows eight-digit, non-palindrome dates such as Feb. 10, 2012 (02/10/2012) to count as a seven-digit palindrome (2/10/2012).

“I thought the same way at first, but then I came to think that it should count because it’s still a full date number that corresponds to a single day in the calendar system,” Inan said. “People get excited when they show up, so to me, I say the more the better.”

from:    http://www.livescience.com/16846-rare-date-today-10-000-years-palindrome.html

UFO’s & Football — WHO KNEW????

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Lee Speigel
UFO At NFL Game: TV Camera Captures Strange Object In Flight During Broadcast
Ufo Video Grabs

First Posted: 11/1/11 08:05 AM ET Updated: 11/1/11 12:10 PM ET

For many football fans who watched the New Orleans Saints rout the Indianapolis Colts on Oct. 23, the most unusual thing about the game was the lopsided final score of 62-7.

But for UFO aficionados and paranormal experts who tuned in, they may have seen something in the sky that was even more out-of-the-ordinary than the tossing of more touchdowns vs. incompletions.

As NBC’s cameras returned from a commercial break and focused on the historic, triple-steepled St. Louis Cathedral in the city nicknamed the Big Easy, a couple of lit objects seemed to streak across the darkening sky — and they’ve yet to be definitively identified.

Viewed in real-time, it’s hard to see much more than something flashing across the screen. But a frame-by-frame scrutiny of the video reveals a rod-shaped object topped with brightly lit dots.

SEEING IS BELIEVING, RIGHT? HERE’S THE NEW ORLEANS UFO VIDEO:

(Check out link below for the video)
Rod-shaped UFOs? Actually, this isn’t the first time such objects have been seen and photographed.

In 1994, independent filmmaker Jose Escamilla was attempting to videotape UFOs near Roswell, N.M. — yes, that Roswell — home of the legendary, alleged crash of a UFO in 1947 that has captured the imaginations of millions of people for decades.

“As I reviewed one of the tapes, I noticed something streak past my camera viewfinder and thought at first it was just a bird or insect,” Escamilla told The Huffington Post.

“Looking at each frame of the footage again, I knew it was something more unusual. My wife called them ‘rods’ as they sort of looked like some kind of life form you’d see in a microscope.”

Since that time, Escamilla has collected hundreds of taped examples from around the world of these so-called rods, which vary in physical form: Some look like centipedes with appendages and others have no appendages but appear to have lights on top of them.

Skeptics maintain there’s nothing extraordinary about all of this — the objects, they say, are merely insects flying very close to the camera lens.

“I think these are insects that got caught in that interlaced video as they’re flying through with a wing beat frequency, and the frames are being captured at a frequency… that causes that look,” insisted Marc Dantonio, chief photo and video analyst for the Mutual UFO Network.

Dantonio owns FX Models — a Connecticut company that creates special effects and models for the government. He’s one of many investigators who insist that when an object — moving very fast, like a flying insect — gets close enough to a camera lens with a slow enough shutter speed, it produces an effect called motion blur, making the insect’s wings appear elongated, or rod-shaped.

“They’re fascinating, but they’re actually quite down to earth,” Dantonio said.

to read more, see some videos, etc…… go to:   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/01/ufo-nfl-game_n_1033966.html

Unlocking the “Copiale Cypher”

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USC Scientist Cracks Mysterious “Copiale Cipher”

Released: 10/25/2011 11:45 AM EDT
Source: University of Southern California

 

Newswise — The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.

Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character “Copiale Cipher” has finally been broken.

The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of a 18th-century secret society in Germany. The rituals detailed in the document indicate the secret society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the secret society were not themselves eye doctors.

“This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies,” said computer scientist Kevin Knight of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, part of the international team that finally cracked the Copiale Cipher. “Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered.”

To break the Copiale Cipher, Knight and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden tracked down the original manuscript, which was found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and is now in a private collection. They then transcribed a machine-readable version of the text, using a computer program created by Knight to help quantify the co-occurrences of certain symbols and other patterns.

“When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite,” Knight said. “Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer.”

With the Copiale Cipher, the codebreaking team began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. But they had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, so they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

“It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure,” Knight says.

After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were “nulls,” intended to mislead to reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.

The team then tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter, or groups of letters. Eventually, the first meaningful words of German emerged: “Ceremonies of Initiation,” followed by “Secret Section.”

For more information about the method of decipherment, visithttp://stp.lingfil.uu.se/%7Ebea/copiale/

Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught. Knight is also applying his computer-assisted codebreaking software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of “Kryptos,” an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.

But for Knight, the trickiest language puzzle of all is still everyday speech. A senior research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of the USC Information Sciences Institute, Knight is one of the world’s leading experts on machine translation — teaching computers to turn Chinese into English or Arabic into Korean. “Translation remains a tough challenge for artificial intelligence,” said Knight, whose translation software has been adopted by companies such as Apple and Intel.

With researcher Sujith Ravi, who received a PhD in computer science from USC in 2011, Knight has been approaching translation as a cryptographic problem, which could not only improve human language translation but could also be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and animal communication.

