Marvel at the ‘Midnight Sun’ eclipse

A solar eclipse at midnight? Putting those two terms together doesn’t normally compute, but this week’s partial solar eclipse was a rare and lovely exception. The moon’s shadow blotted out part of the sun’s disk over far northern areas of the world, where the sun is above the horizon long into the night. The “midnight sun” wasn’t the only weirdness about this eclipse: How many celestial events do you know that begin on a Thursday and end on the previous Wednesday?

The image above was captured by Bjørnar G. Hansen from the island of Kvaløya, near Tromsø in the Norwegian Arctic, just before midnight. The sunbeams, clouds and the outstretched hand add to an already-charming image. Tony Phillips of SpaceWeather.com, which attracts a gold mine of pictures showing auroras, eclipses and other sky phenomena, rates it as one of his favorites.

Bernt Olsen watched the eclipse from nearby, at Brensholmen, and got some good shots of the eclipse despite rain and clouds. “There are 73 years to next time we will experience something like this here up north in the Arctic,” he said in his note to SpaceWeather.com.

via PhotoBlog – Marvel at the ‘Midnight Sun’ eclipse.

Truck-Size Asteroid Zips Close to Earth

An asteroid the size of a small motorhome zoomed near Earth last night (June 1), coming closer to us than the moon ever does.

The 23-foot-long (7-meter) space rock, named 2009 BD, came within 215,000 miles (346,000 kilometers) of Earth at around 8:51 p.m. EDT (0051 GMT on June 2). The moon’s average distance from us is about 239,000 miles (385,000 km).

2009 BD never threatened to hit Earth on this pass, researchers said. But even if the asteroid had slammed into us, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.

“2009 BD is a small object, 7 meters, & poses no threat,” scientists with NASA’s Asteroid Watch program tweeted yesterday. “Rocky objects this size would break apart in our atmosphere & cause no damage.” [Photos of Asteroids in Deep Space]

The asteroid’s small size also made it a tough target for skywatchers. A large telescope was necessary to see it last night, researchers said.

Sticking around for a while

After the close pass, 2009 BD didn’t recede into the depths of space like most asteroids do after such encounters. Rather, it continues to stick close to Earth, stalking our planet on its trip around the sun. In fact, the space rock will remain within 10 lunar distances of us for the next month or so, researchers said. …

via Truck-Size Asteroid Zips Close to Earth | NASA & Asteroid 2009 BD | Asteroids, Meteoroids & Comets | Space.com.

Millions Fewer Girls Born Due to Nuclear Radiation?

Nuclear radiation from bomb tests and power plant accidents causes slightly more boys than girls to be born, a new study suggests. While effects were seen to be regional for incidents on the ground, like Chernobyl, atmospheric blasts were found to affect birth rates on a global scale.The result: Millions fewer females have been born worldwide than would otherwise be expected, researchers estimate. And given Japan’s current nuclear troubles, another boy boomlet could be on the way, experts say.Related: Is this the world’s most dangerous nuclear plant?For the new study, scientists analyzed population data from 1975 to 2007 for 39 European countries and the United States.They found an increase in the number of male births relative to female births in all of the countries investigated from 1964 to 1975—and in many eastern European countries for several years after 1986.In “normal” circumstances, male births outnumber female births by a ratio of 105 to 100, study co-author Hagen Scherb said. “It’s not known what is the biological reason for this ratio,” he added. “It’s a natural constant, like the constant of gravity.”The statistical bumps observed in the study are in addition to that slight natural imbalance. …

via Millions Fewer Girls Born Due to Nuclear Radiation?.

Animal Planet’s Jeremy Wade Risks Life And Limb To Capture River Monsters

In February, a fisherman pulled a 327-pound, 8 1/2-foot-long prehistoric-looking alligator gar from the freshwater site.

One well-known angler, Jeremy Wade, doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “the big one that got away.” As host of the hugely popular Animal Planet series, “River Monsters,” the 55-year-old biologist’s life is a series of detective stories as he travels the world searching for unimaginable creatures that lurk in the murky depths of inland waterways.

“It starts with a crime scene or a story, and then it’s an investigation,” Wade told AOL Weird News from his home in England. “Following the analogy, I will have a list of suspects and will narrow it down to the prime suspect.

“I’ll then apprehend the culprit and then I’ll let him go. It’s all about motivation and understanding, like why did this fish grab the leg of a person who was swimming in a lake?” …

via Animal Planet’s Jeremy Wade Risks Life And Limb To Capture River Monsters.

