October 2007
Monthly Archive
Thu 25 Oct 2007
Posted by glenn under
Government
WRC-TV via MSNBC reports:
WASHINGTON - People snapped pictures and stared as a man “levitated” in front of the White House on Monday.
Dutch magician Wouter Bijdendijk, also known as Ramana, said he couldn’t say much about his magic trick.
“This is an art,” he said. “And in India, they see it also as a science. I hope I make people wonder.”
A crowd gathered to watch the magician’s spectacle. Some took pictures, other videotaped and at least one man checked around Bijdendijk for props.
“I just wanted to show that reality is not all that you think that it is,” Bijdendijk said.
Fri 19 Oct 2007
Posted by glenn under
News
Justin Berton, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, reports:
At the start of the Academy Award-winning movie “American Beauty,” a character videotapes a plastic grocery bag as it drifts into the air, an event he casts as a symbol of life’s unpredictable currents, and declares the romantic moment as a “most beautiful thing.”
To the eyes of an oceanographer, the image is pure catastrophe.
In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
(more…)
Wed 3 Oct 2007
Posted by glenn under
Science
John Roach, National Geographic News, reports:
To find north, humans look to a compass. But birds may just need to open their eyes, a new study says.
Scientists already suspected birds’ eyes contain molecules that are thought to sense Earth’s magnetic field. In a new study, German researchers found that these molecules are linked to an area of the brain known to process visual information.
In that sense, “birds may see the magnetic field,” said study lead author Dominik Heyers, a biologist at the University of Oldenburg.
(more…)
