June 2011 Archives

Researchers looking for signs of life elsewhere in the universe often start by looking for one key ingredient necessary to complex life as we know it: water. And just 750 light-years away, they've  found quite a bit of it spewing from the poles of a young, sunlike star that is blasting jets of H2O into interstellar space at 124,000 miles per hour.

[T]he water droplets are essentially bullets of water moving something like 80 times faster than the average round fired from a rifle. And there's a lot of them. The amount of water ejecting from the star is equal to the amount that flows through the Amazon every second, researchers say.

Known as "the hum," the freaky noise hits the town of Woodland in County Durham every night. And, no, this isn't some lousy B-list horror flick plotline (although, it very well may turn into one).

Every night for the past two months the noise resembling the hum of a car engine has seemingly moved through the air, flooding the entire town's population of 300 with the annoyingly undetectable sound. Sometimes it gets so strong it shakes beds. Sometimes it grows louder in different parts of the same home. But no matter how loud, it's entirely a mystery.

Hums have been reported in various geographical locations. In some cases a source has been located. A Hum on the Big Island of Hawaii, typically related to volcanic action, is heard in locations dozens of miles apart. The local Hawaiians also say the Hum is most often heard by men. The Hum is most often described as sounding somewhat like a distant idling diesel engine. Typically, the Hum is difficult to detect with microphones, and its source and nature are hard to localize.

The Hum is sometimes prefixed with the name of a locality where the problem has been particularly publicized: e.g., the "Bristol Hum", the "Taos Hum" or the "Bondi Hum".^[1]

You can read more here and here.