UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD RECORDS

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope took an image of the “Pillars of Creation” of the Eagle Nebula, located 6,500 light-years away in the Serpens constellation. It contains NGC6611, a young hot star cluster that sculpts and illuminates the surrounding gas and dust, consequently causing a large hollowed-out hole and pillars.

The tallest pillar is around 4 light-years high!

It was probably the most iconic image of space in the 20th century.

Recently, the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory and X-ray readings from the XMM-Newton probe has produced the 21st century version of the image, showing the pillars (actually towers of gas and dust) dwarfed by the full majesty of the nebula, hence showing the Eagle Nebula as they’ve never seen before.

Can you see the pillars?

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Photographer: Sebastian Voltmer (Germany)

Date taken: December 2011

Place: eastern Norway

Description: wide angle & horizontally compressed

Auroras happen due to ionised solar particles thrown at us by the sun’s flares becoming trapped by the earth’s magnetism, agitating atmospheric gases into producing energy in the form of light.

Now getting this kind of photo is probably not as rare as nailing The Man on the Flying Trapeze trick if you used one of those henrys yoyos.

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Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders were the first humans to spend Christmas in space.

They were the crewmembers aboard Apollo 8 which launched on 21st December 1968 and entered the moon’s orbit on Christmas Eve.

To mark the special occasion, they sent greetings and photos, and read from the Book of Genesis.

Commander Borman ended the message with the words:

Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.

About a billion people watched or listened to the broadcast.

They safely returned to Earth on 27th December.

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TrES-2b, also known as Kepler-1b is an exoplanet orbiting the star GSC 03549-02811.

A gas giant with a similar bulk composition to Jupiter, it is the darkest known planet, reflecting less than 1% of sunlight, meaning it reflects even less light than coal. While it has not been determined why it’s so dark, scientists suspect this is due to lack of reflective clouds. Another reason could be its light-absorbing atmosphere.

An artist’s impression:

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… and surely one of the most important photographs ever taken, along with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) photo:

Dubbed The Pale Blue Dot, it’s a photo of Earth snapped between February and June 1990 by the spacecraft Voyager 1 from more than 6 billion kilometers away. Can’t imagine how the camera’s connected to the communications part of the craft, probably via a hydraulic hose or something similar. And yes, you guessed it right, nobody has ever taken a photo of our home planet from so far away, ever or since.

But can you find Earth in the photo? It’s the miniscule dot, perhaps even smaller than a pixel, blue-white in colour about halfway down the brown band on the right. The light band is caused by an artifact of the sun’s rays having been scattered on the camera’s optics.

No words are necessary to explain it, but Carl Sagan, in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space could not have put it better:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

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The 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami hit at 2:46pm local time.

Footage from inside Sendai Airport the moment the tsunami hit

It’s the biggest scientifically verified quake to strike Japan since seismology records began in 1900. But there’s also references to a reportedly bigger quake that hit Japan on 13 July 869 (that’s about 1,100+ years ago), and apparently “confirmed by geological investigations”. That’s called either the Jogan or Teikan earthquake.

It’s 8,000 times stronger than the recent earthquake that recently hit Christchurch, New Zealand.

It’s so powerful that:
- the Earth’s axis was shifted by 25 cm
- the speed of the earth’s rotation is increased, shortening a day by 1.6 microseconds due to “redistribution of Earth’s mass”.
- Honshu, Japan’s biggest island, was shifted 2.4 m to the east.

One of the five most powerful earthquakes since modern record-keeping was begun 110 years ago.

I saw CCTV footage of a hotel pointing at a swimming pool purportedly taken during the quake – the shaking’s so violent that big waves started forming inside the pool that it’s a wonder the CCTV system’s audio and video cables were not damaged.

Tsunami waves of up to 10m in height and traveling up to 10km inland was recorded. I think 10m can reach at least the 3rd story of a building.

Damage as far away as Chile was observed.

Amazing stories abound, like that of Hiromitsu Shinkawa, 60, who ran away on hearing that a tsunami’s coming, then realised he forgot something at home, turned back, then was washed away to sea. He was holding on to the roof when he was picked up by a military helicopter floating 15km off the coast of Fukushima!

Before and after photos.

Beware scams surrounding the earthquake.

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Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand (sometimes written as Porntip Rojanasunan), 54 at first glance could be easily mistaken for a washed out rock star due to her “punk-rock hair dyed purplish red, sparkly eye shadow and a silver fish-shaped ear cuff,” not mentioning a fashion sense not usually attributed to medical specialists.

Some photos follow.

When she testified at the inquest into the death of political aide Teoh Beng Hock in Malaysia on 21st October 2009

Investigating the Santika Pub fire in Bangkok (January 2009) which killed 59 people

In 2005

She is probably the top forensics expert in the South East Asian region, who gained international fame for her work after the 2004 Tsunami.

She has conducted more than 10,000 autopsies. Whoa, that’s a lot, perhaps she’d gotten so used to seeing dead bodies that she’d pass by one without even a blink, while holding a discount cigar in one hand.

