Iris Nebula

Iris Nebula LBN 487 and NGC 7023 in Cepheus

From an image by Hewholooks, which is the user page of Hunter Wilson. Images may be seen at http://hwilson.zenfolio.com/f129011888 or on

Wikimedia athttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=hewholooks

Testa osiriaca danneggiata

"Uno dei pezzi esibiti alla mostra di antichità del Museo Egizio di Torino a Shizuoka (Giappone), durante i lavori di imballo/trasporto, ha subito un grave danno. Si tratta della testa osiriaca che era a suo tempo stata riparata con l'aggiunta di una corona bianca, non sua. Viva preoccupazione degli Egittologi italiani."
http://www.archaeogate.org/egittologia/article/1277/1/danneggiata-la-testa-osiriaca-del-museo-egizio-di-torin.html

Egyptian Museum, Torino

This head has been damaged during the packaging after an exhibition in Japan

The cloak of Harry Potter

This left only one parcel. Harry picked it up and felt it. It was very light. He unwrapped it. Something fluid  and silvery grey went slithering to the floor, where it lay in gleaming folds...
"What is it?"
Harry picked the shining, silvery cloth off the floor. It was strange to the touch, like water woven into material.
"It's an Invisibility Cloak"

http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.com/2011/01/invisibility-cloak.html

Invisibility cloak

Read more at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44641
and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11686303

Eta Carinae's Homunculus

Homunculus Nebula is surrounding the star system Eta Carinae. The nebula is embedded within a much larger ionized hydrogen region, which is the Carina Nebula. Homunculus is believed to have been ejected in a huge outburst from Eta Carinae in 1841, so brightly to be visible from Earth. This massive explosion produced two polar lobes and an equatorial disc, moving outwards. Though Eta Carinae is quite away, approximately 7,500 light-years, it is possible to distinguish in the nebula, many structures with the size of about the diameter of our solar system. Knots, dust lanes and radial streaks appear quite clearly in many images.

At the  http://staff.polito.it/amelia.sparavigna/Astronomical-astrofractool-web.htm, I am comparing the imaging of Homunculus Nebula, obtained by Hubble Space Telescope, and that from the Gemini South Telescope. 

See also http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4323,  A comment on Eta Carinae's Homunculus Nebula imaging.

ESO - AB Pictoris and its companion

European Southern Observatory (ESO) - Coronagraphic image of AB Pictoris showing its tiny companion (bottom left). The data was obtained on 16 March 2003 with NACO on the VLT, using a 1.4 arcsec occulting mask on top of AB Pictoris.

http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0515d/

Chandra Proxima Centauri

"The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a satellite launched on STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. It was named in honor of Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who is known for determining the maximum mass for white dwarfs. "Chandra" also means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit. Chandra Observatory is the third of NASA's four Great Observatories. The first wasHubble Space Telescope; second the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in 1991; and last is the Spitzer Space Telescope." read more at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_X-ray_Observatory

See at http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/proxima/ images of Proxima Centauri.

"Proxima Centauri: A red dwarf star 4 light years from the Sun. (Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO). X-ray observations of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, have shown that its surface is in a state of turmoil. Flares, or explosive outbursts occur almost continually. This behavior can be traced to Proxima Centauri's low mass, about a tenth that of the Sun. In the cores of low mass stars, nuclear fusion reactions that convert hydrogen to helium proceed very slowly, and create a turbulent, convective motion throughout their interiors. This motion stores up magnetic energy which is often released explosively in the star's upper atmosphere where it produces flares in X-rays and other forms of light. X-rays from Proxima Centauri are consistent with a point-like source. The extended X-ray glow is an instrumental effect. The nature of the two dots above the image is unknown - they could be background sources."

Physics - Chance of thunder and gamma-ray flashes

Physics - Chance of thunder—and gamma-ray flashes
In a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters, scientists in Italy (Tavani et al.) present new space-based observations of gamma-ray emissions from thunderclouds, called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs). Their analysis suggests that storms located deep within our atmosphere sometimes produce bursts of electrons with energies up to 100 MeV.

