- Part II of the “Most Unusual Happenings of 2011″ has been posted on UnusualTimes.net. Again, a selection of favorites from this part:
- The largest bear – ever – a 3,500 pounds (1,600 kilograms) South American giant short-faced bear, was discovered in Argentina. “It blew my mind,” one expert explained.
- Scientists were left scratching their heads after methane gas was detected by a Mars rover in the thin Martian air this year. The confusion steams from the fact that methane molecules are released only by living organisms, and with that they are easily blown apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so any methane in the atmosphere must have been released recently. It has yet too be discovered, however, what’s emitting this methane gas.
- An Italian man, shot in the head, sneezes out the bullet. He is expected to make a full recovery.
- Ghostly subatomic particles called, “Neutrinos,” may have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light. If confirmed, the astonishing claim would upend a cardinal rule of physics established by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago.
- ARTIST OF THE DAY is a guy named James Heimer. James grew up in Pennsylvania and has a background in (like many artists and designers) skate culture and hardcore. His main thing seems to be doing concert posters, but his other work is stunning as well.
- Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” (aka: Alien prequel) finally has got a poster up (the tagline reads, “the search for our beginning could lead to our end”; that statue face points towards some sort of archeology-based finding about an ancient culture… it seems):
- Disaster looms for gas cloud falling into Milky Way’s central black hole.
“When we look at the black holes in the centers of other galaxies, we see them get bright and then fade, but we never know what is actually happening,” said Eliot Quataert, a theoretical astrophysicist and University of California, Berkeley professor of astronomy. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to obtain unique observations and insight into the processes that go on as gas falls into a black hole, heats up and emits light. It’s a neat window onto a black hole that’s actually capturing gas as it spirals in.”
“The next two years will be very interesting and should provide us with extremely valuable information on the behavior of matter around such massive objects, and its ultimate fate,” said Reinhard Genzel, professor of physics at both UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany.”
- So that drone that the US government “lost” in Iran? Yeah, an Iranian engineer has been interviewed about the whole ordeal. He’s claiming that the way they captured it was by jamming it’s satellite systems until it couldn’t take anymore and crashed. An opposing group is saying that is a bunch of hogwash, claiming that any amount of jamming — at least right now — could likely not ground such a device. Interesting stuff.
-Sonny
