Amazing. It is over 250 kilometers long. I wonder how it looks up-close…

By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience

Mariners have long told of rare nighttime events in which the ocean glows intensely as far as the eye can see in all directions.

Fictionally, such a “milky sea” is encountered by the Nautilus in Jules Verne classic “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

Scientists don’t have a good handle what’s going on. But satellite sensors have now provided the first pictures of a milky sea and given new hope to learning more about the elusive events.

The newly released images show a vast region of the Indian Ocean, about the size of Connecticut, glowing three nights in a row. The luminescence was also spotted from a ship in the area.

“The circumstances under which milky seas form is almost entirely unknown,” says Steven Miller, a Naval Research Laboratory scientist who led the space-based discovery. “Even the source for the light emission is under debate.”

The leading idea

Scientists suspect bioluminescent bacteria are behind the phenomenon. Such creatures produce a continuous glow, in contrast to the brief, bright flashes of light produced by “dinoflagellate” bioluminescent organims that are seen more commonly lighting up ship wakes and breaking waves.

“The problem with the bacteria hypothesis is that an extremely high concentration of bacteria must exist before they begin to produce light,” Miller told LiveScience. “But what could possibly support the occurrence of such a large population?”

One idea, put forward by the lone research vessel to ever encounter a milky sea, is that the bacteria are not free-living, but instead are living off some local supporting “substrate.”

“This previous excursion reported the presence of bioluminescent bacteria, which were found to be living in association with an algal bloom,” Miller explained.

“So, our best working hypothesis is that we are witnessing bioluminescence produced by bacteria that are colonizing some kind of organic material present in the water,” he said. “Satellite detection will hopefully allow us to target milky seas with properly equipped research vessels that will then be able to answer all these questions definitively.”

I’ve never been a believer of this stuff, so I thought it would be a good idea to post this so others may also stop believing. But it would be very cool if aliens do exist though…
A confidential Ministry of Defence report on Unidentified Flying Objects has concluded that there is no proof of alien life forms.

The 400-page report puts it like this: “No evidence exists to suggest that the phenomena seen are hostile or under any type of control, other than that of natural physical forces.”

Full article here.

Have a nice day

How does it work ?
The battery is made of a layer of filter paper steeped in copper chloride sandwiched between strips of magnesium and copper, then laminated in plastic.

It’s activated when a drop of urine is placed on the battery. The urine soaks through the paper providing the necessary conditions to generate electricity.

The magnesium acts as the battery’s anode, shedding its electrons, while the copper chloride acts as the cathode, gathering them up.

This electron flow delivers power greater than 1.5 milliwatts, the researchers say.

CSIRO research physicist Dr Cathy Foley says the research is important because it raises the possibility of having a self-powered device.

She says the technology could be used in what are known as biomicroelectromechanical systems, or bioMEMS.

Examples of bioMEMs include nanomachines that seek out and destroy cancer cells or cholesterol, or DNA chips with DNA as electronic components.

The technology could also be used to power drug-testing kits, she says.

Foley says the concept could work using any body fluid including semen, blood or tears, as long as the fluid isn’t neutral at pH 7.

Urine, for instance, has a range of pH 4.5 to 8.0, according to the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia.

Is it practical?
Foley says the energy generated by the urine-powered battery would be enough to keep a digital wristwatch or a scientific calculator going, but anything bigger would be impractical.

“You could probably increase the power by having more of them and loading them up,” she says.

“[For power on a large scale] you’d probably have to coat the whole of Australia in this paper-based electrode and wee on it.”

The Source

Hehe i would like to meet this parrot someday. Scientists should teach him green jokes and put him on late night shows or something. Neways, here is a snippet:

The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has scientists coming up short explaining this one.

The bird, a captive African grey called N’kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do.

N’kisi’s remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine.

N’kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.

About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N’kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material.

He uses words in context, with past, present and future tenses, and is often inventive.

One N’kisi-ism was “flied” for “flew”, and another “pretty smell medicine” to describe the aromatherapy oils used by his owner, an artist based in New York.

When he first met Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee expert, after seeing her in a picture with apes, N’kisi said: “Got a chimp?”

N’kisi with picture card and teacher Grace RoselliHe appears to fancy himself as a humourist. When another parrot hung upside down from its perch, he commented: “You got to put this bird on the camera.”

Dr Goodall says N’kisi’s verbal fireworks are an “outstanding example of interspecies communication”.

VISOKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Researchers in Bosnia on Wednesday unearthed the first solid evidence that an ancient pyramid lies hidden beneath a massive hill — a series of geometrically cut stone slabs that could form part of the structure’s sloping surface.

Archaeologists and other experts began digging into the sides of the mysterious hill near the central Bosnian town of Visoko last week.  On Wednesday, the digging revealed large stone blocks on one side that the leader of the team believes are the outer layer of the pyramid.

“These are the first uncovered walls of the pyramid,” said Semir Osmanagic, a Bosnian archaeologist who studied the pyramids of Latin America for 15 years.

Wow! Bigger than pyramids of Giza

NASA has recently released a high-resolution image of the two black holes as their own gravity sucks them into eachother, to form one super-massive black hole.

Two supermassive black holes in the distant universe are slowly spiraling toward a merger that will create a single, super-supermassive black hole. The newly formed black hole would be capable of swallowing billions of stars, according to a new study by atronomers at the University of Virginia, Bonn University, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

Black holes are considered to be the oldest regions of the universe. Scientists believe that these phonomenoms hold clues to understand the formation of the universe. A supermassive black hole is an area in space that is so dense and massive that they contain up to billions of stars. They continue to pull in more stars and matter, further building up their mass and gravitational pull. The area formed by this intense gravitational pull appears just as it sounds like it might - as a black hole in space. Even light cannot escape the intense gravitational pull of a black hole.

More info. Some very cool images of stars and galaxies in there.
Have a nice day.

Eagle Eye.this is very cool. It is a live feed of a camera on a nesting pair of eagles in British Colombia. They have a forum too where people talk about the eagles. Every 20 minutes or so the bird gets up, rotates, tucks the eggs back in (there are two), roll around on them to settle them (?) then tuck some nesting material around itself (I can’t tell which parent is which!).

Four-million-year-old remains in Ethiopia have provided the first hard proof of a link between two key stages of human evolution by bridging the gap between pre-human species, paleontologists said.

“For the first time, we found fossils that allow us to connect the first phase of human evolution and the second phase,” Dr Berhane Asfaw, anthropologist and co-research director of the project that found the remains, told a news conference Wednesday in Addis Ababa.