When I visited a hardware and electrical supply store here in my area, I still noticed incandescent bulbs being sold at the stores. The are sold in various wattage from 5 watts to 100 watts and above.

But in Israel, the government is already banning the use of the incandescent bulbs from 60 watts above. The goal of the regulation which became effective in January 1, is to reduce the power usage of the whole Israel.

The incandescent bulbs is noted of consuming power just to emit more heat than light. So, the power consumed is just wasted. Besides, its life span is lesser compared to electrical lamps that use 25 percent less electricity.

You can still observe, as reported, the meteor shower at dawn from 3AM to 5AM and it is estimated to generate 100 falling stars every hour. It’s peak will occur on the January 4 but it is said to start showering on January 1 up to January 7.

The meteor shower is called by astronomers as “Quads” from its name “Quadrantid. The name Quadrantid is also derived from the name of the constellation “Quadrans Muralis” which was given by a French astronomer Jerome Lalande in 1795.

It is actually the remnants of the comet called by astronomers as 2003EH1 which is located near the earth and believed to have been broken down 500 years ago. They were first seen in 1825.

So, as the earth travels near these remnants, these things will enter the earn atmosphere and will be burn at 50 miles above the surface. We can see them as if a star is shooting down the earth, thus called “Shooting Star”.

When I was in grade school, I learned that Pluto is the ninth planet in the Solar System and it’s the smallest of all the nine planets. But this information was changed when the planet Pluto was demoted from its being planet to just an asteroid member of the kuiper belt and its name is now just a number 134340.

By the time the existence of the Tyche (pronounced ty-kee) planet will be verified and the Tyche’s status will be promoted to being a Planet, the number of planets in our solar system will be backed again to nine. But Jupiter will not be the largest planet since the Tyche planet is believed to be four times larger than the Jupiter.

In Gizmodo report, it is said that no one has seen yet the planet. It just means that even scientists haven’t seen this yet.

However, the two scientists of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, believed that Tyche is hiding in the Oort Cloud and is 15,000 times farther than the earth’s distance from the sun and is 375 times farther than Plutos’s distance from the sun. These two scientists also believed that the data or information about the Tyche are captured already by the NASA Space Telescope called Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or WISE. They are already trying to verify its existence through the captured data. Once verified, they will try to locate its location. And once located other telescopes will be pointed to its location for the confirmation of the discovery.

By the way, Oort Cloud is a spherical cloud of comets with almost a light year of radius (from the sun as its center) and served as the outer edge of our solar system. It is believed that the unlimited number of comets we observed in the skies are coming from the Oort Cloud.

Here’s more things about Tyche:

1. Tyche was probably the planet of the other star and was just attracted or captured by our solar system. This information might be used by other scientist to discredit Tyche as the ninth planet of our solar system.
2. The name Tyche is derived from the name of the Greek goddess responsible for the destiny of cities.
3. Tyche’s atmosphere might be similar to that of the Jupiter and it is most likely made of Hydrogen and Helium.

In 2009, scientists were talking about the possible impact of  Apophis to earth. And according to NASA there’s only two percent possibility of impact.

The Russian scientist of the St. Petersburg State University, Professor Leonid Socolov, however, contradicted the NASA’s statement, saying that the asteroid that has a size of two football field will likely collide with the Earth on April 13, 2039.

The scientist explained that by April 13, 2029 the Apophis asteroid will pass close to the earth. And by that time, the Earth’s gravitational pull will tweak the path of the asteroid so that instead of just passing by the Earth, the asteroid will instead directly hit the earth that will cause a possible death of life form in Earth.

Watch this video of the possible event of the impact of Apophis asteroid and the planet Earth:

The professor, however, said that the possible of impact will become slimmer only if scientist will do something to avoid the impact.

Reference:

Car-size asteroid nears Earth Wednesday http://www.upi.com/ Science_News/2011/02/09/Car-size-asteroid-nears-Earth-Wednesday/UPI-66801297240200/

Nuclear Radiation is the energy emitted during the process that occurred in the atom’s nuclei. This process is called ionization and the nuclear radiation is also called ionizing radiation.

