Meterorite Fragments Located

~The remnants of the meteorite from the previous post have been located near an area with the wonderful name of "Buzzard Coulee", on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. The meteor is now believed to have been a roughly ten-ton asteroid fragment, most of which disintegrated while falling to Earth. No large chunks of it have yet been located, only small fragments.

Incoming!

~A few days ago, the dashboard camera of a police car caught this incredible footage of a meteor over Edmonton, Canada:



^ If I saw something like that, my first instinct would probably be to duck and cover! Astronomers now hope to recover the pieces of the meteor that may have landed on the ground. You can read the story here.

Book Review: Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians

Fellow Librarians:

It has come to the attention of the Librarian Council that fugitive oculator Alcatraz Smedry has recently published a memoir of his early life titled "Alcatraz versus Evil Librarians", under the absurd pseudonym of Brandon Sanderson. Said volume is an EXTREME THREAT to the hegemony of global librarian domination, and it is our task to deal with the fallout caused by its unfortunate publication.

Presented as an exciting coming-of-age story, Alcatraz follows the orphaned title character as he receives a mysterious package in the mail on his twelfth birthday, and soon learns the truth about the conspiracy of librarians that secretly rules most of the world. He has the audacity to infiltrate, with the assistance of a motley band of his relatives from the Free Kingdoms, one of our regional headquarters (disguised as a public library as per standard protocol). Along the way, he confronts sword-wielding librarian guards, miniature talking dinosaurs, laser-firing glasses, a powerful Dark Oculator, and magically-animated death-dealing romance novels.

Young adults will surely enjoy this seditious book, cunningly disguised as "fiction" to entice ignorant readers. While some members of the Council argue that this book should be immediately banned and destroyed on sight by librarian operatives, I believe the opposite approach is in order. Read this book, recommend it to patrons, and extol its virtues! They will surely love it and thank you for the recommendation. Of course, they will believe that "Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians" is merely a work of fiction…which is exactly what we want them to think.

Sapare Aude,

~DJD~

Dark Oculator 1st Class

Inner Libraria

Connecting With Friends and Family

~For my class in Young Adult Literature, my group set up a website titled "Connecting with Friends and Family":

http://familyandfriends.weebly.com/

From the main page, you can select the tabs at the top for sections on friends, family, and family-friendly places; from within each section, there are link on the bottom of the page to subsections with books, movies, music, and magazines relevant to each section.

Along with finding pictures for the website, my job was to locate relevant movies and television shows about family and friends, as well as fiction and nonfiction books. I managed to include some of my favorite novels from when I was younger, such as Invitation to the Game, The Machine Gunners, and The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm.

Phoenix Down

~The Phoenix lander on Mars has stopped communicating with Earth, after five months of scientific exploration on the red planet. Originally planned to last only three months, Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, 2008, setting down on the northern polar area of the planet.

The main objective of the mission was to analyze the history of water in the polar areas, which was known to exist from the observations of previous satellites but of which nothing was otherwise known. Some of its findings include:

• Verifying the presence of water ice and salts in martian soil
• Taking over 25,000 photographs, including some at the atomic level using a powerful microscope
• Analysis of the martian climate and weather patterns, including snow and whirlwinds
• Analysis of martian soil through Phoenix's on-board chemistry lab

Phoenix will be missed, but it was an important part of martian space exploration. By detecting water ice and providing humanity with information on the weather patterns of Mars, we know more about the planet that will be useful in an eventual manned landing in the future. Right now, I'm just glad that Phoenix wasn't hit by the Mars Curse. By the way, here's a link to a blog with some of the best pictures taken by Phoenix.

Unknown "Structures" Tugging at Universe

~NASA astrophysicists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland recently reported some astounding results during a large-scale survey of galaxies in the universe. Simply put: rather than the galaxies all moving away from each other as expected according to the Big Bang Theory (no no, not that Big Bang Theory), much of the matter in the universe seems to be moving in the same direction: towards some massive object(s) beyond the boundary of the visible universe, pulling at everything like an immense magnet.

The study was an analysis of information from a previous study, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped out the intensity of cosmic microwave background radiation throughout the visible sky. The cosmic background radiation, assumed to be a byproduct of the big bang, contains temperature fluctuations which also reveal the velocity of distant galaxies. The expected result of the new study was that the farther away distant galaxy clusters are from us, the slower their motion would appear to us on Earth.

