The American tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives.
Picture-2: In the 1932, George Peters works on these Halloween masks.
The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.
Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.
During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.
By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.
When the first time human set the first foot on the moon, people from all over the world had doubts about the claimed landing. NASA has provided us with many pictures taken when astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon 40 years ago. Many scientists said that Apollo 11 landing was total fake, because you can tell from the pictures that there are some obvious evidences shows that the landing was all made up and created on Earth no the moon.
The people behind these images missed to apply a lot of scientific information that allowed us to bust them down. In this image you can see that the American flag is flapping right? Well, the flag shouldn’t be flapping because the image was taken in an airless lunar surface. There are few Youtube Apollo 11 video landing show the flag flapping and other astronaut acting on the surface of the moon. Watch it at the end of this article.
We know from NASA that when Apollo landed in July 1969, only two people walked on the moon Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin.
Look at this image you would see Neil and Edwin, but who took that picture? Who is that third person? Big question ha? Take a look at the shadow carefully, it looks like another person took the photograph, He/she seems also not wearing the spacesuit.
That’s nonsense, said Bad Astronomy’s Plait commenting on this image, he explains that moon dust, or regolith, is “like a finely ground powder. When you look at it under a microscope, it almost looks like volcanic ash.
So when you step on it, it can compress very easily into the shape of a boot.” And those shapes could stay pristine for a long while thanks to the airless vacuum on the moon. The astronauts’ prints are a bit too clear for being made on a bone-dry world. Prints that well defined could only have been made in wet sand.
I just got back from The Amaz!ing Meeting in Vegas, baby! For those unfamiliar with this particular conference, it's sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), founded by magician, escape artist, and scourge of fake psychics and pseudoscience around the globe James Randi. My pal Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy now heads JREF, and he invited me to be a speaker at TAM this year -- an honor I was happy to accept. This was my first time at TAM, and it is, indeed, an amazing meeting: I had many fascinating, thought-provoking discussions to mull over at my leisure.
Phil did manage to put me on The Most Intimidating Panel on the Planet: it is a surreal -- and humbling -- experience to share a dais with the likes of Bill Prady (executive producer and co-creator of The Big Bang Theory), Mythbusters' Adam Savage, and the incomparable Penn and Teller. But anyone who writes about space science and cosmology is comfortable with insignificance: the greatest among us, after all, is just a tiny speck, or momentary spark, in a roiling vast cosmos that just keeps getting bigger on time scales that dwarf a human lifetime.
Check out this image: see that tiny speck of light, inside the blue circle? That's Earth, as seen from the vantage point of Saturn. We are so much smaller even than that.
Sean reminded me of this famous photo when I told him about one conversation in particular I had after the panel. One young man mentioned that, as an atheist, he always feels at a disadvantage when talking to someone who believes in an afterlife: "Our outlook is just so... bleak in comparison."
I understand where he's coming from: many people think that a world view that doesn't involve an afterlife is a depressing option: why bother trying to be a decent, moral person, the reasoning goes, if there's nothing to look forward to after death?
We were interrupted before I could fully respond to this young man -- conferences are not an ideal format for these sorts of in-depth philosophical discussions -- but I do not think the lack of an afterlife constitutes a "bleak" outlook at all. What frightens people about their own mortality is the thought of not consciously being, and from that, perhaps, springs the human need to invent belief systems that reassure them that their death will not be the end. That, and an unwillingness to admit to ourselves just how insignificant we really are.
We are born narcissists, almost by definition, since we can only experience the world around us from our own perspective. In that sense, the world revolves around us, and no wonder the prospect of having our consciousness snuffed out unsettles us. But empirically, it's a different story. Before Copernicus, pretty much everyone in Western Europe believed that the Earth was the center of the solar system, with the sun and all the other planets orbiting it, and man, made in the image of God, ruling over the whole shebang.