There are several types of ionizing radiation. Few of these are Alpha Particles, Beta Particles, Gamma Ray, Cosmic Ray and Neutrons.

The processes that produce nuclear radiation are radioactive decay, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, and accelerating particles.

The xray photo of sun as shown by the image below was taken by NASA last April capturing two huge explosion on the sun.

Two similar but larger sun activities were spotted by NASA last Sunday across the surface of the sun throwing the supercharged cloud called plasma into the space towards the direction of the earth. The sun’s plasma according to the estimates made by scientists will reach the earth atmosphere today, Tuesday which will be seen like a neon show on the skies. Satellite and communication facilities might be affected by this.

The solar particles that hit the earth last April were believed to be the cause of the destruction of the Intelsat’s Galaxy 15.

We’ll just hope that the event portrayed on the movie, “Knowing” will not be made into reality where in the sun’s flare hit the earth, burning everything in earth.

About the movie Knowing

As described by Amazon:

Nicolas Cage stars in this largely unsatisfying science-fiction tale that begins as a taut and spooky story concerning psychic legacies and ends up falling back on Steven Spielberg’s old, cosmic playbook for default explanations about weird phenomena. Cage stars as astrophysicist and widower John Koestler, whose young son attends a school where a 50-year-old time capsule is dug up and opened. Koestler’s son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), is given an envelope from the capsule containing a sheet of paper inscribed with seemingly-random numbers. Koestler interprets groupings of the numbers as prophesies (made in 1959) of disasters leading up to a globally catastrophic event late in 2009. Moreover, some of the later tragedies involve him or members of his family, suggesting the paper was meant to fall into his and Caleb’s hands. That’s not the only freaky thing drawing father and son in a direction they really don’t want to go. Among other things, a quartet of mute strangers keeps showing up with a powerful interest in Caleb’s whereabouts, and the daughter and granddaughter of the little girl who originally scribbled those numbers in 1959 are under the shadow of a separate prediction of doom. Everything goes swimmingly until it’s time for director Alex Proyas (The Crow) to begin tying up all the strings, and cliches start falling like rain. On the plus side, Knowing includes a couple of breathtaking scenes of calamity, the most horrifying (and realistic) of which is a jet crash the likes of which has never been committed to film.

A review made by Chris Pandolfi:

“Knowing” achieves a level of greatness so few science fiction films ever achieve. It’s not merely an engaging mystery–it’s a deeply thought-provoking fable that’s just as frightening as it is intelligent, and it ultimately makes a statement so profound that I was left completely awestruck. I don’t often have an experience like that at the movies, and for that, I’m indebted to director Alex Proyas and writers Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White, and Stewart Hazeldine. They’ve successfully crafted one of the year’s most stimulating films, taking the audience on a suspenseful, emotional, and ultimately (albeit unconventionally) redemptive journey that poses interesting questions on the nature of things. A movie like this could have easily placed technical achievement over character development, and thankfully, that didn’t happen; we care just as much about the people as we do about the spectacular special effects.

The story begins in 1959, when an elementary school class is asked to draw pictures of what the world will look like fifty years later. What they draw will be put into a time capsule, which will be reopened in the year 2009. Rather than draw a picture, the quiet, disturbed Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) writes out a series of numbers on both the front and the back of a piece of paper.

Flash forward to the present day. We meet an MIT astrophysics professor named John Koestler (Nicholas Cage), who teaches his students that two theories on the nature of the universe have been proposed. On the one side, we have the determinist view, which states that everything happens as the result of a predetermined–and more importantly, a predictable–sequence of events. How, for example, could the Earth be located at just the correct distance from the sun to sustain life? On the other side, we have the random view, which states that absolutely nothing can be predicted, that life, the universe, and everything happened as the result of cosmic coincidences. What exactly does Koestler believe? Here are some clues: His wife died some years earlier, and he’s openly stated that the existence of Heaven can’t be proven.

