Wikipedia Entries to Read in the Dark →

oparnoshoshoi:

spookymrsboo:

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You’re Feeling Possibly Receptive to the Idea That Ghosts Might Exist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belchen_Tunnel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly-Jourdain_incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenheim_Poltergeist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor’s_Grove_Cemetery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Morgan

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Want to Take Your “Walking Dead” Costume to The Next Level

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorruptibility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_burial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia_Felix-Mentor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_Brown_Vampire_Incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necromancy

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Find Yourself Wondering About the Historical Accuracy of ‘Hocus Pocus’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moll_Dyer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Sherwood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Talbye_Trial

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You Start to Wonder if Your Pet Knows Something You Don’t

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapham_Wood_Mystery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtoun_Bridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_(therapy_cat)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dog_(ghost)

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You’re a Complete Anglophile, Even on Halloween

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Heeled_Jack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borley_Rectory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_of_Glamis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_the_Ripper

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Decide Your Little Cousin/Nephew/Sister Isn’t Appropriately Scared of Monsters, and You Need to Remedy That ASAP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Lick_Monster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melonheads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster

5 Wikipedia Entries for When You Want Something Mystifying to Discuss on GChat All Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Dahlia

5 Wikipedia Articles for When You Feel The Need to Brush Up on All Things “The Devil,” (As One Does From Time to Time)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil’s_Footprints
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Thunderstorm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Devil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil’s_Chair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil’s_Tramping_Ground

5 Wikipedia Entries For When You Feel The Need to Prove That Women Can Be Heartless Murderers, Too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Báthory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Dyer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Gunness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_bell

5 Wikipedia Articles For When You Find Yourself Scoffing at This List Because You’re Still Not Sufficiently Creeped Out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anneliese_Michel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces_of_belmez
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amityville_Horror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Sooo reading these tonight.  And I felt rather proud that I knew quite a few of these already.  Like Voynich.  Every linguist’s wet dream.

List of Junji Ito Manga I’ve Read (Plus Links!)

blue-embryo:

Continuing an earlier post, I decided that I would compile a list of Junji Ito works for future reference. I bolded my personal favorites.

Note: I do not take any credit for the links I provide. I’m merely sharing what I’ve already read. This list will probably be incomplete, as some of these links are obscure and get deleted often. That, and I’m constantly reading new scanlated updates. Some of these are short stories, and some are complete sets. Some links of a short story may be repeated in the complete sets. Oh well. Here we go.

expose-the-light:

What if we had a planet instead of a Moon?

Our moon is a pretty big object. It’s big enough to be a respectable planet in its own right, if it were orbiting the sun instead of the Earth. (Actually, it is orbiting the sun in a nearly perfectly circular orbit, that the Earth only slightly perturbs… but that’s a topic for another day.) The Moon is a quarter the diameter of the Earth. Only Pluto has a satellite that is larger, in proportion to the size of the planet it orbits.

But what if the Moon were size of Mars, instead? It would like the picture above. Check out how some of the other planets of the Solar System would look in our sky, if they took the Moon’s place.

At a distance of about 240,000 miles, the Moon occupies a space in the night sky about half a degree wide. By sheer coincidence, this is almost exactly the same size the sun appears, which is why we occasionally get total solar eclipses. (We don’t get a total eclipse every time the Moon passes in front of the sun because the Moon is sometimes a little closer to the Earth and sometimes a little further away, so it will cover more or less of the sun during any eclipse.)

But it’s interesting to imagine what the night sky might look like if one of the Solar System’s planets were to replace our moon. (We’d have to ignore things like tides and gravitation, but that’s the advantage of doing things in the mind’s eye.) So what would we see if we were to replace the moon with Mars? The red planet is almost exactly twice the size of the Moon, so it would appear twice as big in the Earth’s sky. It would be easy to see with the naked eye details on the surface of the planet that were previously visible only through telescopes. You could watch the ice caps grow and shrink during the changing seasons, see dust storms form and move across the planet and make out features like Vallis Marineris and Olympus Mons.

Read More

gifmovie:

10 Amazing Less Known Natural Wonders

01 Socotra archipelago in Indian Ocean - Home of the Dragons Blood Trees.
02 Salar de Uyuni (or Salar de Tunupa) in Bolivia - The world’s largest salt flat.
03 Sossusvlei in Namibia
04 Zhangjiajie, China - Real life Pandora with 800 meters tall sandstone pillars.
05 The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, the 3rd largest in the world.
06 Great Blue Hole in Belize Barrier Reef - One of the largest coral reefs in the world.
07 Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve on Madagascar - A unique nature reserve.
08 Fly Geyser - a very little known geothermal geyser.
09 The Door to Hell (Derweze) in Turkmenistan - A huge open burning gas deposit.
10 Richat Structure in  Mauritania - a  mysterious circular feature in the Sahara desert.
+ More Nature!

expose-the-light:

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Space

There is still so little known about outer space by modern science, but of that little we do know, there are some extraordinarily amazing things. This is a list of the top 10 cool facts about Space.

