Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
If you have ever seen the submarine movie "The Hunt for Red October
Anyway, this is a little project where you can experiment with this fascinating subject. Go have a look and try it for yourself. You could be having races with your mad scientist friends in no time..
So this is actually a six limbed critter. How weird. Now, the thing that begs attention is if some scientist can cause this mutation at will. Drumbsticks are my favorite part of the bird so I’d win out big.
Ryan Dickey, 10, found the four-legged wonder legging it around an incubator at his Te Uku home on Monday.
Mum, Marlene, breeds 14 types of chickens and said it was the first time she’d seen one hatch with four legs.
The little clucker is a Barnevelder chicken, a Dutch breed, and Mrs Dickey said other lesser legged chicks had accepted it without a problem.
[via hemmy]
This morning I spotted the vapor trail from a missile launch from White Sands New Mexico. The launch was part of a test for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system being tested by the US Army. For more information on viewing these launches check out the Space Archive web site. Brian does a bang up job at alerting people of these spectacular events.
Wearing NASA spacesuits and flying along the crest of the Andes, pilot Steve Fossett and co-pilot Einar Enevoldson took their ‘Perlan’ high performance research glider on the world’s first stratrospheric glider flight yesterday – surfing the Andean ‘mountain wave’ to a height of 50,699 feet (15,453 m) – while breaking the previous record by 1,662 ft (507m)
That’s an astounding record to have broken, most comercial airliners cruse in around 33,000 feet and they have thrust. The glider had but the heat from the ground to give it energy to make it up so high. In fact…
During the course of the flight (primarily within a 60 mile radius of El Calafate near the border of Argentina and Chile), the American pair found themselves flying well above commercial air traffic – a fact received with bemusement by pilots of passenger jets under the same air traffic control. Steve Fossett recalled: “I couldn’t understand the Chilean controller describing us in Spanish to the airline pilot – but I understood the answer by the pilot: ‘Wow’.”
Wow is right! If you were asked to choose a role model Steve Fossett would be a good choice. For more info on this amazing man take a look at his write up on Wikipedia.
[via Flight Nest]
New world glider altitude record set by Fossett and Enevoldson in Argentina
If it were not for the fact that you would have to be born with these or at least have replacement eyes with these molecules in them, this would be very cool. I wonder what it would look like? Maybe a slight glow to the north, or maybe it would be like looking at the sky through polarized glasses.
Some birds, notably migratory species, are able to detect the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate. New results from a team of Franco-German researchers suggest that light-sensitive molecules called cryptochromes could be the key to the birds’ magnetic sense.
[via slashdot]
Well these things don’t fly for free. I wonder if NASA will ever fully embrac the capitalistic opportunities of space. Spin-off projects are great, everyone loves CAT scanners, micro electronics, and Tang but there are so many other uses for space. Advertising is just one of the uses that the Russian space agency has employed so far. In the future once a larger habitation structure can be built the possibilities for generating revenue for space agencies broaden significantly.
A Russian cosmonaut will whack a golf ball from the international space station in a publicity stunt on Thanksgiving Day, NASA officials said Tuesday, Associated press news agency reports.
Russian flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin will show off his swing to promote a Canadian golf club manufacturer during a spacewalk on Nov. 23.