Craters on Mercury

This image has been obtained processing an image recorded by the spacecraft MESSENGER  during its planet fly-by  (credits: NASA-JPL)

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

Il delitto di Lord Arthur Savile, titolo originale Lord Arthur Savile's Crime è un racconto di Oscar Wilde del 1887. Il sottotitolo dell'opera era A Study of Duty (letteralmente "uno studio sul dovere").

In this story,  Lord Arthur Savile, is introduced by Lady Windermere to Mr Septimus R. Podgers, a chiromantist, who reads his palm and tells him that he will be a murderer. Lord Arthur wants to marry, so he decides that he has no right to do so until he has committed the murder...
...
Suddenly she looked eagerly round the room, and said, in her clear contralto voice, 'Where is my cheiromantist?'  'Your what, Gladys?' exclaimed the Duchess, giving an involuntary start. 'My cheiromantist, Duchess; I can't live without him at present.'
 'Dear Gladys! you are always so original,' murmured the Duchess, trying to remember what a cheiromantist really was, and hoping it was not the same as a cheiropodist.
 'He comes to see my hand twice a week regularly,' continued Lady Windermere, 'and is most interesting about it.'  'Good heavens!' said the Duchess to herself, 'he is a sort of cheiropodist after all. How very dreadful. I hope he is a foreigner at any rate. It wouldn't be quite so bad then.'
 'I must certainly introduce him to you.' 'Introduce him!' cried the Duchess; 'you don't mean to say he is here?' and she began looking about for a small tortoise-shell fan and a very tattered lace shawl, so as to be ready to go at a moment's notice.

Rhapsody in Blue

At http://www.archive.org/details/rhapblue11924 there is the original recording of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.  This record was released soon after the piece was first performed (1924)  and soon replaced by an electrically recorded record.
Gershwin told his first biographer Isaac Goldberg in 1931: "It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer – I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise... And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper – the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance."

Analogue audio - Cylinders and 78 rpm

"Phonograph cylinders were the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their era of greatest popularity (c. 1888–1915), these cylinder shaped objects had an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which could be reproduced when the cylinder was played on a mechanical phonograph. The competing disc-shaped gramophone record system triumphed in the market place to become the dominant commercial audio medium in the 1910s, and commercial mass production of phonograph cylinders ended in 1929" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder

"Early disc recordings were produced in a variety of speeds ranging from 60 to 130 rpm, and a variety of sizes. From 1900, the two leading manufacturers of flat records were Columbia, which used 80 rpm as its speed, and Victor, which used 76.59 rpm. Since one company's records were playable on the other's machines, the standard speed became 78 rpm, which is around the average speed between the two. By 1925, the speed of the record became standardised at a nominal value of 78 rpm."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record

You can listen old cylinders and 78 rpms at http://www.archive.org/details/78rpm Internet Archive has a huge collection, quite interesting for researches on the modern music history.
rpm = revolutions per minute

E A Poe - The Gold-Bug

William Legrand becomes obsessed with searching for treasure after being bitten by a scarab-like bug thought to be made of pure gold. He notifies his closest friend, the narrator, telling him to immediately come visit him at his home on Sullivan's Island in South Carolina. Upon the narrator's arrival, Legrand informs him that they are embarking upon a search for lost treasure of the pirate Captain Kidd. http://poe.thefreelibrary.com/Gold-Bug

Profiles - Duchess of Medina Sidonia

"Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo was not only a novelist but also a historian, and lived in her palace in Sanlúcar with the most important private archive in Europe, said to be more than one million historical documents. She spent the latter years of her life cataloguing this legacy, in the residence where he ancestors have lived since 1297. The Duchess said in an interview in 2004 that the oldest document in the archive dates from 1128, and published a book ‘Africa versus America’ at the beginning of this decade, the result of years of exhaustive research of her own archive and others in Spain. In it, she challenged the official history that the Americas were discovered by Christopher Columbus, claiming that trade had been taking place across the Atlantic for centuries before the official ‘Discovery.’"
Read more:
http://www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_15508.shtml#ixzz19sDv9POH
and http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_1683000/1683276.stm

