Weird Things

Archive for the ‘Sun’ Category

Teenager Builds Solar Panel – Using Human Hair!

Sunday, December 2nd, 2012

While everyone sits around and debates the cost of solar power and that anything that could effectively power your home right now would cost more than feeding your family for about a year, a teenager in Nepal has come up with a solution that NONE of us thought of…

Using human hair instead of silicon to generate electricity from our buddy, the sun.

Along with fellow students, this kid created a solar panel made using human hair that can generate enough electricity to charge a smartphone! It also brings the prices of this thing down to under $40.

Most people would be like, “Big whoop-de-doo. He can charge a phone.”

When you’re living in some of the less-developed parts of the world? The available wall-sockets are just a little…uh…limited.

Oh..did we mention? He’s a freakin’ KID!

[Design Taxi]

Posted in Experiment, India, Science, Sun | 1 Comment »

BOOM! Possible Supernova Recorded in 774AD

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

Centuries ago, in AD 774, some guy in Britain is keeping a written record of life’s goings-on.

In that year he mentions witnessing something strange…a weird “red crucifix” hanging in the sky.

Fling yourself forward in time. Researchers are unable to explain a strange spike in carbon 14 levels that manifested in unique growth rings in Japanese Cedar trees that year.

UC Santa Cruz biochemistry major Jonathon Allen was listening to a Nature podcast when he heard about the trees and something clicked.

According to Allen’s theory, the spike in carbon 14 that caused the change in the ring patterns of the trees and the ancient text reporting the glowing crucifix in the sky, which seemed to occur around the same period in time, may have both been the same incident…a possible supernova or massive solar flare.

Most scholars that Allen has presented his theory to seem to agree that some kind of massive stellar event took place back in the eighth century and that both nature and the author of an ancient text witnessed it.

[Nature]

Posted in Astronomy, Natural Anomaly, Nature, Space, Sun, Weather | Comments Off on BOOM! Possible Supernova Recorded in 774AD

Can You Spot the Tiny Chinese Space Station on the Face of the Sun?

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

Alright, it’s a little easier when someone puts a tiny circle around it. What you are seeing is China’s Tiangong-1 space station transiting the Sun. This is the handiwork of Astrophotographer Thierry Legault who had to time this perfectly to snap this picture since since the station zoomed through this shot in only .09 seconds.

Notice how the massive sun spot completely dwarves the Tiangong-1 meager size which is only 10.3 x 3.3 meters.

Check out the close up shots at the link below.

[Universe Today] via Bri G

Posted in China, Space Station, Sun | Comments Off on Can You Spot the Tiny Chinese Space Station on the Face of the Sun?

Suicidal Comet Will Attempt To Survive A Pass By The Sun

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

A newly identified comet is coming home for the holidays. And by holidays I mean mid-December and by home I mean the Sun. So really that first sentence doesn’t mean anything. But a comet is going to graze the surface of the Sun, most likely disintegrating it.

The comet is categorized by astronomers as a “sungrazer” and it is destined to do just that; literally graze the surface of the sun (called the photosphere) and pass through the sun’s intensely hot corona, where temperatures have been measured at upwards of 3.6-million degrees Fahrenheit (2-million degrees Celsius).

We should get some pretty wicked images from the daredevil space racer’s death defying stunt. In the slim event that the comet survives, we might even be able to see it in broad daylight.

[Live Science]