A comet sailing through the inner solar system make its closest approach to the sun and will be at its brightest at sunset tonight, but the glare of twilight may make it tricky to see, NASA says. The Comet Pan-STARRS will be 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) from the surface of the sun when it swings around the star today, and should be bright enough to see without the aid of telescopes or binoculars, weather permitting. But the comet is also appearing low on the western horizon at sunset so some planning is needed to spot the celestial wanderer with the naked eye tonight.
"Look too early and the sky will be too bright," said Rachel Stevenson, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Look too late, the comet will be too low and obstructed by the horizon. This comet has a relatively small window."
An asteroid as big as a city block shot relatively close by the Earth on Saturday, the latest in a series of visiting celestial objects including an asteroid the size of a bus that exploded over Russia last month, injuring 1,500. Discovered just six days ago, the 460-foot long (140-meter) Asteroid 2013 ET passed about 600,000 miles from Earth at 3:30 p.m. EST. That's about 2-1/2 times as far as the moon, fairly close on a cosmic yardstick.
"The scary part of this one is that it's something we didn't even know about," Patrick Paolucci, president of Slooh Space Camera, said during a webcast featuring live images of the asteroid from a telescope in the Canary Islands. Moving at a speed of about 26,000 miles per hour, the asteroid could have wiped out a large city if it had impacted the Earth, added Slooh telescope engineer Paul Cox.
The earthquake zones off of certain coasts - like those of Japan and Java - make them especially vulnerable to tsunamis, according to a new study. They can produce a focusing point that creates massive and devastating tsunamis that break the rules for how scientists used to think tsunamis work. Until now, it was largely believed that the maximum tsunami height onshore could not exceed the depth of the seafloor. But new research shows that when focusing occurs, that scaling relationship breaks down and flooding can be up to 50 percent deeper with waves that do not lose height as they get closer to shore.
"It is as if one used a giant magnifying lens to focus tsunami energy," said Utku Kanoglu, professor at the Middle East Technical University and senior author of the study. "Our results show that some shorelines with huge earthquake zones just offshore face a double whammy: not only they are exposed to the tsunamis, but under certain conditions, focusing amplifies these tsunamis far more than shoaling and produces devastating effects."
Life's building blocks can form in the harsh environment of deep space, a new study suggests, bolstering the odds that a comet or meteorite strike may have jump-started biological evolution on Earth.
Linked pairs of amino acids called dipeptides can take shape in space-like conditions, a team of chemists found. Dipeptides brought to Earth aboard a comet or meteorite billions of years ago may have then catalyzed the formation of even more complex molecules necessary for life as we know it, such as proteins and sugars, researchers said.
As this picture shows, in fact the sun is incredibly calm - baffling experts
'Something unexpected' is happening on the Sun, Nasa has warned. This year was supposed to be the year of 'solar maximum,' the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But as this image reveals, solar activity is relatively low.
'Sunspot numbers are well below their values from 2011, and strong solar flares have been infrequent,' the space agency says.m The image above shows the Earth-facing surface of the Sun on February 28, 2013, as observed by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Daniel Ameduri (www.FutureMoneyTrends.com) has spent the last six years warning Americans about the coming economic collapse, signs to look for, and how to prepare. He is the producer of numerous micro documentaries seen by over five million people via his Vision Victory Youtube Channel and regularly hosts interviews with some of the world’s leading contrarian thinkers including G. Edward Griffin, Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, John Williams and Doug Casey. In his latest message to viewers he discusses the three things preppers should be asking themselves.
1. What are you going to do with your wealth? 2. What are you going to do with your life? 3. Where do you draw the line?
Along with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, leading conservative radio host Mark Levin reaches tens of millions of listeners weekly, and what he talked about recently on his nationally syndicated show has sent shivers down the spines of many of them.A few years ago this was fringe theory, restricted only to the sphere of alternative (conspiracy) news.
Warnings of a massive economic collapse, government stockpiling of weaponry, and the idea that Americans could be broadly classified as terrorists and then detained indefinitely or killed often fell upon deaf ears.
Today, as more information ‘leaks’ into the mainstream, it is no longer just conspiracy theory. We now have some of the most influential journalists and commentators in the country alerting Americans to the possibility that everything the government has been preparing for the last several years may soon be realized.
Comet C/2013 A1 could pass within 23,000 miles of Mars in October 2014, but the unpredictable nature of comet orbits mean it could veer closer
If it hits it would leave a crater hundreds of kilometres across
Huge blast would destroy all probes on and around the Mars
A comet hurtling into our solar system from deep space could next year score a direct and cataclysmic impact on Mars, astronomers say. According to current calculations, comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is set for a near miss that will bring it within 23,000 miles of the surface of the Red Planet. But the unpredictable nature of comet orbits, which can change as jet-like geysers of steam erupt from their surfaces as they near the Sun, means it could pass further away, or veer into a direct collision course.
Sinkholes are a common feature in Florida's limestone-rich bedrock as groundwater easily dissolves the calcium carbonate into solution turning the ground into a slushy mix that washes out under the structures built on top of it... But rarely do they kill.
On Thursday night, a sinkhole in Tampa opened up and swallowed the bedroom where Jeffrey Bush, 37, was sleeping. Rescue crews and his brother acted quickly to try and save him, but Friday morning listening devices and cameras placed in the hole failed to pick up any signs of life.
