Tonight you will have one extra second with which to celebrate the new year. A leap second, to be exact. This leap second is not a unique event – in the last 40 years, there have been 22 leap seconds. The last one occured in 1998.

The reason for the leap second is because of disputes between astronomers and physicists. Traditionally, our time scale is based upon the rotation of the Earth on its axis, as well as its rotation around the sun. However, this time is not a constant – that is, the length of a day has been ever-so-slowly increasing for many years. Physicists would rather have time be a constant, and thus invented the atomic clock and an exact time measurement. In order to keep the atomic clock in sync with the rotation of the Earth, leap seconds are added to the clock every few years.

How will you spend your leap second?

Wikipedia entry: Leap Second

In the nation of Peru there are annually a high number of UFO sightings reported, but like most UFO sightings, there are few pictures, and those there are don’t meet the quality standards of 1913 color photography. However absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and there are a few quirks in that region of the world that bear examination.

The largest of these features are the Nazca lines. The area is called the Pampa Colorada. It is 15 miles wide and runs some 37 miles parallel to the Andes and the sea. There is no sand in this desert. From the ground, one only sees that the dark red surface stones and soil have been cleared away, exposing the lighter-colored subsoil, creating the “lines”. But from the air, the “lines” collude to create geometric shapes, depictions of animals and plants in stylized forms, including images of humans.

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There is a disease which causes the human body and mind to gradually deteriorate, causing its sufferers to experience discomfort, memory loss, failed health, disfigurement, and severe physical and mental handicaps. It is always fatal, and there is no known cure. The scientific term for this disease is Senescence, though it is more commonly known as aging or growing old. Every single person is born with this condition, and it kills over a million people a year in the U.S. alone.

Thinking of old age as a curable disease seems strange to some people, but great leaps in medical progress over the past few decades are indicating a future where no one will need to suffer the deteriorating physical condition and the dulling of the mind which occur during aging. Scientists may be able to repair this flaw in evolution’s design, and perhaps perpetual youth will become a reality soon enough that you and I might live to enjoy it.

We here at DamnInteresting.com recently had an opportunity to converse with two of the men leading the effort towards the elimination of aging: Mr. Kevin Perrott and Dr. Aubrey de Grey. But we tried not to take up too much of their time, because they have a lot of work to do, and none of us are getting any younger.

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With all the debates on the teaching of creationism, evolution, and intelligent design this year, it’s good to know that some people take a more humorous approach to natural selection. Darwinian poetry is a project which asks a daring question – can the input of users cause inherently bad poetry to evolve into something better? By applying their own method of natural selection, the project hopes to create one of the most impossible aspects of any language – a good poem.

From the site:

The natural selection process occurs when a random peruser of the site picks one of two poems. Users are invited to vote on poem preferences in order to help the progression of poem society. Eventually the bad poems die off, while new poems are created when the good ones… well… I’ll tell you when you’re older.

Darwinian Poetry

The T-Rex, built by Campagna Corporation in Canada, is technically classified as a motorcycle. This low-slung, teardrop-shaped vehicle doesn’t look a lot like a motorcycle with its three tires, two seats, and steering wheel, but there isn’t quite enough there to classify it as a car, either. It is propelled by a ZZR 1200 Kawasaki motorcycle engine, and it is built with high speeds and high stability in mind.

Perhaps the most apt metaphor would be to call it a high-powered, pavement-friendly snowmobile. But that doesn’t really describe it either. It’s a unique species of hybrid automobile, which appears to have been sired by a sports car with a penchant for sexy Japanese bullet bikes. But regardless of its questionable parentage, it’s a peppy little bastard.

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This just in……

Get your tickets fast. The Russians are at it again. First, they gave rides in their fighter jets. Then they put a tourist in the International Space Station. Now they are offering the chance of a lifetime…a tour to the moon.

That’s right folks, step right up. For only 100 million dollars, you, yes you, can take a two week vacation to the moon. Imagine all the thrills and chills you will get flying to the earth’s only natural satellite and cruising around that big ball o’cheese for 5-6 days before returning to earth.

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Conventional nightvision relies on an image intensifier to convert weak light from the visible and near-infrared spectrum into visible light which can then be seen by the human eye. But nightvision can only work with what it’s got, so when nightvision confronts a scene which is completely dark, it has no light to enhance, and thus becomes useless.

But a new combination of technologies allows a handheld device to perceive great detail in total darkness without emitting a visible beam of any kind. The nine-pound Tiger Vision unit built by MobileLED uses an array of powerful infrared LEDs to shine an invisible beam before it, and has a special digital camera which converts the infrared light into the visible spectrum. It then displays the scene on a built-in four-inch LCD monitor, or on a remote eyepiece which can receive the camera’s signal from up to a hundred yards away. It’s basically a flashlight whose beam is visible only to the light’s operator.

I describe a technology very similar to this in my as-yet-unfinished novel… but the guys at MobileLED actually built the thing, so they are fair bit cleverer than I.

Further reading:
Product details page from tiger-vision.com
MSNBC Article on TigerVision

At humankind’s current rate of growth, it is estimated that by the year 2050, the planet will be host to three billion more people than it is today, making for a 40% increase over Earth’s current population. Yet at present, over 80% of the planet’s arable land is already in use, which leaves one to wonder how such a large number of people will be fed. No doubt improvements will be made in the efficiency of farming techniques, but only so many calories can be coaxed out of the fertile portions of the Earth each year.

Dr. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University has been leading an effort to address that very problem before it becomes a crisis, and his proposed solution is interesting and well-researched… it involves a series of high rises in urban areas where fruit, vegetables, and livestock can be raised by utilizing greenhouse growing methods and recycled resources year-round, allowing cities of the future to become self-sufficient. This concept is called the Vertical Farm.

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