Vatican Celebrates History of Astronomy

Discovery.com-- Rudimentary telescopes, celestial globes and original manuscripts by Galileo are going on view at the Vatican Museums as part of an exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of the astronomer's first celestial observations.

"Astrum 2009: Astronomy and Instruments" traces the history of astronomy through its tools, from a 3rd century A.D. globe of the zodiac to the increasingly complicated telescopes used in more recent times to gaze at the stars.

At a briefing to launch the exhibit Tuesday, Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's top culture official, declined to revisit the Church's 17th century condemnation of Galileo for his discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun.

The Religious Roots of Halloween

Examiner.com-- It’s October, and Halloween is coming up! All around town, the celebrations are beginning, and festive displays are present in every self respecting retail store. Halloween is a fascinating mixture of several religious influences, and a secular desire to party, which have blended to create the modern U.S. holiday we celebrate today.

In antiquity, the Celts celebrated a holiday in the fall known as Samhain. It came around the time for harvest. It was believed that during the Samhain, the wall between the world of the living and the dead was thinner than usual. People could talk to the dead, and ghosts could be roaming the countryside. Frightening masks would be worn to scare them away. The head was believed to hold power, and the head of a vegetable, like a jack o lantern, could frighten away evil spirits. Originally, a turnip was used for this purpose.

The Last Best Ghost Town: Bodie, California

MentalFloss.com-- There are a thousand ghost towns spread across the western United States — a whole constellation of loss and ruin — but most are little more than foundations, or at best a few tumbledown shacks, or if the people who lived and died there did anything of note, and if they’re lucky, a sun-faded commemorative plaque mounted on a squat stone pillar. The ghost town of Bodie, however, is another story altogether. A mining boomtown, it was the third most populous city in the state of California in 1880. By the 1940s sickness, wars, bad weather and exhausted mines had led to the town’s desertion, and its isolated, inhospitable location made certain that it stayed that way; no one eyed this high desert waste, 8,000 feet above sea level between Yosemite and the lonely Nevada border, and imagined a shopping mall in its place. Count us all lucky.

Only five percent of Bodie’s structures are still standing, but considering how large Bodie was, that’s still a lot for a ghost town — more than two hundred. And unlike Tombstone, Calico or any number of other “preserved” ghost towns in the West, it’s not a tourist trap where you can buy cotton candy from gunfight-staging actors playing oldey-timey cowboys; the town is kept in a state of “arrested decay,” which means the park rangers that patrol its dusty streets focus on making sure what’s left of Bodie doesn’t fall down, but they could care less about painting, weatherizing or cleaning up the decades-old trash that’s heaped everywhere.

[Read and see more at MentalFloss.com]

Is the universe sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider?

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

NYTimes.com --More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Mucilages, Ghost blobs of the Mediterranean Sea

Wired.com-- Right now, even as you read this, the giant, mucus-like sea blobs are taking over the Mediterranean Sea. Though they may look like something Steve McQueen should be fighting, or like they should be flying around an old New York City hotel and sliming Bill Murray, they are disgustingly real, and may pose a very real danger.

Yes, it seems that these blobs, called “mucilages,” which were first discovered 280 years ago, are composed of many organisms, both living and dead, and harbor bacteria and viruses that are potentially harmful to humans. The blobs can be relatively small, but can manifest as sheets up to 124 miles long!

According to the National Geographic article in which I read about the giant sea-snot, the mucilages have been increasing in number and lasting longer in the past few decades as sea temperatures have risen. So far, they’re primarily found in the Mediterranean, but there is some evidence that they are spreading elsewhere, and may find their way to the North Sea and Australia in the not-too-distant future.

The article includes a video about the blobs, which I highly recommend watching, and showing to your kids — because what kid wouldn’t like being grossed out by giant sea boogers? Unless you have a strong stomach, though, you may not want to watch it while eating your lunch.

Secrets of´the Mayan Calendar Unveiled