As it so happens, John’s young son, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), goes to the same school that Lucinda Embry attended fifty years earlier. The day comes when the time capsule is unearthed and opened, and lo and behold, Caleb gets the envelope containing the numbers Lucinda wrote. He then takes it home, thinking the numbers might mean something. John initially thinks nothing of it … until he places his wet glass of hard liquor on it and leaves a ring. Was it a predetermined act or a random act that led to a ring being formed around very specific numbers (the significance of which I won’t reveal)? More important, was it a predetermined act or a random act that landed Caleb with the page of numbers in the first place? While I won’t say what the numbers refer to (and this is in spite of the many ads that give plenty of hints), I will say that what John discovers changes him forever, forcing to consider ideas he never thought he would be able to consider.

To describe more of the plot would do you and the film a great disservice. Much of the story thrives on an engrossing mystery that only gets more unsettling with every passing scene. Visual motifs, such as shiny black pebbles, burning landscapes, and silhouetted figures emerging from the forest add great psychological weight. The same can be said for a house so old and ramshackle that, under different circumstances, it would be mistaken as being haunted. It ties in wonderfully with the psychological states of the characters inhabiting it. John is a solemn, broken man, estranged from his father, often detached from his son, occasionally dependent on a bottle of alcohol to drown his sorrows. Caleb is expectedly precocious but surprisingly fragile, always yearning for that which has been lost somewhere along the way. For the first time in a great while, we have a story that can actually support such characters; were it not for the awesome nature of the final fifteen minutes, John and Caleb would be nothing more than melodramatic clichés.

There are two more characters of great importance. One is Lucinda Embry’s daughter, Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne), who enters John’s life in a way that reaffirms the notion that nothing happens randomly. The other is Diana’s daughter, Abby (also played by Lara Robinson), who, like Caleb, has been contacted by the creepy silhouetted figures, eventually called the Whispering People. Watch John and Diana as they search through Lucinda’s abandoned home in the middle of the woods–the fear they express is disturbingly convincing.

Like last summer’s “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” “Knowing” is one of the best cinematic surprises of recent memory, a meaningful and absorbing allegory made with intention of challenging the audience in matters of spirituality. It’s difficult to say whether or not this film takes a religious stance; that would depend on your own view of the nature of the universe. There are, however, a number of religious implications, the least subtle of which is revealed in the final shot. This might account for some early reviews, where words like “overwrought” and “preposterous” came up. From my perspective, those who feel that way have failed to look any deeper than what was presented in the ads, which only scratched the surface. Contrary to what trailers and TV spots have been promising, this is not your average science fiction thriller. Serious time, effort, and thought went into “Knowing,” one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

Watch Knowing

I took 2 hours looking for the photos of the moon taken during the Lunar Eclipse last Saturday night. It happened because I forgot that these photos might be uploaded at the Flickr servers.

And finally got it at Flickr and one of the photos is the one shown below:

This is one of the images I missed to witness by my own. I really missed it.

I went home yesterday from my blogging job through the internet cafe in Maasin City at around 9:00PM. While riding my Yamaha Cripton Z motorcycle (for an hour), I was observing the moon behind me because according to the report there would be a total lunar eclipse on that night. But I found nothing.

Today, the Yahoo! News (AP) reported that the total lunar eclipse happened at 5:44 PM EST. I don’t know what’s the equivalent time of it here in the Philippines. I am not yet knowledgeable on world’s time zone. But one thing that I know, I was observing the moon at 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM Philippine time.

What’s Lunar Eclipse?

According to the news article, Lunar Eclipse happens when Earth passes between the Moon and the Sun.

Lunar eclipses occur when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, an uncommon event because the moon spends most of its time either above or below the plane of Earth’s orbit.

Sunlight still reaches the moon during total eclipses, but it is refracted through Earth’s atmosphere, bathing the moon in an eerie crimson light.

In other words, it’s the event when the earth can’t received the light reflected from the Moon, because the light of the Sun has been blocked by the Earth.

I am wondering if I can experience walking in a zero gravity ground. Our science class told me that the zero gravity can be experienced when a tube or an airplane is in high speed free fall.

There were times that I dreamed I was in the outer space floating like a balloon, or playing on the moon… I wish I can take a ride with the Zero Gravity plane, just like these science teachers:

It’s might be your first time to hear that there is a weather on the outer space. What is it? How does it happen? Is there storm in space? Is the earth affected by the space weather? Why are we concern of the space weather?

All these questions will be answered, just visit here.