Thursday, October 30, 2014

Daily 2 Cents: Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Identified -- Time Travel Possible by 2100 -- Sasquatch Watching a Passing Train?

Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Identified

A fragment of Amelia Earhart's lost aircraft has been identified to a high degree of certainty for the first time ever since her plane vanished over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.

New research strongly suggests that a piece of aluminum aircraft debris recovered in 1991 from Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, does belong to Earhart’s twin-engined Lockheed Electra. The search for Amelia Earhart is about to continue in the pristine waters of a tiny uninhabited island, Nikumaroro, between Hawaii and Australia.

According to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 77 years ago, the aluminum sheet is a patch of metal installed on the Electra during the aviator’s eight-day stay in Miami, which was the fourth stop on her attempt to circumnavigate the globe.

The patch replaced a navigational window: A Miami Herald photo shows the Electra departing for San Juan, Puerto Rico on the morning of Tuesday, June 1, 1937 with a shiny patch of metal where the window had been. Continue reading at Discovery

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Clown Terror in France

Another teenager in the southern city of Montpellier was sentenced to four months in prison for hitting a passer-by 30 times with an iron bar overnight Saturday. The teen was also kitted out as a clown.

Complaints have poured in recently over "armed clowns" wreaking havoc in various parts of the country -- some carrying pistols, knives or baseball bats -- and police have detained several people over the violent trend.

The phenomenon has even prompted anti-clown vigilantism, forcing police to step in to try and quell the hysteria by saying there have only been a few sightings of the grotesque pranksters.

On Monday, a woman who had just got out of her car in Chelles near Paris called the police, saying two clowns -- one of whom was armed with a fake axe -- had attacked her, a source said.

They escaped when a passer-by armed with a baseball bat tried to stop them, and one of the pranksters was subsequently detained when police spotted him, white make-up still all over his face.

In a separate incident just half an hour afterwards, a dozen people wearing the smiling, white masks associated with the Anonymous hacktivist collective attacked three youths at a station in Melun, also in the Paris suburbs, stealing their mobile phones, the police source added.

Trend seen in the US and Britain

The phenomenon of dressing up as an evil clown and terrifying passers-by -- a trend which has also been seen in the United States and Britain -- cropped up in the north of France in early October.

In the town of Bethune, a 19-year-old received a six-month suspended jail term last week for threatening passers-by while dressed as a clown.

These "clowns" have been "mostly spotted outside schools, but also on public roads, in bushes, in a square. Their targets are often young children or teenagers, but also adults," a police source in northern France told AFP.

And the phenomenon has spread to the south of the country.

Police on Saturday night arrested 14 teenagers dressed as clowns and carrying weapons in the Mediterranean port town of Agde.

In Montpellier, meanwhile, the victim of the fake clown told the court that the costumed assailant had chased him, yelling "give me everything, your telephone, your money, your briefcase," and added he had trouble sleeping and had nightmares since the assault.

The attacker, meanwhile, admitted he was drunk.

Theories abound as to the origin of this trend of violence in a country where Halloween has barely made any inroads.

The suggestions include a challenge launched on social networks, popular videos on YouTube showing a terrifying clown pranking people, or even a recent episode of the popular TV series American Horror Story featuring Twisty the killer clown. - The Local FR

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Time travel will be a thing in the year 2100, apparently

Well this is exciting mid-week news if ever we heard it: time travel is going to be an actual thing by the year 2100 (maybe). That's if a bunch of UK scientists are to be believed, anyway.

A number of physicists from Imperial College London and the University of Glasgow have predicted that time machines could actually be a legitimately possible thing within about 85 years, and that teleportation could be just another mode of transport by the year 2080. So we can all look forward to telling Ryanair to do one in 70 years time, then.

And in the most exciting part of the research, which comes from The Big Bang UK Young Scientists & Engineers Fair - or maybe just the part that tells us this might all be a great big elaborate joke *checks calendar to make sure it's not April 1st* - an invisibility cloak a la the wonderful Harry Potter himself could be ready and available to use within 15 years. FIFTEEN YEARS. Which is basically nothing.

But - and this'll shut the doubting Thomas' amongst us RIGHT up - apparently prototypes of invisibility cloaks are already in existence, with the science behind them seeming to be pretty sorted.

Imperial College physicist, Professor Chris Phillips, explained. "One way to create an 'invisibility cloak' is to use adaptive camouflage, which involves taking a film of the background of an object or person and projecting it onto the front to give the illusion of vanishing," he said. Which is basically what we would have said if someone asked us how we thought it would work, too. Ahem.

Excitingly, he revealed: "We're actually not that far away from this becoming a reality – rudimentary technology versions of this have already been created. It's entirely feasible that we could see a 'Harry Potter'-like invisibility cloak within the next 10 to 20 years."

Well butter my beer and call me a mudblood, this is TOO MUCH excitement for one evening.

And Dr. Mary Jacquiline Romero, from the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy also had the presence of mind to explain how teleportation would work for those of us who aren't quite of the same scientific brain-power that she is.

"Teleporting a person, atom by atom, will be very difficult and is of course a physicist's way, but perhaps developments in chemistry or molecular biology will allow us to do it more quickly," she said. But promisingly, she added: "The good thing about teleportation is that there is no fundamental law telling us that it cannot be done."

It's just time travel that'll be the real tough cookie to crack, but according to Colin Stuart, author of The Big Questions in Science, it's already been achieved. "But only in tiny amounts," he hastened to add. "I would say we are looking at 2100 as a very optimistic timescale for travelling weeks into the future."

Well that's as good a word to take as any. Now we've just got to work out a way to stay alive and make sure we see it. - Cosmopolitan

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Click image for larger version

Sasquatch Watching a Passing Train?

Picture was taken on a cell phone from a moving train near Hayden Lake, Idaho. 8-19-2014. (The creature is enlarged in the square on the right)

--Ricky B.

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Zombie Injured by Hit-and-Run Driver

NUNICA, MI — A Muskegon man was hospitalized late Saturday night after being struck by a hit-and-run driver while he was walking away from a party to smoke.

Ottawa County Sgt. Matt Wilfong said Jeffrey Alan Stiles, 45, of Muskegon suffered non-life threatening injuries after being struck by a car on Main Street near Cass Street in Nunica about 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 25.

Stiles was walking in the traffic lane of Main Street smoking a cigarette when he was struck. The driver fled north in an unknown vehicle.

Wilfong said Stiles, who had been at a party, was in costume at the time.

“While he was outside, he decided to walk along the roadway to scare cars, as he was dressed like a zombie for the Halloween party,” he said.

Stiles was listed in good condition at Hackley Hospital on Sunday morning.

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