Totally Amazing and Unique News- 50% of Babies Will Live to Be 100!

More than half of babies now born in the UK and other wealthy nations will live to 100 years, researchers say.
Data from more than 30 developed countries shows that since 1950 the probability of surviving past 80 years of age has doubled for both sexes.
Professor Kaare Christensen, of the Danish Ageing Research Centre at the University of Southern Denmark, who led the study, said life expectancy had been increasing since 1840 and there was no sign of this trend slowing down.


Four 'ages of man'
The researchers said that man could now be regarded as having four stages of life - child, adult, young old age and old old age.
They said there was no evidence that the old old age group were unhealthier than their younger counterparts, partly because the frailest people died first, leaving the most robust to survive past 85.
And a study of US super-centenarians (age 110 to 119 years) showed that, even at these advanced ages, 40% needed little assistance or were independent.

People are not only living longer than they did previously, but also they are living longer, with less disability and fewer functional limitations .

"Professor Kaare Christensen, University of Southern Denmark"

 

Totally Amazing and Unusual Giant Space Smokestacks Plumes

If our eyes could see radio waves, the nearby galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) would be one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. What we can't see when looking at the galaxy in visible light is that it lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting gas plumes ejected by its supersized black hole. Each plume is nearly a million light-years long.

Amazing Photo Image

Unusual Dark Matter in NASA's Amazing 3D Map

March 26, 2010 -- Dark matter makes up the majority of mass in our universe. However, we cannot directly measure the stuff as it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation (i.e. it doesn't emit or reflect any light), but we can indirectly observe its presence.








In this beautiful multicolored Hubble Space Telescope image, the distribution of mostly dark matter has been calculated and mapped. Basically, the location and density of anything with mass has been plotted in a 3D representation of the cosmos.

But if the majority of matter (i.e. dark matter) cannot be seen, how did Hubble work out its location?







SLIDE SHOW: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has snapped images from the far corners of the known universe. Take a look at our favorite Hubble images of 2009.







Hubble is making use of a characteristic of space-time as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Matter bends space-time -- much like a bowling ball will warp a suspended rubber sheet because it's heavy -- and as light travels through this bent space-time, the light's path will be deflected. This deflection can be directly observed.







For example, if a distant galaxy emits light in our direction, it may be diverted slightly in its otherwise straight path. Like a glass lens being placed in front of a lightbulb, the galactic light will distort from our viewpoint -- the heavier the mass, the greater the distortion.







This distortion is known as "gravitational lensing" and it can be used as a tool to detect things like galaxies, black holes and, you guessed it, dark matter.

For One Amazing Hour The EARTH Went Dark

LONDON — Europe’s best known landmarks — including the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and Rome’s Colosseum — fell dark Saturday, following Sydney’s Opera House and Beijing’s Forbidden City in joining a global climate change protest, as lights were switched off across the world to mark the Earth Hour event.




In the United States, the lights went out at the Empire State Building in New York, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, among many other sites in the Eastern time zone.



Millions were expected to turn off lights and appliances for an hour from 8:30 p.m. in a gesture to highlight environmental concerns and to call for a binding pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This year’s was the fourth annual Earth Hour, organized by the World Wildlife Fund.



“I think it’s great to see that hundreds of millions of people share this common value of lowering our carbon footprint,” said Dan Forman, a spokesman for WWF in Washington.



Some 4,000 cities in more than 120 countries — starting with the remote Chatham Islands off the coast of New Zealand — voluntarily switched off Saturday to reduce energy consumption, though traffic lights and other safety features were unaffected, organizers said.



“We have everyone from Casablanca to the safari camps of Namibia and Tanzania taking part,” said Greg Bourne, CEO of WWF in Australia, which started Earth Hour in 2007 in Sydney before it spread to every continent.
By DAVID STRINGER, The Associated Press

Really Amazing!

New York, London and Paris

Truly Amazing Images From Hubble Space Telescope!

Three thousand light-years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope of the Cat's Eye Nebula

In this view of the center of the magnificent barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512, the Hubble telescope reveals a stunning 2,400 light-year-wide circle of infant star clusters.

Source: J. P. Harrington (U. Maryland) & K. J. Borkowski (NCSU) HST, NASA

Astronomers generally believe that the giant bar, which is too faint to be seen in this image, funnels the gas to the inner ring, where massive stars are formed within numerous star clusters. Located 30 million light-years away, NGC 1512 is a neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took advantage of a rare opportunity to record Saturn when its rings were edge-on, resulting in a unique movie featuring the nearly symmetrical light show at both of the giant planet's poles.

It takes Saturn almost thirty years to orbit the Sun, with the opportunity to image both of its poles occurring only twice during that time.



Really Quite Amazing and Unique Images!
Saturn Rings are very Unusual!

Source: NASA, ESA, and Jonathan Nichols (University of Leicester)

World's Most Expensive Speeding Ticket: $ 290,000 !

   I found this story very amazing indeed!
If you're going to set the record for the world's most expensive speeding ticket, you may as well do it in style. That seems to be the reasoning behind a Swiss driver who was caught driving his Ferrari Testarossa in a small village at 100 km/h in January 2010. A court in the northeastern Swiss canton of St. Gallen requested the man dip into his over-$23 million fortune to the tune of $290,000. The fine beat a previous Swiss speeding ticket record of more than $100,000, issued to a Porsche driver in Zurich in 2008, after a string of previous traffic offences.

Story by John Leblanc of MSN
 Photo courtesy of Ferrari

Library Book Overdue for 45 Years Finally Returned

                                  Unique  Old Books!

LONDON - It's common to return a library book late - but not by half a century.
Staff at a British library say they were surprised and puzzled when they received a book that was 45 years overdue through their mailbox.


Alison Lawrie, the principal assistant at Dinnington Library, near northern England's Sheffield, says the Penguin first edition copy of "Quatermass and the Pit" by Nigel Kneale was due back on Oct. 15, 1965.

She says the borrower remains a mystery because the library records don't go back that far, and the sender didn't attach a letter or note with the book.
Lawrie said Friday the sender need not worry about a hefty fine.
She says: "If the person who returned the book wants to come forward, we'd love to know the story behind it."


Stock Photography & Copyright by Soren Breiting.