A fish or a bird - Geoglyphs Titicaca

A geoglyph of Titicaca - As seen by Google Maps

More at https://sites.google.com/site/geoglyphssatelliteimagery/

The geoglyph viewed from the ground (Courtesy, Gary Mariscal Herrera, Director Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Peru)

Centenario - Jose Maria Arguedas

2011, Centenario della nascita di Jose Maria Arguedas, here a poem

They say that we do not know anything
That we are backwardness
That our head needs changing for a better one

They say that some learned men are saying this about us
These academics who reproduce themselves
In our own lives

What is there on the banks of these rivers, Doctor?
Take out your binoculars
And your spectacles
Look if you can.
Five hundred flowers
From five hundred different types of potato
Grow on the terraces
Above abysses
That your eyes don't reach
Those five hundred flowers
Are my brain
My flesh

From: A call to certain academics by José María Arguedas, translated from the Quechua by William Rowe.

New Horizons in Space Missions

New Horizons is a NASA spacecraft mission currently moving toward Pluto. It is expected to be the firsts pacecraft to fly by and study this dwarf planet and its moons, Charon, Nix, and Hydra.
New Horizons was launched on January, 2006. It flew by Jupiter on February, 2007, and orbited Saturn on June, 2008. It will arrive at Pluto on July, 2015, after which it will continue into the Kuiper belt.
Pluto is the largest object of the Kuiper belt, which is the region of the Solar System extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 55 AU from the Sun. The belt consists mainly of small bodies, remnants from the Solar System's formation. It is the home to at least three dwarf planets – Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake. Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, are also believed to have originated in the region.
More info Wiki

W. Irving - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

This evening the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving.
"Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him. He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!"

http://manybooks.net/titles/irvingwaetext92sleep11.html

Owl butterflies

Torino, Museo Scienze

Dumbledore, not Silente

A dumbledore is a bee (bombo). The Headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, has a name showing one of the features of his character: as a bee in summer, he is always moving and his humming is pervading all the school. On the contary, the italian translation of the name in Albus Silente changes the character in authority and austerity.

Where is Voyager 1?

"NASA Probe Sees Solar Wind Decline. The 33-year odyssey of NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached a distant point at the edge of our solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind."

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

7 Exoplanets (Amazing video)

"Hundreds of planets around other stars have been discovered recently, but many centuries may pass before human eyes actually see them up close. Interpreting current data, Hugo award-winning artist Ron Miller takes us to seven of the most fascinating of these worlds."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=7-amazing-exoplanets-interactive#

Wonderful!
"And while we are not quite ready for something like Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets, the almost daily discovery of new planets has brought the number of known worlds to well over 450."

T-Rex bad reputation got worse

It seems that the largest land predators, which ever stalked the earth, were cannibals. As reported among news in Telegraph UK (15 Oct 2010), the reserchers noticed bite marks on the bones of the dinosaurs. Comparing the marks, the scientists realised that a T-Rex was the only animal large enough to have caused them.

T-Rex, Museo Scienze

Thera and the biblical plagues

Thera, a volcano in the Mediterranean sea, produced with its explosion  around 3,500 year ago, one of the biggest cataclysms in the human history. The remains of  Thera are the Mediterranean islands of Santorini,  north of Crete.  As we can read from an article of Telegraph, the volcanic ash of eruption could have clashed with thunderstorms above Egypt, producing severe  hail storms (one of the biblical plagues).
According to Prof.Trevisanato, a Canadian biologist, another plague, the locusts, could be explained by the volcanic fall out from the ash. The ash fall out caused weather anomalies, which produced higher precipitations and humidity, fostering the presence of the locusts. The volcanic ash could also have caused the plague of darkness. In fact, pumice stones have been found during excavations of Egyptian ruins despite there not being any volcanoes in Egypt.
Very interesting article.

Powering the space missions

Deep-space missions are powered by a RTG system. A radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG, RITEG) is a generator that obtains its power from radioactive decay. The heat released by the decay of a  radioactive material is converted into electricity by the Seebeck effect using an array of thermocouples (see "how did Georg do it?").
RTGs are systems quite suitable as power sources for satellites and space probes and also for remote facilities where the use of solar cells is not feasible (for instance, lighthouses built by the former Soviet Union inside the Arctic Circle). RTGs are able to give few hundred watts for very long periods. The problem is to guarentee a safe use of radioisotopes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator

Where is Cassini spacecraft?

