11 Times The Doomsday Clock Time Has Been Adjusted

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If you haven't heard of the Doomsday Clock, here's a brief and terrifying synopsis for you: It was created in 1947 at the University of Chicago as an easy analogy to show people how close we are to armageddon at any given moment. 'Midnight' on the clock represents doomsday, and, obviously, the closer the hands are to midnight, the closer we are to total annihilation.

On January 26, 2917 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock would be set ahead 30 seconds. We now stand at 2 minutes and 30 seconds to midnight. It's the closest we've come to midnight since the 1950s.

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year

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Interesting and unexpected facts from daily news stories of last year.

Mysterious Creature Filmed In London's River Thames

A video which seems to show a 'strange creature' in the Thames has divided the internet over whether it is a whale, a submarine or the Loch Ness Monster.

The YouTube clip, taken from the Emirates Air Line cable car, shows a long dark shape which appears to have two humps emerging from the river. After a brief glimpse, it disappears back beneath the murky water in front of The O2 in Greenwich.

The Norway Spiral

image credit: Bill Davis

On December 9, 2009, a curious spiral of blue and white light appeared in the night sky over northern Norway and Sweden, freaking out a section of the public and generating an intense debate among astronomers and scientists as well as conspiracy theorists.

Everything from anomalous Northern lights, to aliens and a trans-dimensional wormhole was suggested. The light was seen from all across northern Norway as well as from northern Sweden, and was reported to have lasted for 10 minutes.

David Bowie Dead At 69

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David Bowie, born David Robert Jones, whose incomparable sound and chameleon-like ability to reinvent himself made him a pop music fixture for more than four decades, has died. He was 69. David Bowie died Sunday after an 18-month battle with cancer.

25 era-defining photos of David Bowie through the decades.

People Everywhere Share Messages Of Support, Solidarity For Paris

I'm shocked by what happened in Paris, France last night. My thoughts are with the victims and families of those affected by this horrible tragedy.

Scrape It Off, Scrape It Off

image credit: Kristin Wall

On a wall in Seattle's Pike Place Market, thousands of pounds of chewing gum have built up over the past 20 years, stuck there by locals and visitors, eventually becoming a tourist attraction on its own.

This week, the millions of gum wads are being scraped and steam-cleaned away, in a move to preserve the historic buildings. The Pike Place Market Preservation & Development Authority plans to weigh the removed gum before throwing it out. There are apparently no plans to prevent the gum wall from returning once the cleaning is complete.

(via Bits & Pieces)

The Man Who Scans Newspapers

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Computer expert Tom Trynisk has built a historic newspaper site that's orders of magnitude bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy with millions of dollars to spend.

Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress' Goliath. His site has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages.

(via Mental Floss)

Treasure Hunters Say They Found Nazi Gold Train

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Treasure hunters Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter claim they discovered the Nazi gold train and that the long-lost £250million Amber Room could be inside. Koper and Richter discovered the train close to the small town of Walbrzych in south-west Poland, after a German man revealed its location on his deathbed.

It is thought be laden with gold, looted paintings and one noted author went as far to claim that it contrained the Amber Room of the Russian Czars which was looted from a Russian palace by Nazi troops in 1941.

Queen Elizabeth: The Many World Leaders She Has Outlasted

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Yesterday, Queen Elizabeth II became the UK's longest serving monarch - overtaking Queen Victoria's reign of 63 years, seven months and two days. When Elizabeth became Queen in 1952, Stalin was still leader of the USSR and Truman President of the US.

Since then Her Majesty has seen many notable statesmen and women come and go, although one current monarch who came to the throne before her is still in place.

Shade Balls Are California's Most Mesmerizing Water-Saving Trick

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Black plastic shade balls have been used for all sorts of purposes over the years. They've been deployed to keep birds out of water near airport runways, control vapors in industrial ammonia tanks, or stop water from evaporating at petroleum operations.

The city of Los Angeles has realized that shade balls can also be useful for protecting drinking water from contaminants. Back in 2007, the LA Department of Water and Power discovered its reservoirs contained a fair amount of bromide and chlorine. The city decided it would shield some of its reservoirs from the sun. And shade balls were a low-cost option.

