Weird Weather: Heat burst hits Cozad

Cozad residents woke this morning to a weather phenomenon as a heat burst rolled through town. Temperatures rose 20 degrees in a matter of minutes while winds reached speeds of 75 miles per hour.

Many had no idea what was happening. Mike Steinwart, Cozad Street Department, said it came quickly. “No warning, not even a whistle, I thought it was a tornado. The way people explained. I thought it was a tornado, but they say it was a heat burst.”

Trees were thrown into houses and cars but no injuries were reported. There was at least one close call. Nancy Wurst said her son just missed injury as a tree crashed into his car. “He was about a minute from being in the car he was standing at the door getting ready to come outside to go to work. If that would have happened one minute later he could have been in the car.”

The last heat burst in Nebraska was in hastings in 2oo6. – ntv

Halo WALL-E Trailer

This is supposed to be a new level of computer graphics for Pixar. I might go and wear earplugs so I don’t have to hear the annoying “cute” voices.

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Hackers Hijack Critical Internet Organizations

Turkish hackers Thursday defaced the official sites of the international organizations that oversee the Internet’s critical routing infrastructure and regulate domain names, researchers said Friday.

A group calling itself “NetDevilz” claimed responsibility for the hack, which Thursday morning temporarily redirected visitors to the sites for IANA ( Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ) and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

Users who tried to reach iana.com, iana-servers.com, icann.com and icann.net were shunted to an illegitimate site… According to a screen capture of the defacement snapped by zone-h.org, the bogus site simply displayed a taunting message: “You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don’t you believe us?” …
The hackers redirected IANA and ICANN traffic to the same IP address that they used last week when they broke into Photobucket Inc.’s image-sharing site and pushed its users to a server operated by Atspace.com, a German hosting service, said Bulgarian security researcher Dancho Danchev in a blog post Friday.

A spokesman for ICANN contacted Friday morning wasn’t aware of the hack, and declined comment until he found find out more. – nytimes

I did notice that photobucket outage, but I didn’t think it was due to hacking. Interesting.

Supreme Court Upholds Gun Ownership Rights

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Scientists reveal why glass is glass

Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid.

The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman’s plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible.

The breakthrough involved solving the decades-old problem of just what glass is. It has been known that that despite its solid appearance, glass and gels are actually in a “jammed” state of matter — somewhere between liquid and solid — that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass are in something like suspended animation, unable to reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbors. So even though glass is a hard substance, it never quite becomes a proper solid, according to chemists and materials scientists. … The deceptively liquid-like behavior of glass can be seen when you look at glass in the windows of an old building. The glass begins to sag and distort internally over the centuries, due to the effect of gravity. … Royall is part of a group of scientists who think that if you wait long enough, perhaps billions of years, all glass will eventually crystallize into a true solid. In other words, glass is not in an equilibrium state, (although it appears that way to us during our limited lifetimes). – msnbc

Mystery: The molecular arrangement of metallic glass is now understood, but why does this metallic glass give off sparks when struck?

The alloy of zirconium, beryllium, titanium, copper, and nickel is one of the first metallic glasses that can be made in bulk and formed into strong, hard, useful objects. It was discovered by William L. Johnson and Atakan Peker of the California Institute of Technology. – lbl

The sample metallic glass above is obviously not clear. Is some metallic glass transparent?

Suicides ‘LINKED TO PHONE MASTS’ (cell phone towers)

THE spate of deaths among young people in Britain’s suicide capital could be linked to radio waves from dozens of mobile phone transmitter masts near the victims’ homes.

Dr Roger Coghill, who sits on a Government advisory committee on mobile radiation, has discovered that all 22 youngsters who have killed themselves in Bridgend, South Wales, over the past 18 months lived far closer than average to a mast.

He has examined worldwide studies linking proximity of masts to depression. Dr Coghill’s work is likely to trigger alarm and lead to closer scrutiny of the safety of masts, which are frequently sited on public buildings such as schools and hospitals. – express

Some people call them Mind Control Towers. Here is one example of this strange belief:

The day is now approaching in which government mind control technologies will be directed at you, your neighbors, and your loved ones. Every single day, equipment is being erected and installed in this country with the hidden purpose of exerting mind control over the entire population. Everywhere in this country (and overseas), ELF/microwave transmission towers are being erected. The antennae usually look like four slightly curved vertical plates about 2 feet in length and located in either 3 or 4 quadrants around the tower, two thirds up from the ground. Just look around, you’ll see them. – educateyourself

I’ve seen no evidence that a person’s behavior can be controlled by transmissions from these towers. With microwaves you could damage brain tissue, and perhaps make someone nauseous, but our skulls protect us somewhat, so the effects on our eyes would be noticeable before effects on our brains. In other words, interesting, but highly unlikely.

Here is some supposed military speculation from 1996 on the topic, but I don’t think there are mind control rays to change emotions or make people freeze or fall asleep yet.