She is the Director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science, Ministry of Justice, Thailand.

Dubbed Dr Death, she spends more time with the dead than the living, a fact which apparently terrified her husband.

She is a celebrity in her home country but disliked by “many on the police force who has criticized the police as corrupt and has frequently challenged their findings.” As a result, she travels with a minder.

On her appearance, in her own words in 2005:

I wanted to work for society but also I wanted to dress in this style. Being an ordinary doctor was not a good way for me, so I had to find some specialty that was compatible. I work with the dead, and the dead do not complain.

Another, in September 2009:

It‘s my artistic side. Before I became a doctor, I wanted to be an interior designer and the first magazine I subscribed to was the fashion magazine Glamour. The second one was National Geographic. You see, these are two opposite things in my life.

She’s married to a bank manager in Bangkok and they have a teenage daughter. She writes books about her work in her spare time. Her favourite TV show is unsurprisingly “CSI: Miami”. She sleeps for only 4 hours a day, a habit started with she entered her profession 30 years ago.

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Previously, the HIV-1 strain, with 33 million cases worldwide, was thought to have originated from Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV), a virus in chimpanzees.

But for the first time ever, gorillas have been found to be a source of HIV on a 62-year old Cameroonian woman living in Paris. Before Paris, she lived in a suburban area in Cameroon and had no encounters with either gorillas or bush meat. That probably means she got the virus from someone else who was carrying the gorilla strain.

That someone else could be almost impossible to identify, even with top notch gps systems.

It’s a relief to read that current drugs “might still be good enough to combat its effects.”

She was not ill, but “there is no reason to believe that it will not lead to Aids.”

Source
The BBC, 3rd August 2009

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When helium is inhaled, it changes the resonant properties of the human vocal track resulting in a very high squeaky voice.

When sulfur hexafluoride is inhaled, it produces the opposite effect.

Don’t worry, both are harmless gases.

Inhalation of both gases to show their effects was done by Adam Savage on the Mythbusters TV program on 3rd September 2008.

Now, I wonder what would happen if Darth Vader inhales sulfur hexafluoride, then says: “you underestimate the power of the dark side!” or the chipmunks inhale helium, then burst into song.

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So that could mean the Garden of Eden was located several thousand kilometres east of where it’s thought to have been?

Recently, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM)’s Centre for Archaeological Research director Associate Prof Dr Mokhtar Saidin was reported to have said that the earliest tools made by humans in Africa went back back a mere 1.6 million years, while the ones found at Bukit Bunuh (literally meaning Kill Hill), Lenggong, Perak in Malaysia went back a staggering 283,000 years earlier i.e. 1.83 million years ago.

Dr Mokhtar at the site. Behind him is a valley created by a meteorite which crashed 1.74 million years ago.

Photo credit

The archaeological site was found in August 2000 and had an area of 4 square kilometres.

No human remains found though, so could this be another hoax perpetrated by those Bigfoot scammers?

Hopefully not, for USM is a respectable institution of higher learning.

Dr Mokhtar added that at least one of the tools was a hand-axe which was then sent to a lab in Tokyo to determine its age.

He also said that with continuing exploration of the area, they hoped to find human remains.

So did modern man sprout out of South East Asia and spread out around the globe, instead of from Africa?

Dr Mokhtar’s answer was a tantalizing: “it’s possible.”

In fact, apparently there are several places where humans existed more than 1.6 million years ago: in Georgia (1.8 – 1.7 million years ago), Sangiran, Java (1.7 – 1.2 million years ago) & Longgupo and Yuanmou in China (1.8 – 1.6 million years ago). So it was a possibility that as a result of the meteor crash, people migrated from Bukit Bunuh to Java.

Adam’s remains in Malaysia?????

Source
The Star, 29 Jan 2009

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Antony Garrett Lisi PhD, 40 is a theoretical physicist, and adventure sports enthusiast. Strange combination perhaps, especially when you consider that in November 2007, he published the result of his independent research entitled “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” in The New Scientist, which, in laymans’ terms:

…aims to unite Einstein’s General Relativity, which explains how the universe works on very large scales, with that of quantum mechanics, which describes the world of tiny elementary particles.

Explained in slighly more technical language:

proposes a unified field theory combining a grand unification theory of particle physics with Albert Einstein’s general relativistic description of gravitation using the largest simple exceptional Lie algebra, E8.

In other words, he proposed a solution to something which even Albert Einstein failed to do: achieve the Holy Grail: an explanation uniting all the particles and forces of the cosmos.

The other thing is that he rejects string theory, which is currently the dominant model of the universe, to the chagrin of other theoretical physicists.

He does his research independently, meaning he does not work in a university.

In fact, he spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, while in winter, he snowboards in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

Apart from brain-busting activities, he is “a strong proponent of balance in life, particularly between scientific research and the enjoyment of the outdoors.”

He does surfing, snowboarding and windsurfing at the expert level and also does sailing, kitesurfing, mountain biking, skateboarding, motorcycling, cliff diving, rock climbing, hang gliding, paragliding, backpacking, water skiing, wakeboarding, flying, sky diving, and scuba diving.