(thanks Cora)

The New Art Of Coffee

A new machine called the Ripple promises to make lovely art atop your latte's foam. Using special cartridges filled with a natural coffee extract, the Ripple is able to reproduce incredibly detailed images on steamed foamy milk using techniques borrowed from both 3D and inkjet printers.

It takes less than 10 seconds to do its thing. Customers will be able to use a mobile app to place their orders, requesting anything from text messages with custom fonts, to cartoon images, even high-res photos they have stored on their smartphone already.

(thanks Cora)

Expanding The Panama Canal

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In 2006, Panamanians approved a referendum to expand the Panama Canal, doubling its capacity and allowing far larger ships to transit the 100-year-old waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific. Work began in 2007 to raise the capacity of Gatun Lake and build two new sets of locks.

Sixteen massive steel gates, weighing an average of 3,100 tons each, were built in Italy and shipped to Panama to be installed in the new locks. Eight years and $5.2 billion later, the expansion project is nearing completion. The initial stages of flooding the canals have begun and the projected opening date has been set for April of 2016.

Phone Addicts Get Their Own Text-Walking Lanes In Belgium

After Chongqing in China and Washington DC in the USA, now the city of Antwerp in Belgium has its own 'text walking lanes.' A local smartphone specialist, MLab, discovered that a lot of people text while walking, then bump into each other and drop their smartphones. With broken screens, buttons or trashed cases as a result.

(thanks Cora)

The Face Of Litter

Ad agency Ogilvy & Mather Hong Kong created a very creepy Earth Day campaign for the Hong Kong CleanUp Initiative. The agency tapped Parabon NanoLabs to do DNA testing on bits of trash found on the street, such as coffee cups and cigarette butts. The company then used Snapshot DNA phenotyping to produce a sketch of each litterer's face based on the DNA sample found on the trash.

The mug shots were featured on posters near the trash-infested areas. The portraits weren't of real people, just reproductions shaped according to the genetic data, the agency is hoping that the 'Wanted'-style ads are enough of a deterrent to make people clean up after themselves.

The Fascinating, Never-Ending Job Of Painting The Golden Gate Bridge

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The Golden Gate Bridge is under attack. Corrosive salt air, roadway contaminants, age, UV rays - all these things are trying to turn the majestic span into a pitted skeleton.

Luckily the bridge has a powerful ally: an elite squad of painters, numbering just a few dozen. These busy operatives scurry up, down, and around the span on a never-ending quest to keep it protected and looking sharp.

Mysterious Black Ring Over Kazakh Village

A video of a mysterious dark ring in the sky over the village of Shortandy, Kazakhstan left people puzzled and prompted a wave of speculation. Some assumed that the smoky ring is the result of acetylene or a fireworks explosion. Others blamed the phenomenon on the work of a Vortex ring device.

In fact, this seems to be the result of an electrical transformer explosion. When electrical transformers explode, they produce some amazingly resilient smoke rings.

(thanks Ilya)

Spaceflight Now

If you're interested in what's going on in space, Spaceflight Now is the best source for space news. Operated from Cape Canaveral in Florida, Spaceflight Now features current news, ongoing missions, upcoming launches, and archived articles.

Rogue Owl Caught After Year-Long Reign Of Terror In Dutch Town

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A rogue owl that has terrorised the city of Purmerend in the Netherlands for the past year, forcing citizens to arm themselves with umbrellas at night, has been caught by a falconer last Friday.

Dubbed the 'terror owl' by the city's residents, the aggressive European eagle owl is suspected of more than 50 attacks on humans, swooping silently from above and leaving many of its victims bloody and bruised.

607-Foot-Long 'Candy Carpet' Mosaic Installed On A Sidewalk In Chengdu, China

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A 607-foot-long 'carpet' of candy, arranged into a colorful mosaic, was installed on a sidewalk in Chengdu, China as part of a recent promotion for the IFS shopping center. The candy carpet was made of 13 tons of candy and spanning 14,000 square feet.

The candy carpet installation was created by artists Craig Redman and Karl Maier. In addition, the candy wasn't wasted: it was given away to underprivileged children after the close of the installation.

(thanks Cora)