January 2011 Archives

5. "Do not bother to sell your gas shares. The electric light has no future." --Professor John Henry Pepper, Victorian-era celebrity scientist, sometime in the 1870s

6. "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night," Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946.

She was still dancing several days later. Within a week about 100 people had been consumed by the same irresistible urge to dance. The authorities were convinced that the afflicted would only recover if they danced day and night.

So guildhalls were set aside for them to dance in, musicians were hired to play pipes and drums to keep them moving, and professional dancers were paid to keep them on their feet. Within days those with weak hearts started to die.

By the end of August 1518 about 400 people had experienced the madness. Finally they were loaded aboard wagons and taken to a healing shrine. Not until early September did the epidemic recede.

Image via Wikipedia

Far away in the frozen outermost depths of our solar system, there might be a hidden planet four times the size of Jupiter. This secret companion to the Sun could be responsible for sending comets into the inner solar system.

This idea is an intriguing variation on the old Nemesis theory, which holds the Sun has a smaller companion star orbiting the outer reaches of the solar system. The Nemesis star was thought to be either a pint-sized red dwarf of a failed brown dwarf, and either way its movements through the Oort Cloud at the furthest edge of our solar system would cause comets to hurtle out of their obits. Some of these would hit Earth, leading to mass extinction events. The presence of Nemesis would explain why these extinctions occur in an apparently cyclical fashion.

That's the old theory, which fell apart because (among other things) it turns out Nemesis could not have a stable enough orbit to account for the regular mass extinctions, which is the main reason such an object was hypothesized in the first place. But now University of Louisiana-Lafayette astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire have a new theory that holds a rather different kind of companion object is out in the Oort Cloud. Fittingly, they've named it Tyche, who in mythology is the good sister of the evil Nemesis.

You can read more here.

The sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. It was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm. It is in the scale of 1:20 million.

State wildlife officials were going door-to-door on Sunday in the town of Beebe, Arkansas, to collect dead birds after thousands of mostly blackbirds mysteriously fell from the sky.

Workers were searching Beebe, a town of about 4,500 people located 30 miles northeast of the state capital, to collect what officials estimated as between 4,000 and 5,000 birds which began falling from the sky late on New Year's Eve and continued into the next day.