SpongThu, 10 May 2007 09:01 UTC
Move over Mr Jack Thompson, Louisiana State Representative Roy Burrell has upped the ante when it comes to mixing fact and fiction to make political capital.
In a column in The Shreveport Times (which Burrell likes to refer to as The Times) he speaks about U.S. federal judge, James Brady, over-turning Burrell's Jack Thompson-supported state law (HB 1381). The law would have enabled judges to rule on whether a video game was too violent to sell to children. HB 1381 was made law in Louisiana in June 2006, and over-turned as unconstitutional in November the same year.
Our solar system might get booted from the suburbs to the boondocks of our galaxy when the Milky Way merges with its neighbor Andromeda in a few billion years, scientists say.
New calculations by T.J. Cox and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics show there is a small possibility that the Sun and its planets will be exiled to the outer reaches of the merged galaxy.
"You could say that we're being sent to a retirement home in the country," Cox said.
Their findings have been submitted for publication to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In the eye of a furious hurricane, the weather is often quite calm and sunny. But new NASA research is providing clues about how the seemingly subtle movement of air within and around this region provides energy to keep this central "powerhouse" functioning.
Using computer simulations and observations of 1998's Hurricane Bonnie in southern North Carolina, scientists were able to get a detailed view of pockets of swirling, warm humid air moving from the eye of the storm to the ring of strong thunderstorms in the eyewall that contributed to the intensification of the hurricane.
The findings suggest that the flow of air parcels between the eye and eye wall - largely believed trivial in the past - is a key element in hurricane intensity and that there's more to consider than just the classic "in-up-and-out" flow pattern. The classic pattern says as air parcels flow "in" to the hurricane's circulation, they rise "up," form precipitating clouds and transport warm air to the upper atmosphere before moving "out" into surrounding environmental air.
"Our results improve understanding of the mechanisms that play significant roles in hurricane intensity," said Scott Braun, research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "The spinning flow of air parcels - or vortices - in the eye can carry very warm, moist eye air into the eyewall that acts as a turbocharger for the hurricane heat engine." The research appears in the June 2007 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences.
Smack bang in the middle of Antarctica sits a mysterious mountain range. Its jagged peaks cover an area similar to that of the Alps, and its highest point is around 3500 metres above sea level. Yet by rights these mountains shouldn't exist at all.
The space shuttle and its newly repaired hail-damaged fuel tank are ready to return to the launch pad for an 8 June launch, NASA managers said on Friday, even though the tank is a bit of an eyesore.
The Taoist poet Lao Tse famously wrote that water exemplifies the highest good, benefiting all and flowing easily without effort. While this makes for a lovely metaphor, there's more to H20 than is dreamt of in Lao Tse's philosophies.
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have found that, at the molecular level, water exhibits viscous, even solid-like properties.
When molecules of water are forced to move through a small gap between two solid surfaces, the substance's viscosity increases by a factor of 1,000 to 10,000, approaching that of molasses.
The weather in space is controlled by events at the centre of the Earth. A pity, then, that the magnetic field generated there may be about to go into reverse
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The moon is waning. The morning stars are Mars, Neptune, Uranus and Jupiter. The evening stars are Venus, Mercury and Saturn.
Those born on this date are under the sign of Taurus. They include English portrait painter Thomas Gainsborough in 1727; Scottish reformer Robert Owen in 1771; opera coloratura soprano Patrice Munsel in 1925 (age 82); singer Bobby Darin in 1936; filmmakers George Lucas ('Star Wars') in 1944 (age 63) and Robert Zemeckis ('Forrest Gump') in 1952 (age 55); and actor Tim Roth in 1961 (age 46).
A comet or some other extraterrestrial object appears to have slammed into northern Canada 12,900 years ago and triggered an abrupt and catastrophic climate change that wiped out the mammoths and many other prehistoric creatures, according to a team of U.S. scientists.
Evidence of the ecological disaster exists in a thin layer of sediment that has been found from Alberta to New Mexico, say the researchers, whose work adds a dramatic and provocative twist to the decades-old debate about the demise of the mammoths, mastodons and sloths that once roamed North America.
A blink lasts about a 10th of a second, and most people blink about 15 times a minute, or every 4 seconds.
Obviously there is some cleaning and lubrication of the eye that gets handled by blinking, and you certainly know that if you get something in your eye you'll start blinking fiercely. You can also experiment with stopping yourself from blinking and will find after a while that it's a bit uncomfortable. A blink can also be a protective mechanism against bright lights, as any photography buff is only too well aware! Similarly, you may well blink in the presence of irritants like freshly cut onions or tear gas.
Blink rates vary quite a bit depending on emotional and mental states. Stress and anxiety tend to increase a person's blink rate, and this can sometimes give away a lie. Intense concentration tends to reduce the blink rate, and if you're in a situation that implies some danger, your blinking rate can go way down -- presumably to help you look around quickly without missing things.
Comment: More evidence that backs up the story that we relate in the article Forget About Global Warming: We're One Step From Extinction!. For an in-depth analysis of this event, check out the book The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization. See also Laura Knight-Jadczyk's The Secret History of the World, which covers this subject thoroughly.