Asteroid Blast Reveals Holes in Earth's defences

As the US government ponders a strategy to deal with threatening asteroids, a dramatic explosion over Indonesia has underscored how blind we still are Movie Camera to hurtling space rocks.

On 8 October 2009 an asteroid detonated high in the atmosphere above South Sulawesi, Indonesia, releasing about as much energy as 50,000 tons of TNT, according to a NASA estimate released on Friday. That's about three times more powerful than the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima, making it one of the largest asteroid explosions ever observed. However, the blast caused no damage on the ground because of the high altitude, 15 to 20 kilometres above Earth's surface, says astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario (UWO), Canada. Brown and Elizabeth Silber, also of UWO, estimated the explosion energy from infrasound waves that rippled halfway around the world and were recorded by an international network of instruments that listens for nuclear explosions.The explosion was heard by witnesses in Indonesia. Video images of the sky following the event show a dust trail characteristic of an exploding asteroid.

Sudden Impact

The amount of energy released suggests the object was about 10 metres across, the researchers say. Such objects are thought to hit Earth about once per decade. No telescope spotted the asteroid ahead of its impact. That is not surprising, given that only a tiny fraction of asteroids smaller than 100 metres across have been catalogued, says Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet objects as small as 20 or 30 metres across may be capable of doing damage on the ground, he says.

"If you want to find the smallest objects you have to build more, larger telescopes," says Spahr. "A survey that finds all of the 20-metre objects will cost probably multiple billions of dollars." The US Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the White House, must develop a policy to address the asteroid hazard by October 2010 under a deadline imposed by 2008 legislation. It is likely to be influenced by a report from the National Research Council on the asteroid problem, which is expected by year's end.

By David Shiga

Amazing Russian Baby Ali Yakubov Koran/Qur'an Appears on his Skin

Ali Yakubov is a medical mystery. Doctors and family deny any person is responsible for it and that there is no one writing on the boy's skin – nevertheless, words from the holy Koran mysteriously appear on his skin.

The word Allah appeared first, on Ali's chin soon after his birth. Ali was born prematurely with a coronary heart disease and transparent skin which revealed his intestines. At the time doctors warned that he may only live 2 or 3 days. In another twist, his mother, Madiana, complained to doctors that she could ear him crying before his was born. Doctors dismissed this out of hand but Mr. Ahmedpasha Amiralaev, a chairman of the Sagida Murtuzalieva Charity admitted that by the late term even the doctors themselves admitted that it seemed to be the unborn baby that was crying.

Ali has become a religious sensation in Russia. It has been reported that new Koran Arabic script appears on the back of his legs and hands (sometimes his stomach and head) before fading after a few days. Madiana says the boy reaches upwards of 40 degrees centigrade during these appearances.

source : here

Now you can believe it or Not? If you think this is not true, now how is it getting there?

A Halo Phenomena Over Moscow

And you thought rainbows were cool. A few days ago, a mysterious cloud shaped like a halo appeared over Moscow, and the buzz has yet to break.

We're the first to admit that a photograph of the heavenly cloud appears to be photoshopped. It's just so...perfect. But meterologists have spoken up and said the cloud wasn't digitally altered. However, it wasn't exactly what it appeared to be, either.

When the cloud initially formed, some UFO enthusiasts declared it to be a "true mystery." Some even compared it to the giant spaceship hovering over Earth in the movie "Independence Day." Reality quickly dashed any predictions of an alien invasion. An article from the Daily Mail explains that the "luminous ring-shaped cloud" was simply an optical effect.

An official spokesperson for Moscow's weather department said, "Several fronts have been passing through Moscow recently, there was an intrusion of the Arctic air too, the sun was shining from the west — this is how the effect was produced."

The cloud loomed last week, but the searches are still soaring. Lookups on "halo cloud" and "moscow cloud" are both booming, and a video clip has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. You can check it out for yourself below...

Source : Buzz

Bizarre Tongue-Eating Parasite Found in the Jersey Coast

There's been a spate of amazing animal discoveries recently--the giant rat-eating plants found in the Philippines, a huge woolly rat discovered in a volcanic crater--and now, yet another creature has emerged that could be right out of a sci-fi film. It's a bizarre creature that survives by eating its hosts' tongue and then attaching itself inside the mouth.

The sea-dwelling parasite attacks fish, burrows into it, and then devours its tongue. After eating the tongue, the parasite proceeds to live inside the fish's mouth. There's a horror film waiting to be made about this thing. Surprisingly, the fish doesn't seem to suffer any severe impediment--just the loss of its tongue--and seems to have no trouble surviving with its new, far uglier tongue.

