Category: Science

The Washington Post article Rita Is Gaining Force in the Gulf answers a question I had about Hurricane Names: what happens in a very active year when there are more hurricanes than allotted names.

But there is a finite number of preselected names — 21 — each summer, and after Rita, only four are left this year: Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma. If that list is exhausted, the meteorological group will have to revert to a backup plan: naming storms using the Greek alphabet, beginning with alpha, beta and gamma.

The 10th planet discovered is bigger than Pluto!

If you need something to worry about, according to APOD: – Chicago Meteorite Fall, the average homeowner should expect to repair direct meteor damage every hundred million years.

Summer Solstice — from Eric Weisstein’s World of Astronomy has a chart of when exactly the summer solstice occurs each year. This year, the solstice occurs at 6:36 am (Universal Time) on June 21.

Since I am an early riser, I’ve probably seen the phenomenon of Shadow Set, mentioned by Astronomy Picture of the Day, but had never heard the term before reading about it here.

Machholz Meets the Pleiades in today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

The Horse Evolution faq from Talk Origins discusses the evolution of horses: At this point in the early Eocene, equids were not yet very different from the other perissodactyl groups; the Hyracotherium genus includes some species closely related to (or even ancestral to) rhinos and tapirs, as well as species that are distinctly equine. [Note: the particular species that probably gave rise to the rest of the equids, H. vassacciense, may be renamed, perhaps to “Protorohippus”.]

I was reminded of Jack’s comments about US media coverage of the disaster when I found RatcliffeBlog—Mitch’s Open Notebook: Tsunamis and U.S. media via Anita Rowland.

The Wikipedia has an article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake including an animation of the tsunami it created. The end of the article includes a table of contact information for aid groups.