On Dec. 27, the temperature on Mars reached about -20°F. In Saskatoon, Canada the temperature was -45°F. Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, and Calgary are experiencing colder temperatures (with wind chill) than daytime Mars, though at night, the temperature on the red planet plunges to below -100°F.
It’s so cold in Canada that electric poles are snapping in Nova Scotia, windows are breaking spontaneously, most ice skating has been canceled, and even Toronto’s famous polar bear plunge was postponed for the first time in 13 years.
The story of V-2 ended up Down Under is an intriguing one that involves science, politics and Cold War anxieties.
One of the captured V-2s in an Australian workshop.
Australia's two V-2s are currently in storage at an Australian War Memorial (AWM) facility in suburban Canberra.
"When
they came out [to Australia] flocks of people crowded to view them and
see these Nazi terror weapons," said Shane Casey, senior curator of
military heraldry and technology at the AWM.
One is mostly complete. Its components were seized after the war and
put together as part of Operation Backfire, a mission by the Allies to
capture and test German military technology.
"When the Allies conquered Germany, they found largely disassembled rockets or rockets ready to be assembled," Mr Casey said.
The
Meillerwagen trailer accompanying the V-2, which was used to raise the
rockets onto launch pads, is one of the few surviving examples of the
technology.
The other V-2, which left London's docks aboard the
vessel Karamea in February 1947, is today in bits, which are themselves
in disrepair. It was shipped to Australia primarily as a museum piece,
and little is known about its origins.
"There was some confusion
as to whether it was destined for the Australian War Memorial or whether
it was destined for the RAAF at Woomera. There seems to have been some
dissension in official channels about that."
The missile was trucked around the country as part of a fundraising mission, and video shows it outside Old Parliament House. One of the purposes of having the rockets in Australia was to boost
public interest in science, especially the emerging field of space
research.
In 1948, the media was invited to view the more complete V-2 at
Salisbury, where scientists had been inspecting it for design clues.
That work was part of efforts to develop a local rocket program for
defence - a project that also included the Woomera range. At some
point over the next few years, it was painted with a different colour
scheme. The trail goes cold until 1954, when the rocket was put on
display at a Salisbury school and at the Mallala air show.
By the late 60s, Australia became the third nation to design and launch a satellite to orbit the earth. Design work on Australia’s first satellite began in early 1967 as a
joint venture between the Weapons Research Establishment (WRE) and the
University of Adelaide. With, The US and the UK providing assistance on the project, including the US
Department of Defense, NASA, and the UK’s Ministry of Technology.
Kesha has good reason to feature several spaceships on her Rainbow album cover: she apparently experienced a UFO sighting.
The singer behind the emotional new ballad "Praying" recounted the far-out experience in a new interview on the Zach Sang Show. She didn't mention an actual encounter with any extraterrestrials, but she did see what looked like "little balls of fire in the sky."
"I
was in Joshua Tree, totally sober, let me preface -- completely f---ing
sober ... I think people would be like, 'She was on acid' or something.
I wasn't. I was on nothing. I was a totally sober Sally, just a lady in
the desert," Kesha said. "I look up in the sky and there's a bunch of
spaceships."
The story continued: "I swear to God, there were like
five to seven, and I don't know why I didn't like try to take a picture
of it -- I just looked at it. I was sitting on a rock, and I was like,
'What in the hell is that?' I was trying to figure it out, and then they
went away. And then they came back."
The pop star went on to say that "they came back in a
different formation" than the one they were in previously. "I was like,
'Those are f---ing aliens.' They were spaceships!"
Fans might recall an Instagram post in May that hinted at this happening: "ufos are real. i have seen them. not playing," she wrote at the time.
That sighting wound up being a defining moment that partly influenced the theme of Rainbow, due out Aug. 11. Kesha even titled one of the album tracks "Spaceship."
KNOWN AS A NODOSAUR, THIS 110 MILLION YEAR OLD, ARMOURED PLANT EATER IS THE BEST PRESERVED FOSSIL OF ITS KIND, EVER FOUND.
Some 110 million years ago, this armoured plant-eater lumbered through what is now western Canada, until a flooded river swept it into open sea. The dinosaur’s undersea burial preserved its armor in exquisite detail. Its skull still bears tile-like plates and a gray patina of fossilized skins.
For paleontologists the dinosaur’s amazing
level of fossilization—caused by its rapid undersea burial, is as rare as
winning the lottery. Usually just the bones and teeth are preserved,
and only rarely do minerals replace soft tissues before they rot away.
There’s also no guarantee that a fossil will keep its true-to-life
shape. Feathered dinosaurs found in China, for example, were squished
flat, and North America’s “mummified” duck-billed dinosaurs, among the
most complete ever found, look withered and sun dried.
This remarkable fossil is a newfound species
(and genus) of nodosaur, a type of ankylosaur often overshadowed by its
cereal box–famous cousins in the subgroup Ankylosauridae. Unlike
ankylosaurs, nodosaurs had no shin-splitting tail clubs, but they too
wielded thorny armor to deter predators. As it lumbered across the
landscape between 110 million and 112 million years ago, almost midway
through the Cretaceous period, the 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound
behemoth was the rhinoceros of its day, a grumpy herbivore that largely
kept to itself. And if something did come calling, perhaps the fearsome Acrocanthosaurus, the nodosaur had just the trick: two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders like a misplaced pair of bull’s horns.
