Missile Launch California:Still a mistery!

Missile Launch California: a rogue missile or airplane?

Yesterday, photographs out of an affiliate news station out of California showed what appeared to be a missile going through the air around California. Immediately, panic ensued.

Was it a rogue missile, or was it simply an airliner jet, photographed from the right angle? The press and everyone would like you to believe that it's just an airplane.

Conspiracy theorists aren't buying it. They think it's something deeper - something far more sinister.

Personally, I don't know what to believe. Good Morning America brought in an expert this morning that explained how the direction of the missile made it appear as if there's no way this is a missile, and that it's really just an airplane.

Sounds fishy to me, doesn't it you? Come on...do you HONESTLY think if there was an "accidental" launch that they would actually reveal that to us? Wouldn't that be a big black eye

Facebook Launches New Service For Retailers Called Places!

The popular social networking site Facebook is launching the service named Places, is concentrating on the concept of social commerce. The giant has launched a new mobile check in service for leading retailers and it covers several hundreds of mid and small sized businesses in the USA.

The service Facebook Deals is meant for linking users of Facebook Places to offers and deals from brands like Gap, 24 hours Fitness etc.

It is accessible only through the iPhone app of Facebook. The Android smart phone users can avail Places but Deals is not meant for them as yet. The Facebook team said that the popularity of the Places has inspired the merchants.

However, the exact number of Facebook users who use the Places service is not known. The Facebook users who use the Places service on their mobile Facebook app will now get notification of deals and offers at stores nearby. Initially, 23 big retailers and 20000 smaller merchants have tied up for the service. The service will also be helpful for the users as they will not have to use PCs or hit the stores in persons to get notified and updated about new offers. This may eventually change the way commerce is done in near future, feels the Facebook team.

"This is not about broadcasting your location to the world, it's about sharing where you are with your friends," said Michael Sharon, product manager for "Places."

Users will be able to declare their whereabouts whenever they want, thereby opening themselves up potentially to offers, suggestions or advertisements about nearby businesses. Facebook on Wednesday said it had no immediate plans however to pursue such money-making opportunities.

However, Facebook is rolling out the service with an eye on its revenue for sure. It is estimated that the company will earn $1.28 billion from global advertising revenue in 2010 alone. However, before launching such new features Facebook needs to bolster its security, feel some veterans. The hackers have targeted it many times in recent past.

'Why Wont My Parakeet Eat My Diarrhea': One Of The Craziest Google Suggests

"Why wont my parakeet eat my diarrhea,"

Is only one of the many crazy Google suggests out there, reached the top trending topic on Google trends. Wondering why? If you try typing "Why won't..." into Google, you'll see Google try to automatically complete the search term, and few odd suggestions pop up, including "Why won't my parakeet eat my diarrhea."

What's going on here?

It has to do with a Google feature that's designed to expedite searches. How does Google Suggest work, and where do those "suggestions" come from?

The short answer is this: the suggestions are taken from searches previous users all over the world have done on Google, as well as searches you've done, sites in Google's search index, and ads on Google.

They're suggestions based off of searches by people just like you.

a black hole-driven quasar in a nearby galaxy, recently shut off like a snuffed candle.

A black hole is a region of space whose gravitational force is so strong that nothing can escape from it. A black hole is invisible because it even traps light. The fundamental descriptions of black holes are based on equations in the theory of general relativity developed by the German-born physicist Albert Einstein. The theory was published in 1916.

One of the universe’s brightest lights, a black hole-driven quasar in a nearby galaxy, recently shut off like a snuffed candle. New observations of a bizarre cloud of glowing gas, and a nearby galaxy that illuminates it, show that the galaxy’s central light went dim sometime in the last 70,000 years.

The finding could reveal how supermassive black holes
help galaxies grow and evolve.

“This is the best view we will ever have of the host galaxy of a quasar,” said astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski of Yale University, lead author of a paper published online Oct. 26 in Astrophysical Journal Letters and cofounder of the crowdsourced space science project Galaxy Zoo. “It’s the nearest one to us, and the quasar is dead.”

Quasars are ravenous, supermassive black holes that lurk at the centers of some galaxies and devour gas and dust from a surrounding disk.

As the gas falls into the black hole, a process astronomers call accretion, friction heats the gas until it glows white-hot.

“Accretion transforms the darkest objects in the universe into the brightest,” said black hole expert Chris Done of the University of Durham in the U.K., who was not involved in the new study. “It’s like the final scream before it disappears forever below the event horizon.” Astronomers have long suspected that energy from quasars can help galaxies grow, a notion supported by the fact that bigger galaxies tend to have bigger central black holes. But until now, evolving galaxies have been impossible to observe.

