Easter sprinkling in Hungary

 "There are a lot of interesting folk customs still alive all over Hungary. The two, most known customs of Easter are the "sprinkling" and the egg-painting. Both are very common in both urban and rural areas, among people of every age-group."

"A couple of decades ago men poured water on women in rural areas and women wore folk costumes. Boys often dragged girls to the well and poured water on them with pail. Sometimes they washed them in creek. The possible reason for this very old tradition is that people believed in the cleaning, healing and fertility effect of water."

Source: http://minnesotahungarians.com/?q=node/227

Can Water Float on Oil?

"The floatability of water on oil surface was studied. A numerical model was developed from the Young–Laplace equation on three interfaces (water/oil, water/air, and oil/air) to predict the theoretical equilibration conditions. The model was verified successfully with an oil/water system. The stability of the floating droplet depends on the combination of three interface tensions, oil density, and water droplet volume. For practical purposes, however, the equilibrium contact angle has to be greater than 5° so the water droplet can effectively float. This result has significant applications for biodegrading oil wastes."

Source: http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/la204820a

Faster-than-light neutrinos could be down to bad wiring

 "In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light."

"A repeat of the experiment by the Opera team will now address whether the issues they have found affect the ultimate neutrino speed they measure.
The two problems the team has identified would have opposing effects on the apparent speed."

"On the one hand, the team said there is a problem in the "oscillator" that provides a ticking clock to the experiment in the intervals between the synchronisations of GPS equipment.
This is used to provide start and stop times for the measurement as well as precise distance information.
That problem would increase the measured time of the neutrinos' flight, in turn reducing the surprising faster-than-light effect."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17139635

3500 years old ancient jokes

"The evidence of sex, politics and beer-drinking comes from a newly translated tablet, dating back more than 3,500 years, which reveals a series of riddles.

The text is fragmentary in parts and appears to have been written by an inexperienced hand, possibly a student. The researchers aren't sure where the tablet originates, though they suspect its scribe lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia, near the Persian "

He gouged out the eye:

It is not the fate of a dead man.

He cut the throat: A dead man (-Who is it?)

The answer is a governor.

In(?) your mouth and your teeth (or: your urine)

constantly stared at you

the measuring vessel of your lord (-What is it?)

The answer, it appears, is beer.

The deflowered (girl) did not become pregnant

The undeflowered (girl) became pregnant (-What is it?)

The answer, strangely enough, appears to be "auxiliary forces," a group of soldiers that tend not to be reliable.

The tower is high

it is high, but nonetheless has no shade (- What is it?)

The answer is sunlight.

Like a fish in a fish pond

Like troops before the king (-What is it?)

The answer is a broken bow.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/18147-ancient-riddles-decoded-mesopotamia.html

Teens send Lego man on an a balloon odyssey 24 kilometres high

 "Two weeks ago, Ho and Muhammad launched a homemade balloon carrying a Lego passenger and four cameras. It fell back down to Earth 97 minutes later with astonishing footage from an estimated 24 kilometres above sea level, three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft."

"The project cost $400 and took four months of free Saturdays. It wasn’t a school assignment. They just thought it would be cool."

"They ordered a professional, $85 weather balloon online, and bought $160 worth of helium from a party supply store. Ho purchased a special wide-angle video camera he had been coveting with his own money."


"Finally, they assembled the whole thing, carefully carving out space inside the Styrofoam container for the three point-and-shoots, the wide-angle video camera, and a cellphone with a downloaded GPS app. They super-glued their Lego astronaut to a gangplank on the outside, and printed off a Canadian flag for him to hold. "


Source and video here: http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1120808--toronto-teens-send-lego-man-on-a-balloon-odyssey-24-kilometres-high

Russian scientist claims to have discovered life on Venus

"Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer at Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claims to have detected signs of life in 30-year-old photographs of Venus."

 

"Science fiction writers of the Golden Age often imagine that a habitable world existed hidden below the deep cloud cover of the Venusian atmosphere, and it made for some great stories - the time I read Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day" in middle school still haunts me. But by the 1960s, the American Mariner probes and their Soviet Venera counterparts had revealed Venus was just about the most inhospitable place imaginable, an acidic world with surface temperatures of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures nearly 92 times that of Earth." 

"As far as these cloud-based microbes go, the current scientific consensus is that the possibility can't be dismissed. Of course, that's a far cry from actually proving there's life on Venus, and even that is still about a million light-years away from scorpions and black flaps hanging out on the Venusian surface."

Source: http://io9.com/5878554/russian-scientist-claims-to-have-discovered-life-on-venus

How much energy would the Death Star require?

"This planet is going to be modelled after earth with the exception that it is a solid planet. It is then possible to use the gravitational binding energy of the target planet to estimate the amount of energy required to be supplied to the Death Star's laser beam in order to destroy it [...] The energy required to destroy the planet in question is 2.25 ⨉ 10^32 J. However, the destruction of large planets such as Jupiter can require much larger energy demands [...] we can estimate this energy to be 2 ⨉ 10^36 J "

Source: http://io9.com/5876473/how-much-energy-would-the-death-star-require-to-destroy-earth