 

Kansas Police Open Fire At Lawn Ornament, Mistaking It For An Alligator

Police responding to a rare alligator sighting in suburban Kansas City took quick action to dispatch of the beast, shooting it in the head, as instructed, while it lurked menacingly in the weeds leading down to a pond.

It wasn’t until a second rifle shot bounced off the reptile’s head that the officers realized they had mortally wounded a concrete lawn ornament.

A resident of a subdivision near the pond called police Saturday evening to report that his children spotted the alligator while they were playing in some nearby woods.

After consulting a conservation agent, who told them to kill the gator if they felt it posed a danger, one of the officers shot it twice in the head before realizing something was up, said Tom Gentry, an Independence police spokesman.

“It didn’t move,” Gentry said. “They inched up closer and closer and discovered it was a mock-up of a real alligator made to look like it was real.”

In the officers’ defense, it was growing dark when they shot the fake gator and it was partially submerged in the weeds.

The property owner told police that the gator was meant to keep people off his property, Gentry said. Officers told him a no-trespassing sign would have been wiser.

“Now he’ll have to patch up his alligator,” Gentry said.

Conservation agent Derek Cole said the department has received calls in the past about alligators that had been set free in populated areas, so there was no reason to believe the Saturday sighting wasn’t valid.

“The department doesn’t get involved in something like that,” Cole said. “They asked if they could go ahead and dispatch it if it was a danger, and I said there’s a kill shot on alligators, a small kill shot on the head. I said if they can get a shot like that, go ahead.”

via Kansas Police Open Fire At Lawn Ornament, Mistaking It For An Alligator (VIDEO).

Creating Cumbria’s musical hill

Five hundred musical instruments, powered only by the wind, have been installed in Cumbria to create what is billed as an “interactive musical landscape”.

The sound made by the instruments, some conventional and some purpose-built, varies according to the wind strength and direction.

French composer Pierre Sauvageot, along with French group Lieux Publics, is behind the “Harmonic Fields” installation near Ulverston, which is part of the “Lakes Alive” arts festival.

He explains how it works and how his team went about installing the instruments in the right place.

“Harmonic Fields” can been seen from 3-5 June 2011 at Birkrigg Common near Ulverston.

via BBC News – Creating Cumbria’s musical hill.

More video at the BBC.

Human hair thefts strike US salons

A spate of hair extension thefts across the US has put the spotlight on the lucrative market for human hair.

It may sound an unlikely source of income – but salons across the country are on alert after a series of raids in which hair worth tens of thousands of dollars has been stolen.

In the latest theft, thieves rammed a car through the front door of a beauty supply shop in Atlanta, Georgia, and escaped with an estimated $10,000 (£6,119) in hair extensions.

In Houston, one raid at My Trendy Place hair salon earned the perpetrators $120,000 (£73,432) of Indian “virgin hair” – unprocessed and untreated.

Owner Lisa Amosu said the burglar, filmed on closed circuit television, knew exactly what he wanted and didn’t even bother to raid the cash till, heading straight for the storeroom housing hundreds of extension bundles and wigs.

“They cleared me out,” she says. “It’s so unfortunate, because the hairpieces were made especially for cancer survivors and for ladies who could not usually afford them.

“Hair extensions are a huge part of my business. I have customers who come from Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Louisiana, because they get high quality.”

In one raid, in March, the owner of a shop in Michigan was shot dead as he tried to prevent $10,000 of extensions from being taken.

Other thefts over the last few months, include a separate $85,000 raid in Texas, and two raids in California, worth $60,000 and $10,000 respectively.

Surveillance cameras have shown burglars breaking through walls and windows, slithering along floors to avoid alarms and then grabbing expensive hair extensions from the shelves and stockrooms.

Sgt Frank Quinn of Houston Police said the burglars are selling the stolen hair on eBay, Craigslist or more informally from the boot of their cars. …

via BBC News – Human hair thefts strike US salons.

China: Teenager ‘sells kidney for iPad’

A teenager in China has sold one of his kidneys in order to buy an iPad 2, Chinese media report.

The 17-year-old, identified only as Little Zheng, told a local TV station he had arranged the sale of the kidney over the internet.

The story only came to light after the teenager’s mother became suspicious.

The case highlights China’s black market in organ trafficking. A scarcity of organ donors has led to a flourishing trade.

It all started when the high school student saw an online advert offering money to organ donors.