While the isopod, a kind of louse, has been known to exist for a while now, discoveries of live specimens is rare. The BBC reports that "Fishermen near the Minquiers - islands under the jurisdiction of Jersey - found the isopod, a type of louse, inside a weaver fish." So no, the tongue-eater wasn't found in that Jersey. The Jersey Shore is still tongue replacing creature-free, if you stateside Northeasterners were worried about the thing ruining your late summer vacationing.

Not that you'd have to be too concerned anyways--the isopod isn't a threat to humans in the slightest, though it's reportedly vicious, and can deliver quite a little bite. One of the fishermen who found the creature described it thus: "Really quite large, really quite hideous - if you turn it over its got dozens of these really sharp, nasty claws underneath and I thought 'that's a bit of a nasty beast'." And while it can't seriously hurt people, it evidently doesn't like them: "It doesn't affect humans other than if you do actually come across a live one and try and pick it up - they are quite vicious, they will deliver a good nip."

( http://www.treehugger.com/ )

20 Percent(%) of Our Energy Used By The Neurons (Brain)

Experiments conducted on squid brains in the early days of neuroscience created misunderstandings about the workings of the human brain that have persisted for 70 years, according to a new study. While the squid experiments did shed light on how messages are transmitted between brain cells with electrochemical signals (and led to a Nobel Prize for the experimenters), researchers are just now realizing that the results gave scientists a confused idea about the efficiency of neurons.

The story begins seventy years ago when a pair of British physiologists, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, took the first stab at figuring out how neurons transmit electrical signals, known as action potentials. Because most neurons are small–in humans, a cubic millimeter of gray matter can contain 40,000 neurons–the duo turned to squid, which contain a giant axon, the long thin part of a neuron through which action potentials travel. Those early experiments found that transmitting the action potential along the axon was a very inefficient process that used a great deal of energy, and neuroscientists ever since have assumed that mammal brains had the same inefficient wiring.

Researcher Henrik Alle, lead author of the new study published in Science, decided to reexamine the old assumptions. “I saw this old work,” says Alle. “I thought I cannot believe personally that nature would waste such energy.” Alle figured that nature would have made the process more efficient in mammals, whose brains send a huge number of messages [NPR News].

Alle and his colleagues studied rat brains using sophisticated techniques that weren’t available to Hodgkin and Huxley, and found that rat neurons use only about a third as much energy to transmit the action potential. The researchers say we can assume that the results from rats can be applied to human brain cells. “Electrical signals found in mammalian brain cell types are very similar”, says Alle.

The difference between the cephalopod and the mammals can be explained by the movements of the positively and negatively charged ions that flow in and out of the neuron, changing its voltage and beginning the electric pulse of the action potential that moves down the axon. Hodgkin and Huxley were the first to suggest that the squid cells were inefficient because sodium ions entering the cells neutralised the effect of potassium ions leaving. This hampered the creation of a net voltage across the cell membrane. “It’s like having the accelerator and the brake on at the same time,” says Arnd Roth, a study coauthor. In rat cells, however, the process is better coordinated so that almost all the sodium ions enter before potassium ions rush out.

The results don’t change the scientific thesis that although the brain accounts for only 2 percent of our body weight, it consumed 20 percent of our energy–it just means that the energy is being used by the neurons in other ways than to generate action potentials. Researchers suspect that the bulk of energy that goes to the brain is used for keeping the brain cells alive and used in synapses, where signals are transmitted from one neuron to the next.

(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com)

Found, the coldest place on Earth That is Antarctica's Ridge A

The search for the best observatory site in the world has led to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth, a place where no human is thought to have ever set foot. The finding was detailed on August 31 in the Publications of the Astronomical Society.
Antarctica's Ridge A, world's coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth. To search for the perfect site to take pictures of the heavens, a US-Australian research team combined data from satellites, ground stations and climate models in a study to assess the many factors that affect astronomy — cloud cover, temperature, sky-brightness, water vapour, wind speeds and atmospheric turbulence.

The researchers pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A that is 4.053 metres high up on the Antarctic Plateau. The study revealed that Ridge A has an average winter temperature of minus 70 degrees Celsius and an extremely low amount of water in the air.

The site is also extremely calm, which means that there is very little of the atmospheric turbulence that elsewhere makes stars appear to twinkle.

"It's so calm that there's almost no wind or weather there at all" said study leader Will Saunders, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Australia.