However, what the scientists discovered was quite different: rather than an apparent slowdown, the galaxy clusters (such as the Bullet Cluster pictured above, some 3.8 billion miles away) are all moving at the same speed, about two million miles per hour, and more importantly, they are moving in the same direction.

The phenomenon has been nicknamed "dark flow" by Alexander Kashlinsky, the lead scientist on the study (apparently because if you can't account for something in astronomy, you just add "dark" in front of it). The tentative hypothesis to explain the phenomenon is that the rapid inflation of the early universe just after the big bang pushed large amounts of matter beyond the cosmological horizon; as the inflation of the universe slowed to what it is today, the matter continues to be pushed "outside" of what we can see. Another theory is that some as-yet-undiscovered curvature of space results in the apparent movement in one direction.

Still, if these controversial findings hold up, the cosmological implications would force us to reevaluate key aspects of Big Bang Theory, which is currently the leading cosmological model. The current theory assumes that space has near-identical properties everywhere in the universe, but if matter (and therefore space) exist beyond the visible universe, they have to be accounted for somehow in our model of cosmology.

The complete study was published in the October 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed astrophysics journal. You can look at the published article in PDF format here, but be warned that it's heavy on physics.

My theory is that the galaxies are all very hungry, hence their movement towards a certain restaurant.

Farewell Mike

~Michael Crichton died unexpectedly yesterday of cancer at age 66. He was the writer of many novels (most famously, Jurassic Park) most of which were made into films. He was also a screenwriter, and was the creator of the long-running hospital drama ER.

This is especially sad for me, because Crichton was one of my favorite writers when I was younger. I still remember the first book of his that I read--it was a paperback copy of Sphere, which I ordered from the Scholastic book magazine when I was in Mr. Post's 5th-grade class at Fishkill Elementary. I've read it at least a half-dozen times since then, and I've also read most of Crichton's other thriller novels. As for the film adaptions...well, with the exception of "Jurassic Park", they were lacking, to say the least. I'm still waiting for Jurassic Park 4: Dino-Riders:



I've not enjoyed Crichton's most recent novels. He seemed to become increasingly bitter in his writing, and his novel "State of Fear" is widely viewed as an anti-environmentalist screed (Crichton once famously pronounced that "environmentalism is a religion", angering many). The last book of his I read (and the last one published prior to his death) was Next, about genetic engineering. While it raised some very interesting issues, as a novel it was a failure, with disconnected plot lines that never linked to each other.

Still, I'll miss Crichton's novels; I may not have enjoyed his more recent books as much as his earlier works, but I would always read them and look forward to the next one. He was a master of taking controversial, modern issues and working them into the plots of his books. For example, he has tackled such diverse issues as genetic engineering (Jurassic Park, Next), sexual harassment (Disclosure), cultural clashes (Rising Sun), psychological horror (Sphere), nanotechnology (Prey), vikings (Eaters of the Dead), killer viruses (Andromeda Strain)...you get the idea. His most recurring themes were technology-run-amok, the breakdown of organized systems, and a calm, well-educated protagonist that solved the problem though rational thinking.

Naturally, Crichton's death immediately launched an epic pun threat on reddit based on the titles of his novels:

Don't worry. He'll be buried in amber and one day ...

He fell Prey to The Andromeda Strain...too soon?

Don't get into a State of Fear that you'll be ostracized. It only Congo well for you.

Hes reached the end of his personal Timeline - R.I.P Michael

He literally was The Terminal Man

He's phear of technology was well known.

In the interest of full Disclosure, let's not forget his accomplishments.

Accomplishments that can be seen in the light of the Rising Sun.

What else can we say? What's Next?

Next? There Sphere we'll see Eaters Of The Dead.

He was such a great writer... I feel like his death was a Great Train Robbery. Did he die in the E.R.?

Things You May Not Have Known About Michael Crichton:

• The man was gigantic: 6'9''!!
• He was a graduate of Harvard Medical School, so we should be calling him Dr. Crichton, thank you very much.
  
• He had a dinosaur named after him ("Crichton's ankylosaur", a small, armored plant-eating dinosaur that dates to the early Jurassic Period, about 180 million years ago).
• The lead character of the science-fiction show Farscape, John Crichton, was named after Michael Crichton
• When he was in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names "John Lange" and "Jeffery Hudson", both of which are subtle references to his unusual height.
• He once wrote a textbook about computer programing titled Electronic Life.

Crichton may be gone, but he won't be forgotten: his last novel will be published posthumously next year. Perhaps you should get yourself down to the library and check it out.