There was a very good reason people balked when confronted with scientific evidence to the contrary. Accepting Copernicus meant removing man from his place at the top of the cosmological food chain. “The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe later wrote of the implications of a heliocentric universe to 17th century believers. “Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind.”
Until the modern era of space exploration, however, when the Hubble Space Telescope took this famous image of the Ultra Deep Field:
You learn to redefine vastness when you're married to a cosmologist who thinks about these things for a living. Every speck in that image is an entire galaxy. Each one of those galaxies contains billions of stars, no doubt with countless undiscovered solar systems orbiting them. Somewhere in that vast expanse, floats our tiny blue planet. We are smaller now than ever.
If one embraces an atheist worldview, it necessarily requires embracing, even celebrating, one's insignificance. It's a tall order, I know, when one is accustomed to being the center of attention. The universe existed in all its vastness before I was born, and it will exist and continue to evolve after I am gone. But knowing that doesn't make me feel bleak or hopeless: I find it strangely comforting.
Nor does it make me feel like nothing I do could possibly matter -- quite the opposite: everything we do matters a great deal. That's the great paradox. It makes our short time here on Earth incredibly precious, in which every moment should be savored. I tell my husband I love him every single day, because those days are finite. Fifty years will be gone in an instant from a cosmological perspective. Our choices, our actions, how we choose to behave toward our fellow travelers -- random kindness to strangers -- all of this becomes tremendously important when one embraces insignificance... because this life is all we have.
Photos: (top) The Pale Blue Dot (Voyager mission). (bottom) Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Source: NASA/ESA. Public Domain.
It's all about the historic Apollo 11 moonwalk this week, marking the 40th anniversary. But while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin deserve their place in space history, they were two among many men (and women) who risked their lives to venture into the uncharted territory of space.
Case in point: Welsh poet Meirion Jordan pays tribute to the Russian cosmonauts in the epilogue of Moonrise, a lovely collection of poems with strong science themes (h/t: In the Dark):
I, Yuri Gagarin, having not seen God, wake now to the scrollwork of a body, to my own white fibres leafing into the bone: know that beyond this dome of rain there is only the nothing where the soul sweers out its parallax like a distant star and truth brightens to X, to gamma, through a metal sail.
So I return to you, cramming your pockets with the atmosphere and the evening news, fumbling for gardens in the moon’s shadow, in its waterfalls of silence. I wish for you familiar towns, their piers and amusement arcades unpeopled at dusk, the unicorn tumbling by on china hooves behind the high walls of parks, among congregating lamps.
May you find Earth rising there, between your steepled hands. May your voyages end. May you have a cold unfurling of limbs each morning, when I am fallen out of the world.
Photo: Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders while in orbit around the moon. Source: NASA
Nothing makes summer nights more magical than the dancing lights of fireflies. Fireflies live throughout the world, but it seems many species have started disappearing, and no one really knows why. Scientists suspect various things causing firefly decline, from pesticides to habitat loss to light pollution – in other words lights at night may affect the blinking insects that evolved to blink in the dark. But with little information on historical numbers for most species, scientists really don’t know.
Enter Firefly Watch, a citizen science project where people across the U.S. - and even around the world - can send in information on fireflies they see while out and about, enjoying an evening picnic at the lake or camping, or just peering out at the firefly lights in their backyard. Firefly Watch is run by scientists at Tufts University, Fitchburg State College and the Museum of Science in Boston but volunteers can collect data on fireflies across the nation. Anyone can participate! All you do is pick a locale, provide some detail about the site such as whether the location has mown or overgrown grass, shrubs, water, and the like, and then report on firefly presence or absence for as long as you can. “FireflyWatch is a nation-wide and potentially world-wide project,” says Fitchburg College Biology Professor Christopher Cratsley. “The maps on the site allow for data entry from anywhere on the planet.” The primary focus of the information provided on the site is geared towards North American firefly watcher, though.