All these elements combine to make the perfect recipe for an astronomical observation post: "The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers," Saunders said. "Because the sky there is so much darker and drier, it means that a modestly sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on earth."

The site would even be superior to the best existing observatories on high mountain tops in Hawaii and Chile, Saunders said. Researchers assert that a telescope at the site could take images nearly as good as those from the space-based Hubble telescope.

Located within the Antarctic Territory claimed by Australia, the site is 89 miles from an international robotic observatory and the proposed new Chinese "Kunlun" base at Dome A, a higher point on the Antarctic Plateau.

source : google.com

Chernobyl / Chornobyl City The Wost Nuclear Incident

Chernobyl / Chornobyl is a city in Uni Sovyet at the wost nuclear incident, but after the collapse of uni sovyet, this country into Ukraina teritory. Now Chernobyl city in northern Ukraine, in Kiev Oblast (Province), near the border with Belarus.


The city was evacuated in 1986 due to the Chernobyl disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located 14.5 kilometers (9 miles) north-northwest. The power plant is within Chernobyl Raion (District), but the city was not the residence of the power-plant workers. When the power plant was under construction, Pripyat, a city larger and closer to the power plant, had been built as home for the power-plant workers.


Though the city today is mostly uninhabited, a small number of inhabitants reside in houses marked with signs stating that the "Owner of this house lives here". Workers on watch and administrative personnel of the Zone of Alienation are stationed in the city on a long term basis. Prior to its evacuation, the city was inhabited by about 14,000 residents.
The world called Chernobyl city is The Wost Nuclear Incident in History.

7 Big Holes In The World

1. Big hole kimberley Mine - South Africa




The underground Kimberley Mine (located at 28°44′18.86″N 24°45′30.95″W) was mined to a depth of 1097 metres and estimates total have been taken in the mine is 22 millions tons. But the Kimberley mine has been closed since 1914.

2. Bingham canyon mine, SLC, Utah USA




The Bingham Canyon Mine (located at 40°31′13.54″N 112°08′58.09″W) is an open-pit mining operation extracting a large porphyry copper deposit southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, in the Oquirrh Mountains. The mine excavation began in 1863 until now. This Hole has a size : 3/4 mile deep and 2,5 mile across.

3. Great Blue Hole, Belize




The Great Blue Hole is a large underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize (located at 17°18′56.02″N 87°32′04.20″W). The hole is circular in shape, over 300 metres (984 ft) across and 125 metres (410 ft) deep. A blue hole is a submarine cave or sinkhole. They are also called vertical caves. If you want to diving, you can try The Great Blue Hole.

4. Hole(Spillway) in Monticello dam in california



Hole (Spillway) Monticello Dam is a dam in Napa County, California, United States (located at 38°30′44.15″N 122°06′17.60″W)


5. The Diavik diamond mine, Canada




The Diavik Diamond Mine (located at 64°29′40.88″N 110°16′16.35″W) is a diamond mine in the North Slave Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada, about 300 kilometres (186 miles) north of Yellowknife. It's connected by an ice road and Diavik Airport with a 5,235-foot (1,596 m) gravel runway regularly accommodating Boeing 737 jet aircraft.

6. Mirny diamond mine,Siberia RUSIA




The Mirny Diamond Mine (located at 62°52′94.23″N 133°99′35.38″W) is 525m deep and has a diameter of 1200m. It was the first, and one of the largest, diamond Pipes in the USSR. It's now abandoned. While it was still operational, it would take two hours for trucks to drive from the top to the bottom of the mine.

7. Chuquicamata copper mine - Chile





Chuquicamata or "Chuqui" (located at 22°16′42.38″N 68°54′13.55″W) is an open pit copper mine in Chile. It is the mine with the largest total production of copper in the world - though it is not the largest copper mine. The mine is over 850 meters deep.

24 Year The Baby Become a Stone in stomach

Batu raja - Indonesia, Dr H Hafiz Usman SpOG showed the baby who has become the stone or in the medical term was acknowledged as Lito Pedion. These phenomena was found in the abdomen Ms. Painah (48) when the team of the doctor carried out the operation mioma uteri (the benign tumour) in the patient's uterus. The operation was carried out on Wednesday (22/4) in Dr Nosemir Baturaja Hospital. Source : here

Mysterious Standing Stones of Stonehenge

One of an amazing disappearance is The mysterious standing stones of Stonehenge in England. The stonehenge disappearance in August, 1971. more info here.