A new clue comes from Hanny’s Voorwerp, a weird cloud of glowing green gas found in Galaxy Zoo’s archival telescope data in 2007. The Voorwerp (Dutch for “object” ) was thought to be lit up by a nearby quasar zapping it with a floodlight-like jet of ionizing radiation. But there was no nearby quasar to be found. The closest object was a wimpy, dim galaxy called IC 2497 between 45,000 and 70,000 light-years away from the Voorwerp. Both objects are about 730 million light-years from Earth, “which cosmologically speaking is our backyard,” Schawinski said. There were two possible explanations for the missing quasar. Either there’s so much gas and dust between Earth and the galaxy that the floodlight looks like a flashlight to us, but not to the Voorwerp, or the quasar died sometime between when its light hit the Voorwerp and now.

To test the first idea, Schawinski and colleagues observed the galaxy with two space telescopes, the Suzaku X-ray Telescope and the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory. These telescopes detect high-energy X-rays that would penetrate even the thickest clouds of dust. The team did see a few X-rays, but it was “a really weak, puny little source,” Schawinski said. “This source is way way way too weak to light up the Voorwerp,” he said. “It’s like trying to light up your house with an LED. It’s just not enough.”

As it appears today, the quasar is 100 to 10,000 times dimmer than whatever lit up the Voorwerp, Schawinski and colleagues concluded. The quasar must have shut down sometime in the last 45,000 to 70,000 years, while its light was still traveling to the Voorwerp, and left the cloud as a ghostly echo of the dead quasar’s former brilliance. Because the quasar switched off so quickly, the accretion disk surrounding the black hole must have been relatively small, Done says.

That’s consistent with some models of how black holes gobble up their surroundings. “Those models are quite hard to test,” Done said. “This might tell us is that our ideas about accretion do actually work. I’m quite excited about it.”

The quasar corpse also provides a unique laboratory for studying how galaxies evolve shortly after their central engines quiet down. “It’s certainly giving us a view of a very particular phase of the evolution of quasars, and one that we can’t normally study,” Done said. The discovery would never have happened if not for Galaxy Zoo, Schawinski notes. “We would have never found the nearest quasar to us, this system that will ultimately teach us so much about black holes and galaxies and how they evolve together, if it wasn’t for citizen science and the internet,” he said. “It’s so much cooler than anything we could have imagined.”

Read More at: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience

Melatonin:Drinking the nighttime milk of cows may help insomniacs fall asleep.

Drinking the nighttime milk of cows may help imsoniacs fall asleep. A German firm has recently patented a new milk product, which it claims contains high levels of sleep-regulating hormone melatonin, ABC News reports.

The Munich-based company, Milchkristalle, believes that if its herd of cows is milked between 2 and 4 a.m. the animals will produce more melatonin than during the daytime.

They freeze-dried the milk, packed it and sold it under the brand Nightmilk Crystals, which can be mixed with milk or yogurt and consumed before going to bed.

"It tastes like milk, maybe a little bit stronger," said Maike Schnittger, a Hamburg resident who uses Nightmilk Crystals.

Schnittger was out of work for a while and at night worries used to flood her mind, keeping her up for hours. But she says taking Nightmilk Crystals was a huge help, conking her out in just 30 minutes.

"It was a deep sleep and the next morning I felt really awake," she said, adding that she likes that the product is natural.

To further boost the hormone production, the cows are fed clover and soothed under warm red lights to calm them while being milked. And during the day when the weather is good, the pampered animals are turned out in a pen with grass and deep, cozy sand.

The special treatment, as claimed by the firm, helps yield milk that has ten times more melatonin than the normal milk.

After years of research, Nightmilk Crystals' inventor Tony Gnann says his studies show that giving cows different care and milking them during the middle of the night changes the level of nocturnal melatonin in their blood and the milk they produce.

Melatonin, which is widely available without a prescription in the US, is under much stricter restrictions in Europe where it's only available at pharmacies.
The hormone is naturally produced by the body and used by the brain to regulate the sleep-wake cycle. Doctors often recommend supplements of melatonin for people who have jet lag or work odd shifts.

"Melatonin won't make you sleepy, but will help you fall asleep if your body clock is out of sync," said David Schulman, a doctor at the Emory University sleep laboratory in Atlanta.

Meanwhile, consumer watchdog groups have questioned the company's science, saying a person would have to drink an impossible amount of the milk product to see results.

Schulman also has concerns about the dose size. The average recommended dose of melatonin is three milligrams, far more than a person would get from the 1,800 picogram dose of the Nightmilk Crystal supplement.

"I'd be surprised if this small a dose did anything at all," Schulman said.


Article extracted from www.timesofindia.com