10. Lightweight

Fact: If you put Saturn in water it would float

The density of Saturn is so low that if you were to put it in a giant glass of water it would float. The actual density of Saturn is 0.687 g/cm3 while the density of water is 0.998 g/cm3. At the equator Saturn has a radius of 60,268 ± 4 km – which means you would need an extremely large glass of water to test this out.

9. Constantly Moving

Fact: We are moving through space at the rate of 530km a second

Our Galaxy – the Milky Way is spinning at a rate of 225 kilometers per second. In addition, the galaxy is travelling through space at the rate of 305 kilometers per second. This means that we are traveling at a total speed of 530 kilometers (330 miles) per second. That means that in one minute you are about 19 thousand kilometers away from where you were. Scientists do not all agree on the speed with which the Milky Way is travelling – estimates range from 130 – 1,000 km/s. It should be said that Einstein’s theory of relativity, the velocity of any object through space is not meaningful.

8. Farewell old friend!

Fact: The moon is drifting away from Earth

Every year the moon moves about 3.8cm further away from the Earth. This is caused by tidal effects. Consequently, the earth is slowing in rotation by about 0.002 seconds per day per century. Scientists do not know how the moon was created, but the generally accepted theory suggests that a large Mars sized object hit the earth causing the Moon to splinter off.

7. Ancient Light

Fact: The light hitting the earth right now is 30 thousand years old

The energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago – it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun! The temperature at the core of the sun is 13,600,000 kelvins. All of the energy produced by fusion in the core must travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles.

6. Solar Diet

Fact: The Sun loses up to a billion kilograms a second due to solar winds

Solar winds are charged particles that are ejected from the upper surface of the sun due to the high temperature of the corona and the high kinetic energy particles gain through a process that is not well understood at this time. Also, did you know that 1 pinhead of the sun’s energy is enough to kill a person at a distance of 160 kilometers? [Sourced from Planet Science]

5. The Big Dipper is not a constellation

Fact: The Big Dipper is not a constellation, it is an asterism

Many people consider the big dipper to be a constellation but, in fact, it is an asterism. An asterism is a pattern of stars in the sky which is not one of the official 88 constellations; they are also composed of stars which are not physically related to each other and can be vast distances apart. An asterism can be composed of stars from one or more constellations – in the case of the Big Dipper, it is composed entirely of the seven brightest stars in the Ursa Major (Great Bear) constellation.

4. George’s Star

Fact: Uranus was originally called George’s Star

When Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, he was given the honor of naming it. He chose to name it Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) after his new patron, King George III (Mad King George). This is what he said:

In the fabulous ages of ancient times the appellations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were given to the Planets, as being the names of their principal heroes and divinities. In the present more philosophical era it would hardly be allowable to have recourse to the same method and call it Juno, Pallas, Apollo or Minerva, for a name to our new heavenly body. The first consideration of any particular event, or remarkable incident, seems to be its chronology: if in any future age it should be asked, when this last-found Planet was discovered? It would be a very satisfactory answer to say, ‘In the reign of King George the Third.’

Uranus was also the first planet to be discovered with the use of a telescope.

3. Extra Moons

Fact: Earth has at least 4 moons

Okay – that is not actually true – but it is very close. In 1986, Duncan Waldron discovered a asteroid (5km across) that is in an elliptic orbit around the sun with a period of revolution virtually identical to that of Earth. For this reason the planetoid and earth appear to be following each other. The periodic planetoid is named Cruithne (pronounced krin-yə) after an ancient group of Scottish people (also known as the Picts). Because of its unusual relationship with Earth, it is sometimes referred to as Earth’s second moon. Cruithne, is fainter than Pluto and would require at least a 12.5 inch reflecting telescope to attempt to be seen. Since its discovery, at least three other similar asteroids have been discovered. These types of objects are also found in similar relationships to other planets in our Solar System. In the image above (courtesy of Paul Wiegert), the earth is the blue circle with a cross in it, and Cruithne’s orbit is shown in yellow.

2. Sunspot Music

Fact: Sunspot activity may be the primary reason for the beautiful sound of Stradivarius violins

Antonio Stradivari is considered to be the greatest violin maker ever. He lived in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scientists have been unable to work out what it is about his violins that makes them so incredible, but they do know that the timber used to make them is a very important contributing factor. From the 1500s to 1800s, the earth underwent a little ice age mostly due to increased volcanic activity and decreased solar activity (this is called the Maunder Minimum). As a result of this cooling, the types of trees that Stradivari used for his violins were particularly hard (due to slow growth). Hard timber is especially good when making violins. It is very probable that had Stradivari lived in a different age, his violins would not be prized as they are today. This picture above is made of three overlapping photos. It shows the rings in the spruce tree used to make the most famous Stradivarius violin, the “Messiah.” The first row of numbers gives the width of each ring in millimeters (one mm is about the thickness of a fingernail). The bottom row gives the years in which each ring grew.