Cassini–Huygens is a robotic spacecraft currently studying the planet Saturn and its  satellites. The launched spacecraft consisted of two elements: the Cassini orbiter, named for the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, and the Huygens probe, named for the astronomer, mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens. Cassini-Huygens  was launched on October 15, 1997, and it entered into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. On December 25, 2004, the Huygens probe was separated from the orbiter and  reached Saturn's moon Titan on January 14, 2005. It descended into the atmosphere of the moon, sending information back to the Earth. This was the first landing ever accomplished in the outer solar system. The mission will continue until 2017. 

On November 2, Cassini was triggered into a standby mode, after a bit flip caused it to miss an important instruction. Cassini was reactivated as scheduled on November 24 and has returned to perfect working order, in time for two scheduled close fly-bys with Enceladus.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

What is powering Cassini?

Bacteria in Titanic rusticles

TITANIC BEING EATEN BY DESTRUCTIVE BACTERIA, by Rossella Lorenzi.
"A new bacterium isolated from the Titanic wreck is accelerating the wreck's disintegration into a pile of dust."

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/titanic-bacteria-rust-wreck.html

These are bacteria potentially dangerous to underwater metal structures.  Shipwrecks disapper but also offshore oil and gas pipelines. The articecle tells that the newly discovered species could also have positive applications for industry for instance in the recycling of iron structures in deep ocean.

Night at the Museum - 4 - Egypt

Wood and faience objects at the Egyptian Museum

Torino, Palazzo Madama

Striges (Owls)

Strix (pl. striges or strixes) was the Ancient Roman and Greek word for owl. The name is Greek in origin. From it, the name of the genus Strix was derived.

See also the Owls of Harry Potter

Treasure Island

A seafarer...
"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?" My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.
"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you're at-- there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. "You can tell me when I've worked through that," says he, looking as fierce as a commander.
http://www.online-literature.com/stevenson/treasureisland/1/

Queste sono le parole con cui si presenta il vecchio lupo di mare alla locanda dell'Ammiraglo Benbow.
Isola del Tesoro, R.L. Stevenson

Paleolithic Crete

Oustanding!
A research team led by Thomas Strasser and Eleni Panagopoulou announced the discovery of stone tools at two sites on the island of Crete that are between 130,000 and 700,000 years old. The tools resemble those made by Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus, showing that our human ancestors boated across at least 40 miles of open sea to reach the island. This is the earliest  evidence of seafaring.
http://www.archaeology.org/1101/topten/crete.html

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me paucis, si tibi di favent, diebus, si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam cenam, non sine candida puella et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.
Haec si, inquam, attuleris, venuste noster, cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli plenus sacculus est aranearum. Sed contra accipies meros amores, seu quid suavius elegantiusve est: nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque; quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.

Gaius Valerius Catullus

Revisiting the construction of pyramids

"The Kufu pyramid, with a volume of 2,7 millions of meter cubes, was completed over a period of 20 to 30 years. From this one can estimate a daily rhythm of 300 to 400 blocks, each having an average volume of 1 meter cube. This means one block put at the right place every 2 minutes.  To achieve this goal,  1 meter square of block face would have to be hewn every 20 seconds! What a performance, with tools made of stone or with soft copper ..."  As we can read in the Europhysics News Vol. 40, No. 1, 2009, pp. 27-31, Revisiting the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, Guy Demortier,  www.europhysicsnews.org/epn20091p27.pdf ...
"In 1978,  the French chemist Joseph Davidovits rejected the generally accepted technique of carving and hoisting stones. He proposed that the building method involved the moulding on site: blocks were made of a kind of concrete whose basic binding compound was natron: a sodium carbonate extracted very close to the site of Giza.  The binder was obtained by some chemical reaction leading to a geopolymer (a name given by Davidovits). It is a poly-sialate containing an alkaline nucleus: sodium from natron.  Natron, lime and water form caustic soda,  which reacts with aluminous limestone to yield the basic geopolymer.  X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction have shown that the blocks consist of limestone (85 to 92%) associated with a binder.  Additional analyses were performed by PIXE (Particle-Induced X-ray Emission), PIGE (Particle-Induced gamma-ray Emission) and by NMR-Spectroscopy for structural characterization in laboratories of Namur and Lecce. One of the pyramid’s samples appeared  to be made of  a central compact structure embedded in a material of different composition. The central part is identified as natural limestone but the outer part contains a large amount of F,  Na,  Mg,  Al,  Si."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Davidovits
http://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/pyramids/pyramids-3-the-formula-the-invention-of-stone/2