From USAF Scientific Advisory Board, New World Vistas Air and Space Power for the 21st Century, Ancillary Volume, p89. “Prior to the mid-21st century, there will be a virtual explosion of knowledge in the field of neuroscience. We will have achieved a clear understanding of how the human brain works, how it really controls the various functions of the body, and how it can be manipulated (both positively and negatively). One can envision the development of electromagnetic energy sources, the output of which can be pulsed, shaped, and focused, that can couple with the human body in a fashion that will allow one to prevent voluntary muscular movements, control emotions (and thus actions), produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory, produce an experience set, and delete an experience set. This will open the door for the development of some novel capabilities that can be used in armed conflict, in terrorist/hostage situation, and in training…” – mindjustice

Scientists at Porton Down researched comical non-lethal crowd control devices

Instant banana skins, flying remote control planes into protectors to knock them down, knock out drugs and other things were proposed (and tested?)

According to recently declassified files from the National Archives, the military wanted weapons that would “incapacitate” demonstrators, allowing them to be captured. …

The scientists were given the widest possible brief and came up with a range of weaponry that come straight out of the pages of science fiction novel.

They included a powerful, fast-setting, glue that when sprayed on clothes would instantly set them hard and so incapacitate the wearer and a super-slippery strip of road called an “instant banana skin” which would cause crowds to lose their footing.

The scientists also researched a drug which would safely knock someone out but they rejected the idea worried that anything made people unconscious very quickly risked killing them too. Instead, they worked on an “auto-inject dart” – to be fired from a gun – which contained either an emetic to make them sick or an anaesthetic to make them fall asleep.

However their favoured drugs turned out to be too dangerous. Files show the medical staff advised there was “an unacceptably high risk of death” with the vomit-inducing apomorphine.

The scientists seemed to do better with their “entangler grenade”, another idea they took forward. This would explode in the air into coils of wire, landing on and immobilising protestors. The wire would be covered in fast-setting super adhesive and stick to rioters.

Royal Ordnance was asked to make up 1,000 of the grenades for testing but there the file ends – there is no indication of whether further tests were carried out. – telegraph

I once had a cool dream where rioters (not protesters, mind you, this crowd was rioting, not just exercising free speech. ) were made harmless by firing a bubble material at them. They were trying to fight but each person became encapsulated in his own bubble (not air tight). In my dream the angry people inside were still violently attempting to kill each other, but their bubbles were just bouncing around harmlessly. They could breathe fine and eventually, after they’d stopped struggling for three hours, the bubble would dissolve.

Holes in the Earth: 170 and Counting

At last count, there were more than 170 known impact craters on our planet, according to the Earth Impact Database maintained by the University of New Brunswick in Canada. These puncture wounds are littered over every continent, as well as the seafloor.

There would be countless more if it weren’t for Earth’s constant remodeling. Plates shift, mountains form, volcanoes erupt and erosion washes over the planet’s surface, continually hiding the evidence of most craters.

“If there was no erosion or tectonic activity, we would look like the moon,” said Lucy Thompson, a geologist at the University of New Brunswick. “The moon is just pockmarked with impact craters.” – space

One Step Closer to Tricorders, with Handheld Device that Identifies Life Forms

Using nothing more than a battery-powered device that emits a beam of ultraviolet light, future robotic explorers will be able to identify the building blocks of life on other planets and moons. A group of scientists in the U.S. and the U.K. have developed a small device which uses a low-power laser beam to sweep over rocks or soil, identifying identify organic substances that are the signposts of life as we know it. Specifically, the little machine “sees” life by causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), often called the earliest form of organic matter in the universe, to light up. The discovery is so promising that it’s likely to be launched out with the next generation of Mars rovers. – io9

Fossil fills out water-land leap

Scientists say a fossil of a four-legged fish sheds new light on the process of evolution.

The creature had a fish-like body but the head of an animal more suited to land than water.

The researchers’ study, published in the journal Nature, says Ventastega curonica would have looked similar to a small alligator. Scientists say the 365-million-year-old species eventually became an evolutionary dead end.

… “From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body.

… Experts believe that Ventastega was an important staging post in the evolutionary journey that led creatures from the sea to the land. Scientists once believed that these early amphibious animals descended in a linear fashion, but this discovery instead confirms these creatures diversified into different branches along the way. …

“Ventastega fills the gap between Tiktaalik and the earliest land based mammals. All these changes in these creatures are not going in lockstep; it’s a mosaic with different parts of animal evolving at different rates. Ventastega has acquired some of land-animal characteristics, but has not yet got some of the other ones.”

For instance, the creature had primitive feet – but with a high number of digits. … You would have seven, eight, maybe even nine toes per foot… – bbc

Evolution takes forward and backward steps along the way. Too many toes was not as useful so that didn’t last.