So it goes

Circular beam of electrons in a Teltron tube

(Source: Wikipedia)

Others may appear green, brown or black, or combinations of these colours. These icebergs have usually rolled over, exposing basal ice, or have emerged from below water level. The various colorations are caused by differences in density, air-bubble content and impurities. For example, black ice is of high density and bubble free; dark layers indicate the presence of rock materials derived from the base of the parent glacier. Occasionally, rocks may be found on the original upper surface of the iceberg. As the iceberg melts, these materials precipitate into marine or lake sediments.

(Source: thecanadianencyclopedia.com)

Karl Selim Lemström worked a quiet miracle in 1882: He strung conducting wire over the summit of a Lapland mountain and watched it draw down a shaft of light from the night sky — proof that the aurora borealis is an electrical discharge from the upper atmosphere.

Thomas Cane’s “Santa Claus detector,” patented in 1996, combines yuletide spirit with cold-hearted espionage. Kids booby-trap the hearth as shown on Christmas Eve, and if the decorative ribbon is pulled during the night, the stockings light up, giving proof of the fat man’s visit. “This is particularly important to young children, providing reassurance that the child’s good behavior has in fact been rewarded by Santa Claus.”

The patent abstract says that the same technology can be used to monitor the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Presumably they’re working on countermeasures.

(Source: futilitycloset.com)

When a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook Olympia, Wash., in 2001, shopowner Jason Ward discovered that a sand-tracing pendulum had recorded the vibrations in the image above.

Seismologists say that the “flower” at the center reflects the higher-frequency waves that arrived first; the outer, larger-amplitude oscillations record the lower-frequency waves that arrived later.

“You never think about an earthquake as being artistic — it’s violent and destructive,” Norman MacLeod, president of Gaelic Wolf Consulting in Port Townsend, told ABC News. “But in the middle of all that chaos, this fine, delicate artwork was created.”

Chamberlin Observatory, Denver, 1900.

Explorer XVII Satellite, Goddard Space Flight Center, 1963.

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