The owls of Harry Potter

Hedwig is the snowy Harry Potter's owl. At the following link, a precious discussion on the owls playing in the books and movies, by Laura L. Erickson, The Owls Of Harry Potter:
http://www.lauraerickson.com/bird/Species/Owls/HarryPotter/HarryPotter.html

Hedwig

Owls - rapaci notturni d'Europa

Mediante fotografie e testi, 32 pannelli descrivono la sistematica, la classificazione, la biologia, l’etologia e la conservazione degli Strigiformi. Un’attenzione particolare è rivolta alle specie viventi nel continente europeo: dal gufo delle nevi al barbagianni, dalla civetta capogrosso all’assiolo. I pannelli sono affiancati da numerosi reperti di animali tassidermizzati provenienti dalle collezioni scientifiche del Museo.

http://www.regione.piemonte.it/museoscienzenaturali/mostre/temporanee/owls.htm
mostre/temporanee/dwd/Owls_Pieghevole.pdf
Exhibition, Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, Torino

Human, All Too Human - 3 - Denisova

The Denisova hominin is the name given to the remains of a member of the genus Homo that may be a previously unknown species. The discover is based on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA, obtained from a bone of a juvenile that lived about 41,000 years ago. The find happened in  the Denisova Cave (Altai Krai, Russia), a region also inhabited at about the same time by Neanderthals and modern humans. From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisova_hominin

El sacrificio de los bosques

"La construcción de las cinco centrales hidroeléctricas contempladas en el pacto energético entre Brasil y Perú no sólo demandará una inversión millonaria sino que también implicará un gran daño ambiental. Casi 1,5 millones de hectáreas de bosques desaparecerían en 20 años, según un cálculo independiente."
http://connuestroperu.com/

The Red-Headed League

"Set in 1890, a business-man named Jabez Wilson, a man with red hair, comes to consult Holmes. He tells them that his young assistant, Vincent Spaulding, some weeks ago had shown him, and urged him to respond, to a newspaper want-ad offering work to only red-headed male applicants. The next morning, Wilson had waited in a long line of fellow red-headed men, was interviewed and was the only applicant hired, because none of the other applicants had hair to match Wilson's red locks. Wilson, whose business mainly operates in evenings, was well-paid, receiving four pounds a week for several weeks; the work was obviously useless clerical work in a bare office. Finally one morning, a sign on the locked office door inexplicably announced that "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED."" from Wiki

 ***

"Sherlock Holmes and I surveyed this curt announcement and the rueful face behind it, until the comical side of the affair so completely overtopped every other consideration that we both burst out into a roar of laughter.
"I cannot see that there is anything very funny,” cried our client, flushing up to the roots of his flaming head. “If you can do nothing better than laugh at me, I can go elsewhere.”
"No, no,” cried Holmes, shoving him back into the chair from which he had half risen. “I really wouldn’t miss your case for the world. It is most refreshingly unusual. But there is, if you will excuse my saying so, something just a little funny about it. Pray what steps did you take when you found the card upon the door?” 


More http://ignisart.com/camdenhouse/ or http://etext.virginia.edu/

Red-headed Neanderthals

Probably this fact is already well-known...

BBC reported that a research team  extracted DNA from the remains of two Neanderthals and retrieved part of a gene called MC1R. In modern people, a mutation in this gene causes red hair. Until this discovery, no one knew what hair colour our extinct relatives had: by analysing a version of the gene in Neanderthals, the scientists found that they were flame-haired.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7062415.stm