Aurora The Valkyrior [Valkyries] are warlike virgins, mounted upon horses and armed with helmets and spears. /…/ When they ride forth on their errand, their armour sheds a strange flickering light, which flashes up over the northern skies, making what Men call the “aurora borealis”, or “Northern Lights”. — Thomas Bulfinch, Mythology Sorry, Disney fans, we […]
Sprites, Elves, Trolls, Pixies, Ghosts, Gnomes, and Blue Jets No, we’re not traveling today to Middle-earth or into the belly of a dungeon crawler. Instead, we’ll take to the skies. All the fantastical characters of today’s title are real phenomena in the upper atmosphere! Lightning strikes – photo by Mircea Madau Most of us
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The Bluetooth Bombshell Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler dropped into being on 9 November 1914 in Vienna, Austria. If you’re a fan of classic cinema, you might know Kiesler by her stage name, Hedy Lamarr. Billed by Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, as “the world’s most beautiful woman,” Lamarr found widespread fame during the Golden Age
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You Shall Pass Most of us are well familiar with overpasses, those three-dimensional intersections of highways and byways. These structures allow roads to cross safely without those pesky traffic lights, stop signs, or roundabouts. An overpass on the New York Thruway – image by Jojalozzo Utilizing vertical space for road travel is good for both
Roy G. Biv Many students learn the mnemonic Roy G. Biv to recall the visible colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. It’s a handy way to quickly remember the order of a rainbow spectrum. Have you ever asked yourself, “what exactly is indigo?” Is it near blue? Near violet? A mixture of the two? If
The Orphan Tsunami and the Ghost Forest Whale was a destroyer. Whale attacked and killed all the smaller whales, which provided food and oil to humans. The people began to starve. From her home in the mountains, Thunderbird spied the distress of the humans on the coast. She soared over the ocean, waiting for Whale to surface. When
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The Loudest Sound On 27 August 1883, reverberations from the northwest disturbed the morning serenity of sheep ranchers outside Alice Springs, Australia. The men later described the sound as “a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery.” No war raged in central Australia in 1883; no military exercises took place. Were these ranchers under
May the Forces Be With You Yeah, I’m a day late. When you write articles on specific days of the week you can’t fight the calendar. And this year 4 May landed on a Tuesday. Nobody likes to read about a holiday, no matter how fourced, after it happens. I could have posted this episode on
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The Iron Catastrophe Everyone alive today owes their existence to a catastrophe. To explain that seemingly paradoxical statement, let’s foray into a brief overview of the universe, our sun, and the planet, courtesy of Columbia University. Somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang kicked things off. There was hydrogen and only hydrogen. The
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The Danish Temblor In our previous issue, we explored the recent confirmation of a theory that Earth has five layers instead of the previously believed four. The standard model included the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core. Before 1936, the models would have indicated the earth had just three layers: crust, mantle, core.
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