
source::::glasbergen.com
natarajan
NASA scientists have discovered the coldest place on our planet. It’s a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau. On a clear winter night, temperatures can dip below -133.6 degrees F (-92 degrees C)
The new record is several degrees colder than the previous low of minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C), set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. The coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth is northeastern Siberia, where temperatures dropped to a bone-chilling 90 degrees below zero F (minus 67.8 C) in the towns of Verkhoyansk (in 1892) and Oimekon (in 1933).
Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center made the discovery by analyzing 32 years of data from several satellites that have mapped Antarctica’s surface temperature.
Near a high ridge that runs from Dome Arugs to Dome Fuji, the scientists found clusters of pockets that have plummeted to record low temperatures dozens of times. The lowest temperature the satellites detected was minus 136 F (minus 93.2 C), on Aug. 10, 2010.

With remote-sensing satellites, scientists have found the coldest places on Earth, just off a ridge in the East Antarctic Plateau. The coldest of the cold temperatures dropped to minus 135.8 F (minus 93.2 C) — several degrees colder than the previous record. Image Credit: Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center
The quest to find out just how cold it can get on Earth – and why – started when the researchers were studying large snow dunes on the East Antarctic Plateau. When the scientists looked closer, they noticed cracks in the snow surface between the dunes, which were possibly created when wintertime temperatures got so low the top snow layer shrunk. This led scientists to wonder what the temperature range was, and prompted them to hunt for the coldest places using data from satellite sensors.
Video Link is given below …
Read more about how scientists found and measured Earth’s coldest place, from NASA
source::::: Earth sky News site
natarajan
THIS could be the best thing you’ll see all week. It could even make you believe in Santa again.
Pl click the link below for video and story as appeared in news .com.au on 11.12.13 !!!
Instead of hitting passengers with flight delays, lost luggage dramas or other holiday horrors, an airline has provided a different kind of Christmas travel surprise.
Many are even calling it a Christmas “miracle”.
Canadian airline WestJet asked a group of 250 passengers at Toronto and Hamilton International Airports what they had on their Christmas wishlists via an interactive Santa Claus.
Requests ranged from underwear to a big-screen TV.
When the passenger boarded their flight, airline staff took off – but they didn’t join the passengers in the air, instead they dashed to the shopping centre.
More than 150 WestJet employees played the part of Santa’s elves by purchasing personalised gifts, wrapping them and getting them to the Calgary airport before the passenger landed.
The passengers were truly surprised when they made their way through baggage claim to find their dream gifts waiting for them.
The four-month-long project was turned into an ad for the airline.
WestJet announced they will also five away holiday flights to families in need if the video exceeded 200,000 views. It has achieved well over that, and is currently at over two million hits.
source:::::news.com.au
natarajan …11.12.13
This new illusion has been making the rounds of the Internet the last few days:
What’s the illusion? It’s that the two squares are actually the same colour, it’s just the edges that are different. The middle area, where these edges meet, causes the illusion. When covered up you can see the two upper and lower sections are the same colour:
It’s actually just a take on the well-knownCornsweet illusion, which takes advantage of a phenomenon that occurs in your brain called lateral inhibition.
To understand how it works, you first need to know a little about how we see things. Cells on the back walls of our eyes react to the energy in light that is funneled to them.
They get excited and send an electric impulse to special cells in the brain, which collate signals from many eye cells and send the average of those signals on.
These brain cells interpret the millions of signals coming from the millions of eye cells into a picture with brightness and different colours.
There are special ways that these brain cells influence each other. Lateral inhibition is one of those interactions — the more active brain cell tones down the sensitivity of the one next to it, making it less excited.
That amplifies the signal on one side of the black/white boundary and diminishes the signal on the other side of the boundary, creating more contrast between them than actually exists. It allows us to see more vividly, but also creates these optical illusions.
It is also active in our other senses, like hearing, touching, and smelling.
Here are some more examples:
The Grey Square or Checker Shadow Illusion. The squares A and B are the same colour:
And here’s a gif proving it:
There’s also the Grid Illusion, which produces grey dots at the intersections of these white bars:

A third is the Mach Band Illusion, which suggests a gradient within a one-colour grey bar. The areas near the lighter colour look darker and those near the darker colour look lighter (as the red dotted line represents in the image below — when it veers left we are experiencing progressively lighter colours and when it veers right the colours look darker.):
source::::::businessinsider.com au
natarajan