Carl Zimmer wrote an article about the Firefly Watch project for the New York Times, Blink Twice if You Like Me, which also covered the firefly evolutionary ecology research by Tufts University professor Sara Lewis. The website actually was the brainchild of one of Lewis’ former graduate students, Adam South, and Don Salvatore at the Museum of Science. South recruited two of Lewis’ former students, including Kristian Demary who studies the impact of light pollution on fireflies including data collected from Firefly Watch volunteers, and Cratsley, who is very interested in the citizen science aspect. “My career balances research on fireflies with efforts to improve science education through teacher preparation, professional development and outreach,” says Cratsley. Lewis also started the FLASH Together Now website, which stands for Firefly Lovers Act to Save our Heritage, a website to draw attention to reasons for firefly decline.
Last fall I wrote an article about fireflies in lore and legend around the world for Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, Fire Beetle. I had gone camping with my son and his middle school class on the banks of Texas’ Colorado River, and some of the kids saw fireflies for the first time of their lives. Many tried to catch them in jars, as kids often do, and we all delighted in the magic of the moment.
The part of the firefly’s ‘behind’ that blinks is called a lantern. The original evolutionary purpose of their glowing bioluminescence is a warning to potential predators that their bodies contain noxious chemicals called lucibufagins. Actually, all firefly larvae glow, they’re called glow worms, but not all adult fireflies glow. Fireflies, for the record, are not flies but beetles. And over evolutionary history, most firefly species have co-opted their glowing body parts to attract mates. The U.S. has about 175 firefly species, each with its own color and flashing pattern. Some species in other countries blink synchronously. And one of my favorite tidbits of information is that the Japanese word for firefly, hotaru, implies harmony between humankind and all other creatures on the planet. Long live fireflies!
Space Shuttle Discovery (Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-103) is one of the three currently operational orbiters in the Space Shuttle fleet of NASA, the space agency of the United States. (The other two are Atlantis and Endeavour.) When first flown in 1984, Discovery became the third operational orbiter, and is now the oldest orbiter in service. Discovery has performed both research and International Space Station (ISS) assembly missions.
History
The spacecraft takes its name from previous ships of exploration named Discovery, primarily HMS Discovery, the sailing ship that accompanied famous explorer James Cook on his third and final major voyage. Others include Henry Hudson's ship Discovery which he used in 1610–1611 to search for a Northwest Passage, and RRS Discovery, a vessel used for expeditions to Antarctica in 1901-1904 by Scott and Shackleton (and still preserved as a museum). The shuttle shares a name with Discovery One, the fictional Jupiter spaceship from the films 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010.
Discovery was the shuttle that launched the Hubble Space Telescope. The second and third Hubble service missions were also conducted by Discovery. She has also launched the Ulysses probe and three TDRS satellites. Discovery has been chosen twice as the return to flight orbiter, first in 1988 as the return to flight orbiter after the 1986 Challenger disaster, and then for the twin return to flight missions in July 2005 and July 2006 after the 2003 Columbia disaster. Discovery also carried Project Mercury astronaut John Glenn, who was 77 at the time, back into space during STS-95 on October 29, 1998, making him the oldest human being to venture into space.
Had the STS-62-A planned missions from Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1986 for the United States Department of Defense gone ahead, Discovery would have flown those missions.
Flights
Discovery has flown 35 flights, completed 4,888 orbits, and flown 117,433,618 miles (195,938,294 km) in total, as of June 2008[update]. Discovery is the orbiter fleet leader, having flown more flights than any other orbiter in the fleet, including four in 1985 alone. Discovery flew all three "return to flight" missions after the Challenger and Columbia disasters: STS-26 in 1988, STS-114 in 2005, and STS-121 in 2006.
STS-41-D: First flight.
STS-51-D: Carried first sitting United States Member of Congress into space, SenatorJake Garn (R-UT).
STS-26: Return to space after Challenger disaster (STS-51-L).
