Scribal Terror

Avoid breathing meteor gas

News in Science reports:

About 200 villagers have fallen ill from mysterious gases that spewed from a crater after a meteorite crashed in southeastern Peru, officials and scientists say.

But they say no radiation has been detected.

Scores of residents of the farming village of Carancas began vomiting and complaining of headaches and dizziness after the meteorite struck the area at the weekend, leaving a crater 8 metres deep and 20 metres wide.

"We have determined with precision instruments that there is no radiation," says engineer Renan Ramirez of the Peruvian Nuclear Energy Institute.

Ramirez says the illnesses may have been triggered by sulfur, arsenic or other toxins that may have melted in the extreme heat produced by the meteorite strike.

Lucy in the sky

Confirming what the Beatles always knew, astronomers have actually found a diamond in the sky - directly above Australia. It is the biggest known diamond in the universe, in fact.

According to American astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, a white dwarf star in the constellation of Centaurus, next to the Southern Cross, has been found to have a 3000-kilometre-wide core of crystallised carbon, or diamond.

It weighs 2.27 thousand trillion trillion tonnes - that's 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a 1 followed by 34 zeroes. The biggest earthly jewel is one of the British crown jewels, the 530-carat Star of Africa.

However, this cosmic jewel is hidden beneath a layer of hydrogen and helium gases, with the diamond core making up between 50 and 90 per cent of its mass. "It's the mother of all diamonds," said astronomer Travis Metcalfe, who led the team of researchers that studied the star.

"Some people refer to it as Lucy, in a tribute to the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

Known officially as BPM 37093, the star confirms a theory, first raised in the early 1960s, that cool white dwarfs should have a diamond core. -- The Age (2004)

In tangentially related news,

Miners in South Africa claim they have unearthed the biggest diamond in the world.

The giant 7,000 carat jewel is said to be the size of a coconut and worth at least £15million, reports the Daily Mirror.

I blame global frothing

The Daily Mail reports (via Deep Sea News):

Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards' centre, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales.

One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away.

It stretched for 30 miles out into the Pacific in a phenomenon not seen at the beach for more than three decades.

Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed.

All are churned up together by powerful currents which cause the water to form bubbles.

These bubbles stick to each other as they are carried below the surface by the current towards the shore.

As a wave starts to form on the surface, the motion of the water causes the bubbles to swirl upwards and, massed together, they become foam.

The foam "surfs" towards shore until the wave "crashes", tossing the foam into the air.

Norway's shame

Via Aftenposten:

Amidst all the talk about carbon dioxide emissions and global warming comes news that Norway's national mascot may be contributing to the destruction of the environment, through burping and other bodily functions. . . .

The research web site www.forskning.no has calculated that the annual gas emissions from a moose are equal to those from an individual's 36 flights between Oslo and Trondheim.

A grown moose will burp and pass so much methane gas in the course of a year that it amounts to 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide emissions.

Newspaper VG reported that a motorist would have to drive 13,000 kilometers in a car to emit the same.

Mira's tail

News in Science reports on a dying star named Mira with a tail 13 light years long:

A large star in its death throes is leaving a huge, turbulent tail of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen in its wake that makes it look like an immense comet hurtling through space, astronomers say . . . .

The star is rocketing through our Milky Way galaxy at 130 kilometres per second, literally faster than a speeding bullet.

And it's spewing material that scientists believe may be recycled into new stars, planets and maybe even life.

"We believe that the tail is made up of material that is being shed by the star which is heating up and then spiralling back into this turbulent wake," says Professor Christopher Martin of the California Institute of Technology, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature.

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Where's the pot of gold?

End of the rainbow located in Iceland. Via Arbroath

Word to the wise

Don't wear an iPod while jogging in a thunderstorm

Noctilucent clouds

Live Science reports:

A new NASA satellite has recorded the first detailed images from space of a mysterious type of cloud called “night-shining” or “noctilucent."

The clouds are on the move, brightening and creeping out of polar regions, and researchers don't know why.

"It is clear that these clouds are changing, a sign that a part of our atmosphere is changing and we do not understand how, why or what it means," said atmospheric scientists James Russell III of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. "These observations suggest a connection with global change in the lower atmosphere and could represent an early warning that our Earth environment is being changed."

The "Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere” (AIM) satellite first imaged the noctilucent clouds May 25. People on the ground began seeing them June 6 over Northern Europe.

The clouds form 50 miles above the Earth’s surface, in an upper layer of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. The puffs of water vapor and crystals appear during summer months above the Northern Hemisphere's pole as well the Southern Hemisphere’s pole in summer.

Here's what they look like from the ground:

Aurora australis

A bolt from the blue

According to the Miami Herald, David Canales, a landscaper, was killed this past Thursday by lightning that came out of a clear blue sky. It's a bizarre phenomenon called a "bolt from the blue":

Dan Dixon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Miami, said that when Canales was hit, a typical afternoon storm was forming but nowhere near the area.

Weather data showed that lightning activity picked up north of Pinecrest shortly before 1 p.m., as a storm gathered momentum and swept through Coral Gables and then downtown.

''Most lightning will come from the base of a thunderstorm, inside that rain-shaft area,'' Dixon explained. ``But occasionally, what we call a bolt from the blue comes out of a thunderstorm still several miles away.''. . .

The bolts normally travel horizontally away from the storm and reach farther than typical lightning, then curve to the ground. . . .

Dixon said protecting yourself from such unexpected lightning is difficult.

''They are very unpredictable and very dangerous. We urge people to stay indoors even if you hear thunder only faintly in the distance,'' Dixon said. ``If you're close enough to hear thunder, you're close enough to be struck by lightning.''

The photo is from NOAA