Here’s an uninteresting photo of the Los Angeles twilight.  Fortunately, or not, it looks more like a UFO sighting than anything else.  But, trust me, it’s just the moon - I was there.

Many people won’t think so, but I think this is cool (equations in WordPress):

 http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/02/17/math-for-the-masses/

I saw this and just couldn’t resist posting it here, it had me rolling on the floor laughing:

From engrish.com:

Help is still needed in Australia.  Volunteer Ministers locally, and otherwise are assisting firemen and residents to recover from the conflagration.

Check out News on VolunteerMinisters.org

Volunteers are urgently needed to assist the more than three thousand firefighters who are working around the clock to protect townships in and around the Mansfield and Wangaratta areas in Victoria, Australia.

Teams of Scientology Volunteer Ministers from Scientology churches around Australia are mobilizing to evacuate those in the area and give assistance to the firefighters and other emergency response personnel.

A series of bushfires in the mountains of Southeastern Australia are threatening to join and create one vast fire in the state.

While thick clouds of smoke move in over Melbourne, 2 hours north of the fire zone, over 540 square miles (1,400 square km) of bushland have been burned. And there is no relief in sight, with a forecast of hot and gusty winds and temperatures expected to reach 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) tomorrow.

The Church of Scientology of Melbourne is the headquarters for this Scientology Disaster Relief effort. Anyone who can help should contact the Volunteer Ministers Coordinator to get instructions and directions on how to meet up with the team.

Contact information:

Volunteer Ministers Coordinator
Church of Scientology of Melbourne
42 Russell Street
Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Australia
Tel: 03-9654-8655
E-Mail: melbourne@scientology.net

You can also contact the International Scientology Volunteer Ministers Coordinator for more information on what to do.

The study, performed by Laramie Potts and Ralph von Frese of Ohio State University, reveals that ancient lunar impacts played a much larger role in shaping the moon’s surface than scientists had previously thought. It may also help explain the origins of two mysterious bulges on the moon’s surface.

(Damn, that’s an ugly planet!)

The new analysis reveal that shock waves from some of the moon’s early asteroid impacts traveled through the lunar interior, triggering volcanic eruptions on the moon’s opposite side. Molten magma spewed out from the deep interior and flooded the lunar landscape.

When the magma cooled, it created dark patches on the moon called “lunar maria” or “lunar seas.”

During a full moon, some of these patches combine to form what looks like a grinning human face, commonly known as the “Man in the Moon.”

The man’s eyes are the Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, its nose is the Sinus Aestuum and its grinning mouth is the Mare Nubium and Mare Cognitum.

The effects of some of those traveling shock waves are still visible in the moon’s interior today. Cross-sectional images of the insides reveal that a part of the mantle, the section between the moon’s core and crust, still juts into its core today, 700 miles below the point of one of the impacts.

The images were created from data collected by NASA’s Clementine and Lunar Prospector satellites.

Early surveys by the Apollo missions revealed that the moon isn’t a perfect sphere. There is a bulge on the Earth-facing side, called the near side, and another bulge on the far side.

According to one hypothesis, these bulges are the result of Earth’s gravity tugging on the moon during the early years following its cataclysmic formation, when its surface was still molten and malleable.

The current study suggests that this scenario is only partly correct. The researchers think the moon was struck by at least two very powerful asteroid impacts in its past (in addition to countless smaller impacts that left smaller craters easily identifiable still today).

One of the major impacts struck the near side, sending shock waves that traveled through the lunar interior to create the bulge on the far side; the other impact struck the far side and created the bulge on the side.

The researchers think the impacts happened about four billion years ago. At that time, roughly half a billion years after the birth of the solar system, the moon was still geologically active and its core and mantle were still molten and malleable.

Back then, the moon was much closer to the Earth than it is today and the gravitational interactions between the two were much stronger. The researchers think that when magma spilled out of the moon’s interior, Earth’s gravity immediately grabbed hold and hasn’t let go since.

“This research shows that even after the collisions happened, the Earth had a profound effect on the moon,” Potts said.

The findings were detailed in a recent issue of the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors.

Astronomers found the activity up where Earth’s magnetic field meets a constant stream of particles flowing out from the sun.

While space is commonly called a vacuum, in fact there is gas everywhere, albeit not as dense as the air you breathe.

The newfound bubbles are technically called density holes. In them, gas density is 10 times lower. The gas in the bubbles is 18,000,000 Fahrenheit (10,000,000 Celsius) instead of the 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit of the surrounding hot gas, which is known as plasma.

The bubbles were found in data collected by the European Space Agency’s Cluster mission, a flotilla of four spacecraft. Researchers first thought they had an instrument glitch when the spacecrafts passed through bubbles.

“Then I looked at the data from all four Cluster spacecraft. These anomalies were being observed simultaneously by all the spacecraft. That’s when I believed that they were real,” said George Parks, University of California, Berkeley.

The bubbles expand to about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) and probably last about 10 seconds before bursting and being replaced by the cooler, denser solar wind, Parks and his colleagues say.

It is not known for sure how the bubbles are created, but the researchers suspect it involves the solar wind colliding with the magnetic field, which forms a boundary called the bow shock. The phenomenon is similar to the wake formed by the front of a boat.

The discovery, detailed in the journal Physics of Plasmas, could help astronomers better understand how this solar wind interacts with the magnetic field.

Well, looks like the Taliban is at it again…

Stuff like this sucks - it just fuels the racial fire, and who can tell in a scene like this what really went down…

Uh, ho - what have international politics come to!

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