What Was That Ring Around the Moon?
Dec/09BC
Source: Yahoo! Buzz
Yahoo! - Many folks who looked up at the sky last night were greeted with a very bizarre sight: a luminous ring surrounding the moon. Were aliens coming? Was the end of the world at hand? Fortunately, no.
Though it looked ominous, the shiny ring around the moon last night was actually a rather common weather phenomenon. According to various weather-related blogs across the Buzz, this ring around the moon occurs when thin cirrus clouds, which contain ice crystals, refract the moonlight. A blog from the Goddard Space Flight Center explains that “the shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring. Since the ice crystals typically have the same shape, namely a hexagonal shape, the Moon ring is always the same size.”
New Blue Whale Song Mystery
Dec/09BC
Source: WIRED
WIRED - All around the world, blue whales aren’t singing like they used to, and scientists have no idea why.
The largest animals on Earth are singing in ever-deeper voices every year. Among the suggested explanations are ocean noise pollution, changing population dynamics and new mating strategies. But none of them is entirely convincing.
“We don’t have the answer. We just have a lot of recordings,” said Mark McDonald, president of Whale Acoustics, a company that specializes in the sonic monitoring of cetaceans.
McDonald and his collaborators first noticed the change eight years ago, when they kept needing to recalibrate the automated song detectors used to track blue whales off the California coast. The detectors are triggered by songs that match a particular waveform. Every year, McDonald had to set them lower.
Since then, he and Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers Sarah Melnick and John Hildebrand have gathered thousands of blue whale recordings made since the 1960s, spanning populations from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific to the East Indian Ocean. Their analysis, published in October in Endangered Species Research, shows that the songs’ tonal frequency is falling every year by a few fractions of a hertz.
“It’s a fascinating finding,” said John Calombokidis, a blue whale expert at the Cascadia Research Collective. “It’s even more remarkable, given that the songs themselves differ in different oceans. There seem to be these distinct populations, yet they’re all showing this common shift.”
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Ron Artest admits he used to drink Hennessy at halftime
Dec/09BC
Source: Yahoo! Sports
Yahoo! - Leave it to Ron Artest to try and steal a little of Tiger Woods and Allen Iverson’s headline thunder.
In a lengthy and candid interview for the upcoming issue of Sporting News magazine, Artest — best known as the central figure in the infamous Malice at the Palace in Detroit — lets it fly, including a startling admission that he drank alcohol during games as a member of the Chicago Bulls.
“I used to drink Hennessy … at halftime,” said Artest, who played with the Bulls from 1999-2002 and now is with the Los Angeles Lakers. “I [kept it] in my locker. I’d just walk to the liquor store [near the stadium] and get it.”
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