Britain has committed £88m towards the construction of the world's largest telescope. The huge observatory, to be built in the Chilean Andes, will allow astronomers to capture images of the universe's earliest moments.The giant eye on the sky, known as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), will cost more than €1bn (£900m) to build. Its main mirror, which will gather light from distant stars and galaxies, will be 39 metres in diameter, made of 798 segments. The observatory will gather 15 times more light than the largest telescopes today.
"Every area of astronomy, from planets around other stars to the first galaxies in the universe, will be revolutionised by this telescope," said Professor Simon Morris of Durham University.
Mayor Leigh Dollar is working with city officials to pass an ordinance that would give police the power to “disarm individuals” during a disaster, a chilling example of how the second amendment is being assaulted via the back door.
The new rule would allow authorities to confiscate guns of “unruly” people during an extreme weather event such as the April 2011 tornadoes or any other emergency.
“The ordinance states officers could disarm individuals, if necessary, reports ABC 31. “Dollar says the proposal is just way to give officers more authority to protect themselves.”
Extreme weather events have been on the rise in the last few decades, and man-made climate change may be causing them by interfering with global air-flow patterns, according to new research.
The Northern Hemisphere has taken a beating from extreme weather in recent years — the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Pakistan flood and the 2011 heat wave in the United States, for example. These events, in a general sense, are the result of the global movement of air. Giant waves of air in the atmosphere normally even out the climate, by bringing warm air north from the tropics and cold air south from the Arctic. But a new study suggests these colossal waves have gotten stuck in place during extreme weather events.
Supporters for the city of Orlando allowing front-yard vegetable gardens protested outside of City Hall on Monday in hopes of keeping the city from imposing too many regulations in its new ordinance.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said at the council meeting on Monday that the concerns of the College Park couple, whose front-yard vegetable garden made headlines across the nation last year, will be taken into consideration as the city drafts a new proposed ordinance.The Helvenstons tell Local 6 they're glad the city is willing to allow front yard gardens, but they're concerned officials might impose too many restrictions, possibly limiting the garden to a quarter of the front yard, requiring a fence and outlawing taller crops. [LINK]
They've terrorized a shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead," been folded into classic literature, and even crashed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website. Seriously. What is the deal with zombies?
The shuffling (or quick-as-lightning, depending on your preferred version) hordes are horror-movie staples, but they've lately skyrocketed in fame with humorous takes such as in the book "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" (Quirk Books, 2009) and the movie "Shaun of the Dead" (2004), which follows a sad-sack salesman during the zombie apocalypse. In 2011, the CDC capitalized on zombie fever with a blog post dedicated to preparing for a zombie uprising, driving so much Internet traffic that their servers crashed.
NASA, universities and private groups in the US are working on asteroid warning systems that can detect objects from space like the one that struck Russia last week with a blinding flash and mighty boom. But the US space agency reiterated that events like the one in the Urals, which shattered windows and injured nearly 1,000 people, are rare.
"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The meteor that crashed to earth in Russia was about 55 feet in diameter, weighed around 10,000 tons and was made from a stony material, scientists said, making it the largest such object to hit the Earth in more than a century.
Large pieces of the meteor have yet to be found. However, a team from the Urals Federal University, which is based in Yekaterinburg, collected 53 fragments, the largest of which was 7 millimeters, according to Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist at the university.
Data from a global network of sensors indicated that the disintegration of the Russia fireball unleashed nearly 500 kilotons of energy, more than 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The shock wave from Friday's (Feb. 15) meteor explosion above Russia sent subsonic waves through the atmosphere halfway around the world. Up to 11 sensors in Greenland, Africa, Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and other far-flung regions detected the Russian meteor blast's infrasound, or low-frequency sound waves. The sensors are part of the global network of 60 infrasound stations maintained by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).
Infrasound's long wavelengths (about 20 to 0.01 Hertz) can travel far distances in the atmosphere, at frequencies humans can't hear. Elephants, whales and even pigeons use infrasound for communication and navigation, scientists have discovered. [LS]
If the economy is improving, then why are many of the largest retail chains in America closing hundreds of stores? When I was growing up, Sears, J.C. Penney, Best Buy and RadioShack were all considered to be unstoppable retail powerhouses. But now it is being projected that all of them will close hundreds of stores before the end of 2013. Even Wal-Mart is running into problems. A recent internal Wal-Mart memo that was leaked to Bloombergdescribed February sales as a “total disaster”. So why is this happening? Why are major retail chains all over America collapsing? Is the “retail apocalypse” upon us? Well, the truth is that this is just another sign that the U.S. economy is falling apart right in front of our eyes. Incomes are declining, taxes are going up, government dependence is at an all-time high, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has been steadily falling since 2006. The top 10% of all income earners in the U.S. are still doing very well, but most U.S. consumers are either flat broke or are drowning in debt. The large disposable incomes that the big retail chains have depended upon in the past simply are not there anymore. So retail chains all over the United States are now closing up unprofitable stores. This is especially true in low income areas. [ECB]
An asteroid hurtled toward Earth's backyard, destined Friday to make the closest known flyby for a rock of its 150-foot size. In a startling coincidence, a meteor exploded above Russia's Ural Mountains just hours before the asteroid was due to zoom past the planet.
Scientists insisted the meteor had nothing to do with the incoming asteroid since they appeared to traveling in opposite directions. The asteroid is much more immense object that was expected to miss Earth by 17,150 miles, avoiding catastrophe.But that's still closer than many communication and weather satellites. Scientists insisted these, too, would be spared.