He summarised his life philosophy perfectly during an interview with Wired News in February 2007:

Surfing and snowboarding are what I do for fun – to get out and play in nature. We live in a beautiful universe, and I wish to enjoy it and understand it as best I can. And I try to live a balanced life. Surfing is simply the most fun I know how to have on this planet. And physics, and science in general, is the best way of understanding how everything works. So this is what I spend my time doing. I do what I love, and follow my interests. Shouldn’t everyone?

Such is the interest in the “surfer dude” that Hollywood already expressed interest in making a movie about his life.

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Nudibranchs are related to snails, but they do not have any shell. Like snails, their bodies are soft. Unlike snails, they are blind, and hence have to rely on their senses of smell, taste and feel to get around.

However, their most outstanding feature is their vivid colours with unbelievable palettes.

Organisms of the sea, they are relatively small, usually measuring between 2cm and 6cm in length.

They can be found in all the seas of the world, from the deepest to the shallowest parts of it.

Their lifespan is 1 year.

There are more than 3,000 known species, only half of which have been discovered.

They eat coral, sponges, eggs, small fish, and yes, other nudibranchs too.

Some photos of nudibranchs:

Click here to see more pictures

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The Neural Correlate Society holds such an annual contest. According to them:

The contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community.

For 2007, the first prize went to Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonesi and Elena Gheorghiu of McGill University, Canada with their entry entitled “The Leaning Tower Illusion”:

Perhaps the fact that it’s very striking, yet very simple is the main factor that contributed to its triumph. We have 2 pictures The Leaning Tower of Pisa, put side by side. They are actually the same picture, yet your eyes will tell you that the tower on the right leans somewhat more, as though the picture on the right was photographed from a different angle.

The explanation, as given by the contest website is:

The reason for this is because the visual system treats the two images as if part of a single scene. Normally, if two adjacent towers rise at the same angle, their image outlines converge as they recede from view due to perspective, and this is taken into account by the visual system. So when confronted with two towers whose corresponding outlines are parallel, the visual system assumes they must be diverging as they rise from view, and this is what we see. The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from below, but works well with other scenes, such as railway tracks receding into the distance. What this illusion reveals is less to do with perspective, but how the visual system tends to treat two side-by-side images as if part of the same scene. However hard we try to think of the two photographs of the Leaning Tower as
separate, albeit identical images of the same object, our visual system regards them as the ‘Twin Towers of Pisa’, whose perspective can only be interpreted in terms of one tower leaning more than the other.

Source
Neural Correlate Society’s best visual illusion contest

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While Malaysia is still searching for her first Nobel prize winner, Sir William Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971) had already set an extremely high standard.

He’s the youngest ever Nobel Prize winner at the age of 25, in 1915. I have a feeling William was not the type to lepak around, unlike our many twentysomethings…

The English physicist was born and educated in Australia, then at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was professor of physics at Victoria Univ., Manchester, from 1919 to 1937. From 1938 to 1953 he was professor of experimental physics at Cambridge and director of the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1954 he was made head of the Royal Institution. He shared with his father the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies, with the X-ray spectrometer, of X-ray spectra, X-ray diffraction, and of crystal structure. In 1941 he was knighted. Among his works are The Structure of Silicates (1930) and Atomic Structure of Minerals (1937). With his father he wrote X Rays and Crystal Structure (1915).

The second youngest is Carl David Anderson, who was 31 when he received his prize for the discovery of the proton. Nevertheless, this did not prevent his biography to claim that he IS the youngest ever – The Discovery of Anti-Matter : The Autobiography of Carl David Anderson, the Youngest Man to Win the Nobel Prize.

Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize at age 35. Marie Curie was 36 when she received her first Nobel Prize in physics and 44 when she received her second Nobel in Chemistry.

To make our task even harder, another title would be the first Malaysian to win TWO Nobel prizes. So far, Linus Pauling was the only person who received Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace. Marie Curie was the only person ever to win both the Chemistry and the Physics Nobel. However, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger have won two Nobels each, in physics and chemistry, respectively.

Now…the only way for us to upstage these westerners is to win THREE Nobel Prizes, the first one at the age of 21, right?

Source: thedailystar.net

More challenges: not just to grace TIME magazine’s cover, but to be selected as TIME’s person of the year. And to make that task even harder, to be the youngest ever TIME’s person of the year. That record belongs to Charles Lindbergh at the age of 25 in 1927. Others:
2nd – Queen Elizabeth II, 26 in 1952
3rd – Martin Luther King Jr., 34 in 1963
4th – Jeff Bezos, 35 in 1999

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Looks like I’m into spooky sounds today…

Scientists at NASA have now heard proof (called ‘Saturn kilometric radiation’) that Saturn has a phenomenon similar to the earths’ Northern Lights (aurora borealis). Talking about the eerie sounding noise, Dr. Bill Kurth with the University of Iowa, says “We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn’s magnetic field lines.”

The sound:

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