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

Chemistry Nobel for quasicrystals

"Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals, a mosaic-like chemical structure that researchers previously thought was impossible."

Source: http://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-05-israeli-wins-chemistry-nobel-for-quasicrystals/

Prehistoric Children Finger-Painted on Cave Walls

"As many exasperated parents have discovered, kids like to draw on walls. It turns out they’ve been doing it since the Stone Age, in some cases with the help and encouragement of grown-ups. Researchers have uncovered evidence that children as young as 2 decorated France’s Rouffignac caves with markings known as finger flutings at least 13,000 years ago, drawing not only simple lines but also symbolic shapes. The most prolific budding artist, thought to have been a 5-year-old girl, braved the pitch-dark caverns’ rocky terrain to hone her craft on high, remote corners—perched, perhaps, on the shoulders of an approving adult."

Source: http://www.history.com/news/2011/09/30/prehistoric-children-finger-painted-on-cave-walls/

Dogma breaking: speed of light

"A startling find at one of the world's foremost laboratories that a subatomic particle seemed to move faster than the speed of light has scientists around the world rethinking Albert Einstein and one of the foundations of physics.

Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, who announced the discovery Thursday are still somewhat surprised themselves and planned to detail their findings on Friday.


Source: http://www.wpri.com/dpps/news/strange_news/roll-over-einstein-pillar-of-physics-challenged-ob11-jgr_3948307

Workers Find 7-Million-Year-Old Beaver Teeth

"The Bureau of Land Management says a fossil found by employees on federal land represents the earliest record of living beavers in North America.

The pair of teeth was found on BLM land in northeast Oregon.

The Albany Democrat-Herald reports the teeth come from the Rattlesnake Formation and are 7 to 7.3 million years old.


Source: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/18/workers-find-7-million-year-old-beaver-teeth-in-oregon/