December 18, 2007

Catfish





A kid's inflated rubber ball was floating in the lake, a catfish tried to eat it, but got its teeth stuck in it, a local saw the struggling fish trying to submerge but slowly getting tired at the repeated attempts and came to its rescue.

Niagara Falls, 1911, Frozen almost solid, an occurrence documented only once more in 1848.


Buffalo Express newspaper wrote the article:
The Falls of Niagara can be compared to nothing but a mere mill dam this morning. In the memory of the oldest inhabitants, never was there so little water running over Niagara's awful precipice, as at this moment! Hundreds of people are now witnessing that which never has, and probably never may again be witnessed on the Niagara River.

Last night at 11 o'clock the factories fed from the waters of this majestic river were in full operation, and at 12 o'clock the water was shut off, the wheel suddenly ceased their revolutions, and everything was hushed into silence. Various are the conjectures as to the cause; the most reasonable of which is that Lake Erie must be making a grand delivery of ice, and this the mouth of the Niagara, although large, is not quite enough to take in the whole at once, and that the consequences are, back water.

December 17, 2007

December 16, 2007

Statler and Waldorf at their best!

A Jet From The Sun


What powers the solar wind? Our Sun is known to emit a powerful wind of particles with gusts that can even affect astronauts and satellites orbiting Earth. The cause of the solar wind has been debated for decades but is thought to be rooted in Alfvén waves generated by the ever changing magnetic field of the Sun. Newly released images from the Japanese Hinode satellite appear to bolster this hypothesis, imaging an average of 240 daily plasma jets that are excellent candidates to fuel the outwardly moving Alfvén waves. The jets and waves are themselves ultimately created by magnetic reconnection events, rapid events where lines of constant magnetic field suddenly move extremely rapidly, dragging electrons and protons along with them. On the image left, one such jet is visible in X-ray light. Bright spots show relatively energetic regions elsewhere on the Sun.

Tickle Me Emo

December 11, 2007

Ghostbusters Cereal!!!!

The Eagle Nebula

The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy. This fairy, however, is ten light years tall and spews radiation much hotter than common fire. The greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is actually a giant evaporating shell of gas and dust inside of which is a growing cavity filled with a spectacular stellar nursery currently forming an open cluster of stars. The above image in scientifically re-assigned colors was released as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Gibbous Europa

Although the phase of this moon might appear familiar, the moon itself might not. In fact, this gibbous phase shows part of Jupiter's moon Europa. The robot spacecraft Galileo captured this image mosaic during its mission orbiting Jupiter from 1995 - 2003. Visible are plains of bright ice, cracks that run to the horizon, and dark patches that likely contain both ice and dirt. Raised terrain is particularly apparent near the terminator, where it casts shadows. Europa is nearly the same size as Earth's Moon, but much smoother, showing few highlands or large impact craters. Evidence and images from the Galileo spacecraft, indicated that liquid oceans might exist below the icy surface. To test speculation that these seas hold life, ESA has started preliminary development of the Jovian Europa Orbiter, a spacecraft proposed to orbit Europa. If the surface ice is thin enough, a future mission might drop hydrobots to burrow into the oceans and search for life.