1. Cold Welding

Fact: If two pieces of metal touch in space, they become permanently stuck together

This may sound unbelievable, but it is true. Two pieces of metal without any coating on them will form in to one piece in the vacuum of space. This doesn’t happen on earth because the atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material between the surfaces. This might seem like it would be a big problem on the space station but as most tools used there have come from earth, they are already coated with material. In fact, the only evidence of this seen so far has been in experiments designed to provoke the reaction. This process is called cold welding. For those who still don’t believe it, here is the Wikipedia article on Cold Welding.

the-star-stuff:

A Field Guide to Alien Planets

(January 10, 2011)

Alien planets come in all shapes and sizes. Generally speaking, these planets — known to astronomers as exoplanets or extrasolar planets — orbit stars outside our solar system, but there are a few surprises out there. Here’s a look at the types of exotic worlds that scientists have discovered so far.

Pulsar planets

The first true discovery of extrasolar planets came in 1994, when radio astronomers discovered worlds around the pulsar PSR B1257+12, about 980 light-years away in the constellation Virgo. A pulsar is not a normal star, but a dense, rapidly spinning remnant of a supernova explosion. The oldest exoplanet known yet, PSR B1620-26 b, nicknamed Methuselah, is also a pulsar planet, located 5,600 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius

Hot Jupiters

A “Hot Jupiter” is a gas giant that is as close or closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. The first discovery of an extrasolar planet around a sun-like star was 51 Pegasi B, an exoplanet roughly 50 light-years away. Of the 429 exoplanets discovered to date, 89 have been hot Jupiters, most likely because their large size and proximity to their stars makes them easier to spot using current techniques.

Exo-Earths

Although the vast majority of the exoplanets found have been gas or ice giants, terrestrial exoplanets most likely outnumber these behemoths, and upcoming missions may soon finally discover rocky worlds the size of Earth with atmospheric conditions that mimic our own. To harbor life, these “Goldilocks planets” would have to orbit their star at just the right distance from  to not roast or freeze — as well as be large enough to retain an atmosphere , but not so large as to become a gas giant.

Super-Earths

A super-Earth is a planet with a mass roughly 10 times greater than Earth’s. The first super-Earths ever found were two of the planets around PSR B1257+12. Super-Earths might be more geologically active than our planet, as astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest they experience more vigorous plate tectonics because they possess thinner plates that are under more stress.

Eccentric planets

The planets in our solar system have, for the most part, fairly circular orbits. The exoplanets found so far, however, can have far more eccentric orbits, moving in close and then far from their stars. Where a perfect circle has an eccentricity value of zero, roughly half of exoplanets seen thus far have an eccentricity of 0.25 or greater. These eccentric orbits can cause exoplanets to experience extreme heat waves.

Super Neptunes

Only one “super Neptune” has been discovered so far: In 2009, astronomers discovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptune orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. The solid planet earned the name “super Neptune” because it shares many of the physical characteristics of our Neptune. Neptune has a diameter 3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth’s, the Super Neptune (named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earth masses.

Water worlds

There are two kinds of worlds that might be entirely covered with water . “One is a terrestrial Earth-like planet that’s just covered with a lot more water than our world, like the Kevin Costner movie, but is otherwise still familiar,” said astronomer Charles Beichman, executive director of NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute. “Or you can imagine a hot Neptune which is almost totally composed of water that is close enough to its star to not be frozen, but instead have an ocean thousands of kilometers deep and perhaps an atmosphere like a gas giant’s, with lots of hydrogen and water vapor.”

Chthonian planets

Sometimes hot Jupiters or hot Neptunes orbit too close to their stars, and the star’s heat and extreme gravity can rip away the planet’s water or atmosphere, leaving behind the rocky core. Scientists have dubbed these evaporated remnant cores “chthonian planets.” Their proximity to their stars could mean they are covered in lava.

Free-floating planets

There are hints that a number of bodies with the mass of gas giants might be free-floating, rather than orbiting a star. These bodies might either have escaped from their suns or never had a star to begin with, born in star-forming regions without the mass needed to ignite.

Rogue planets

A rogue planet is a planet-sized object that has been ejected from its system and is no longer gravitationally bound to any star, so it orbits the galaxy directly. To become a rogue planet, a planetary-mass object would have to be ejected from its solar system, making it starless. This could be achieved by the competing gravitational forces of the sun and larger planets. Also known as interstellar planet, or orphan planet, a rogue planet would require geothermal activity in to sustain life without energy from a star.