Illegal agents organised a trip to the hospital and paid him $3,392 (£2,077) after the operation.

With the cash the student bought an iPad 2, as well as a laptop.

When his mother noticed the computers and the deep red scar on his body, which was caused by the surgery, Little Zheng confessed.

In 2007, Chinese authorities banned organ trafficking and have introduced a voluntary donor scheme to try to combat the trade.

via BBC News – China: Teenager ‘sells kidney for iPad’.

This makes me sick.

The Myth of Cyberterrorism

Terrorists will not kill you with a computer. No, a 12 year old did not hack into a dam in Arizona and gain control over the flood gates. That’s a myth.

In 1998, a 12-year-old hacker broke into the computer system that controlled the floodgates of the Theodore Roosevelt Dam in Arizona, according to a June Washington Post report. If the gates had been opened, the article added, walls of water could have flooded the cities of Tempe and Mesa, whose populations total nearly 1 million.There was just one problem with the account: It wasn’t true.

A hacker did break into the computers of an Arizona water facility, the Salt River Project in the Phoenix area. But he was 27, not 12,and the incident occurred in 1994, not 1998. And while clearlytrespassing in critical areas, the hacker never could have had control of any dams–leading investigators to conclude that no lives or property were ever threatened.

via ZDnet.com

This article below is from 2002, but it is still true today.

 

Joshua Green

There are many ways terrorists can kill you–computers aren’t one of them.

Again and again since September 11, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and senior administration officials have alerted the public not only to the dangers of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons but also to the further menace of cyberterrorism. “Terrorists can sit at one computer connected to one network and can create worldwide havoc,” warned Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge in a representative observation last April. “[They] don’t necessarily need a bomb or explosives to cripple a sector of the economy, or shut down a power grid.” …

The federal government has requested $4.5 billion for infrastructure security next year; the FBI boasts more than 1,000 “cyber investigators”; President Bush and Vice President Cheney keep the issue before the public; and in response to September 11, Bush created the office of “cybersecurity czar” in the White House, naming to this position Richard Clarke, who has done more than anyone to raise awareness, including warning that “if an attack comes today with information warfare . . . it would be much, much worse than Pearl Harbor.”

It’s no surprise, then, that cyberterrorism now ranks alongside other weapons of mass destruction in the public consciousness. Americans have had a latent fear of catastrophic computer attack ever since a teenage Matthew Broderick hacked into the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons system and nearly launched World War III in the 1983 movie WarGames. Judging by official alarums and newspaper headlines, such scenarios are all the more likely in today’s wired world.

There’s just one problem: There is no such thing as cyberterrorism–no instance of anyone ever having been killed by a terrorist (or anyone else) using a computer. Nor is there compelling evidence that al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization has resorted to computers for any sort of serious destructive activity. What’s more, outside of a Tom Clancy novel, computer security specialists believe it is virtually impossible to use the Internet to inflict death on a large scale, and many scoff at the notion that terrorists would bother trying. “I don’t lie awake at night worrying about cyberattacks ruining my life,” says Dorothy Denning, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and one of the country’s foremost cybersecurity experts. “Not only does [cyberterrorism] not rank alongside chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but it is not anywhere near as serious as other potential physical threats like car bombs or suicide bombers.”

Which is not to say that cybersecurity isn’t a serious problem–it’s just not one that involves terrorists. Interviews with terrorism and computer security experts, and current and former government and military officials, yielded near unanimous agreement that the real danger is from the criminals and other hackers who did $15 billion in damage to the global economy last year using viruses, worms, and other readily available tools. …

via “The Myth of Cyberterrorism” by Joshua Green.

 

 

… the threat of CyberTerrorism is largely a myth. A report published by James Lewis of the Washington think-tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, tends to support this view, claiming that although clearly many major states have the capability of undertaking CyberWarfare attacks which could be classed as acts of war, there are few, if any, non-state actors with these capabilities…. Despite what several “B” movies and shows like “24″ or “Law and Order” suggest, there are no super-powered hackers who can take over GPS satellites, hospital emergency equipment or air traffic control systems. Any failures are more likely to be collateral damage from economic attacks, or simple incompetence in the deployment of basic safeguards by those responsible for defense.

CyberTerrorism is a great buzzword, and is being used to attract millions of dollars in counter-terrorism funding, but the real risks should be seen as financial, and the attackers are far more likely to be from the world of organized crime rather than Al Queda.