Archive for Interesting facts
Mystifying meteorologists: translucent blue spheres rain down in the UK
Posted by: | CommentsPrepare your tinfoil hats: A man in Dorset, UK, was showered with tiny spheres of blue goo that rained down from the sky during a hailstorm last week. The tiny, one-inch gelatinous spheres are odorless, are not sticky, and are not meteorological, British authorities say. Basically, no one has any real clue what they are.
The Source of the ‘Blue Goo’
Will listening to Mozart really make me smarter?
Posted by: | CommentsYes, but no more than listening to Justin Bieber. The misconception that there’s something unique about Mozart’s ability to increase brainpower began in 1993, with a paper in Nature. Neurobiologists Gordon Shaw, Frances Rauscher and Katherine Ky of the University of California at Irvine found that students who listened to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata demonstrated a temporary increase in spatial-temporal reasoning, as measured by an IQ test. The public seized on the romantic idea that listening to Mozart would make them smarter, and Don Campbell, a teacher and music educator from Texas, capitalized on the notion with an international bestseller, The Mozart Effect.
Amazing animal dragons
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2012 is the Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese zodiac and the Dragon is the only one of the horoscope’s 12 animals to be wholly mythical… or is it? These 7 amazing animal dragons may not fit the outsized, leather-winged, fire-breathing draconian stereotype but by chance or by design, by name or by nature, they’re the closest things there are today to actual real-life dragons.
Dragonfly
Dragonflies got their name from ancient folklore that depicted them as having descended from extinct dragons. Other European legends regarding dragonflies put them in rather a bad light, leading to colloquial names including Horse Stinger, Eye Stealer, Ear Cutter and the Devil’s Darning Needle. On the other hand, Chinese and Japanese folk tales associate dragonflies with prosperity, harmony, agility and power.
Spanish engineer crafts "world’s smallest" V-12 engine
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Anyone who appreciates the precision art of engine design ought to get a kick out of this offering from a Spanish engineer named Patelo. Starting with hunks of aluminum, bronze and stainless steel, he spent over 1200 hours designing, milling, turning and drilling what he claims is "probably" the world’s smallest V12 engine.
