The title tells it all – a Nebraskan State Senator, in an attempt to make a point about frivolous lawsuits, files an injunction against God. I can hear the cranks revving their engines already … [Via Pharyngula]
[tags]God, law, religion[/tags]
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Peruvian villagers become sick after meteor strike
Villagers in Southern Peru became sick with a mystery illness last Saturday after a meteor struck nearby. The villagers complained of headaches and vomiting caused by a strange odor. Several police officers also became sick while investigating the impact. Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater.
One can not help but think of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.
UPDATE
An engineer from the Peruvian Nuclear Energy Institute told the AFP news agency no radiation had been detected from the crater and ruled out the fallen object being a satellite.
Renan Ramirez said: “It is a conventional meteorite that, when it struck, produced gases by fusing with elements of the terrain.”
The gases are believed to have affected the health of about 600 people who visited the site.
Robot toy can now recognize human faces, new torment for cats on the way
A new toy that’s been developed will be able to greet you and your family’s pet by name, as well as display emotions. The 17-inch doll comes in at 1/5 the price of the now defunct AIBO at $300, primarily due to the outsourcing of processing power to your computer, which it will connect to using Wi-fi. Zeno will be able to learn faces and names, as well as being fully mobile (walking, at least, no jump jets – yet). Its first debut was at Wired Magazine’s NextFest conference Sept. 13th-16th in LA. The developer’s website has an email list for those of you dying to keep track of its next appearance. [image courtesy Wikipedia Commons]
Zeno covers pretty much everything you need — vision, hearing, speech — to move about the world and the crafty outsourcing of computing power potentially allows for updates. Combine it with this guy and I’m definitely in!
(via PC World)
Anatomy of a bank run, offline and online
You may or may not have heard about the ‘bank run’ of panicking customers withdrawing their savings from beleaguered UK lending institution Northern Rock over the last few days. While the phenomenon of snowballing panic causing the initial problem to worsen is an old one, it has moved to populate the online world in parallel with the offline – so many customers are trying to access Northern Rock’s website at once that their servers can’t cope and return 404-page-not-found errors, adding to the impression of an institution in trouble. [Image from Getty, copied from BBC article]
As a side note, the Financial Times is predicting that this is the start of a rough period for finance on both sides of the pond – welcome to Crunch Week.
[tags]finance, banking, economics, internet[/tags]
Solved: someone found those pesky missing Dwarf Galaxies
Image courtesy of NASA via spacetoday
A big conundrum in astronomy and cosmology over the last ten years has been the ‘Missing Dwarf Galaxy’ Problem. Dwarf Galaxies are much smaller than normal galaxies and though this makes them fainter and harder to find, astronomers have still been finding far fewer than predicted. The prediction comes from the ‘Cold Dark Matter’ model. Dark matter, which is thought to make up around 22% of all substance in the universe compared to about 2-5% of the matter we can see, forms in distinct ‘halos’, in which real galaxies form. (The remaining 74% of energy density is the mysterious dark energy, responsible for the expansion of the universe.)
By studying the distribution of these dark matter halos, astronomers predicted that a large galaxy such as our own Milky Way should have a hundred or so smaller dwarf satellites. The problem is, until very recently only a handful had been seen. A lot of these could have no visible stars and it was difficult to see a way to detect them. Until now. Two astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii think they may have found a load more, possibly solving one of the biggest questions in our study of the stars.
Incidentally, the name for a galaxy smaller than a dwarf class is known as a hobbit galaxy. [via science daily]