The National Science Foundation funds Knight’s cryptography and translation research. The Copiale Cipher work was presented as part of an invited presentation at the 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics meeting.

For more information about the video or to arrange an interview with Professor Kevin Knight, contact Suzanne Wu atsuzanne.wu@usc.edu.

from:   http://www.newswise.com/articles/usc-scientist-cracks-mysterious-copiale-cipher?ret=/articles/list&category=life-arts&page=1&search[status]=3&search[sort]=date+desc&search[sub_section]=31&search[has_multimedia]=

 

Just When You Thought it was Safe to Travel in Outer Space

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Vampire Stars, Frankensatellites & More: A Spooky Space Halloween

by Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 28 October 2011 Time: 07:30 AM ET
An artist's conception showing a so-called "blue straggler" star being created by stealing mass from its partner in a binary star system. Soon the giant star (seen towards the upper left of the image) will donate the remainder of its envelope, leaving onl

 
An artist’s concept showing a so-called “blue straggler” star stealing mass from its partner in a binary star system. Soon the giant star (upper left) will donate the remainder of its envelope, leaving only a half-solar-mass white dwarf core (shown peeking through the tenuous envelope of the giant) as the companion to the blue straggler.
CREDIT: Aaron M. Geller

This story was updated at 10:56 a.m. EDT.

Halloween is nearly upon us, which means Earth will soon be crawling with costumed witches, ghouls and zombies. But October has shown us that our planet doesn’t have a monopoly on spookiness.

Over the last month, a series of cosmic phenomena have provided thrills and chills, just in time for Halloween. Here’s a rundown of the recent spooky space news, from revelations about vampire stars to a plan to build Frankensatellites in orbit

The secrets of stellar vampires

“Blue stragglers” are mysterious stars that act much younger than the ancient neighbors with which they formed. They burn much hotter, for example, and appear much bluer.

Astronomers have been trying to explain the origins and behavior of blue stragglers since their discovery in the 1950s, and a new study may finally have done the job. It appears that most blue stragglers are vampires, sucking hydrogen fuel away from companion stars.

This keeps the stars young, just as slurping up victims’ blood keeps the vampires of fiction from dying or growing old. [Haunting Photos: The Spookiest Nebulas in Space]

The sky is falling

The threat of death from above can inspire fear beyond reason, perhaps because we’re often helpless to predict or combat it — just ask Chicken Little. And this October brought an event that evoked some “sky is falling” sentiment.

On Oct. 22, a dead German satellite called ROSAT slammed into Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, apparently harming nobody. It was the second uncontrolled satellite crash in a month; NASA’s defunct UARS spacecraft fell to Earth on Sept. 24, also causing no known injuries.

Experts had said that there was just a 1-in-2,000 chance that any piece of ROSAT would strike anybody anywhere on Earth. But those odds, while small, were non-zero — enough to get a lot of people talking, and some of them worrying.

Artist's impression of the ROSAT satellite in space
Artist’s impression of the ROSAT satellite in space.
CREDIT: German Aerospace Center

Frankensats

Since Mary Shelley published her novel “Frankenstein” in 1818, the idea of creating new life from disparate dead parts has been a staple of the horror genre. And now the concept is getting some traction in space.

The United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced on Oct. 20 that it wants to harvest still-working parts of dead satellites, then incorporate them into new space systems on the cheap.

In DARPA’s plan, a servicing satellite would pluck functioning antennas from defunct spacecraft, then attach them to newly launched mini-satellites in orbit. The “Frankensats” would save the military on launch costs, because antennas are so big, bulky and expensive to get off the ground.

 

Frankenstein moon mystery

Mary Shelley and her iconic novel also figure prominently in another recent celestial story.

Shelley was reportedly inspired to write “Frankenstein” in the summer of 1816, after staying up all night swapping ghost stories with her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and several other friends.

At the end of the evening, Byron is said to have challenged each member of the group to come up with his or her own scary tale. Shelley later wrote that she couldn’t come up with an idea for several days, but then had a terrifying nightmare about a scientist who created a monster from an assortment of body parts.

Some authorities have questioned her version of events, suggesting Shelley may have taken some liberties with the truth for the sake of a good story. A new study, however, suggests that Shelley’s account rings true.

She mentioned that moonlight streamed into her room when she awoke from her dream in the middle of the night. After poring over astronomical records and visiting the Switzerland estate where Shelley and the group met, researchers determined that light from a bright gibbous moon probably did flood Shelley’s room in the wee hours of June 16, 1816.

Byron’s ghost story challenge, the researchers conclude, likely took place between June 10 and June 13, and Shelley probably awoke from her nightmare around 3 a.m. on June 16.

Freakishly small full moon

Full moons are another Halloween trope, bringing out the werewolves as they do (according to lore). And October’s full moon was particulary noteworthy, for it was the smallest one of the year….

to read more and see more, go to:    http://www.space.com/13430-astronomy-space-spooky-universe-halloween.html