Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Are you a real peeps person?

If you are a real peeps person you will appreciate the article recently published in the News and Observer in North Carolina.

Spring has sprung and peeps are peeping out all over. Real peepsfolk carry their peeps in their pants pocket for all the world to see...

News and Observer
March 25, 2007
Thomasi McDonald, Staff Writer

Poetry and Peeps in Southern Village

CHAPEL HILL - Audrey Gillen, 10, hadn't eaten a Peep since kindergarten because, she said, her parents are "all healthy, healthy."

Small wonder, the normally poised Audrey, who lives in Durham, got a rush while staring at the trays and bowls of Peeps on display Saturday at Market Street Books & Maps in Chapel Hill's Southern Village.

"I'm going to get over-sugared today," she said.

Audrey and her mother were among about 50 children and adults who showed up at the bookstore for PeepFest 2007. With enough Peeps to feed a small village, festival organizers held poetry and cooking contests and a concert inspired by the marshmallow candy shaped like baby chickens and rabbits. Read more...


Sunday, March 18, 2007


Interesting finding about water on Mars. Polar layered deposits hold most of the known water on Mars, though other areas of the planet appear to have been very wet at times in the past. The south polar layered deposits alone are the size of the US state of Texas.


BBC News
March 16, 2007
Paul Rincon, Science reporter, BBC News, Houston

Polar water 'would blanket Mars'
Enough water is locked up at Mars' south pole to cover the planet in a liquid layer 11m (36ft) deep.

The Mars Express probe used its radar instrument to map the thickness of Mars' south polar layered deposits.

Analysis of the Marsis radar data shows that the polar deposits consist of almost pure water-ice. Read more...

Friday, March 16, 2007

Lunar transit of the sun

Solar Eclipse, STEREO Style — On Feb. 25, 2007 there was a transit of the Moon across the face of the Sun - but it could not be seen from Earth. This sight was visible only from the STEREO-B spacecraft in its orbit about the sun, trailing behind the Earth.

Not your ordinary view of an eclipse. In a report on the Science@NASA
website Lika Guhathakurta, STEREO Program Scientist at NASA headquarters says "What an extraordinary view. The fantastically-colored star is our own sun as STEREO sees it in four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. The black disk is the Moon. We caught a lunar transit of the sun." she explains.

See the spectacular images and read the story on the NASA website...

NASA
March 12, 2007

Stereo Eclipse

When scientists announce they're about to calibrate their instruments, science writers normally put away their pens. It's hard to write a good story about calibration. This may be the exception:

On Feb. 25, 2007, NASA scientists were calibrating some cameras aboard the STEREO-B spacecraft and they pointed the instruments at the sun. Here is what they saw:

Read the report and watch the video of the eclipse! Read more...

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Crossing the road at a Marathon

Here's a twist on the old question "Why did the chicken cross the road". This time it's "How to cross a busy road without stopping the traffic, building a bridge or digging a tunnel". It's a "neat, and simple, trick" to cross the road during a marathon.


Check out this solution from Richard G. Brown in London from his blog "Design Patterns for Life". Read the solution...

Make paper clip starship with office supplies





Looking for more things to do for fun? Check out these instructions on making your own Starship Enterprise...



"How to Make a Starship Enterprise with Removable Saucer Section Out of Office Supplies" from David M Chasse...

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Bring out the "space tractor"

Only in the movies do we hear about saving the earth from an asteroid crashing into our planet and destroying it. A news report published in the News and Observer in March, 2007, describes a study by NASA and the Air Force to ways to prevent such a crash by by destroying or change the course of an asteroid named "Apophis". Named for "an ancient Egyptian god of evil, Apophis is about 900 feet long -- three times the length of a football field -- and is traveling at 12,000 mph."

It further states "In the past eight years, 754 asteroids bigger than 1 kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) across have been detected orbiting near Earth. But none is expected to come as close as a smaller one called Apophis, which was discovered just before Christmas in 2004."

An exerpt from the article follows...

News and Observer
March 6, 2007

Experts ponder moving asteroid
Robert S. Boyd -
WASHINGTON - NASA and the Air Force are studying ways to ward off a medium-sized asteroid that will streak within 18,000 miles of Earth in 2029 and that has an extremely slight chance of crashing into our planet in 2036.

Ideas discussed at a Planetary Defense Conference this week include a "gravity tug" or "space tractor" that would hover near the space rock and tow it into a safe orbit. Other possibilities include a head-on collision with an unmanned spaceship or a nuclear explosion. Read more...

Friday, March 2, 2007

Paris Hilton news ban experiment

Did you miss her this week? For a short time the Associated Press decided to try an experiment and banned news about Paris Hilton for a week just to see what reaction it might bring. Well, for a week we got to hear news about events all over the world without injection of news about Paris constantly. It would seem that trivia took a holiday and we all were better off for it.

Perhaps the ban could continue and important news could be published - at least for a while...

CNN News
March 2, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) -- So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license.

Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. Here at The Associated Press, we put out an initial item of some 300 words. But it actually meant more to us than that.

It meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton.

It was only meant to be a weeklong ban -- not the boldest of journalistic initiatives, and one, we realized, that might seem hypocritical once it ended. And it wasn't based on a view of what the public should be focusing on -- the war in Iraq, for example, or the upcoming election of the next leader of the free world, as opposed to the doings of a partygoing celebrity heiress/reality TV star most famous for a grainy sex video. Read more...