ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

Enjoy ‘Blue Moon’ tomorrow
Bangalore, August 29, 2012, DHNS:

Bangalore and other Indian cities would witness the “Blue Moon” day on Friday, a rare occurrence in which two full moons are visible in a single calendar month.

According to a note by Mumbai Nehru Planetarium Director Arvind Paranjape, the normal interval between two full moons is twenty-nine-and-a-half days, which is just short of the calendar month with 30 or 31 days, which usually means that there is one full moon each month.

However, when the full moon occurs on the first day of the month, a recurrence is witnessed in the same calendar month.

Though this may happen in any month of the year, February is an unlikely time for a “blue Moon” given that it has only 29 days even on a leap year.

“However, whether a particular place will have a Blue Moon or not, will be determined by its time zone. The exact time of August 31, 2012 full moon to the nearest minute is 7:28 pm IST,” Paranjpye said in the note.

“Nearly everywhere in the world, it will be the Blue Moon day on August 31. But for places like Auckland or Wellington in New Zealand which are in time zone +12 it will be September 1. These cities will ‘have’ the Blue Moon on September 30.”

The ‘Blue Moon’ occurs roughly once in two and a half years and the last one was witnessed on March 30, 2010.

The term “Blue Moon” is popularised by modern astronomy writers who wanted to draw attention to the ‘second full moon’ in a calendar month, but the term has also crept into the common usage through terms like “once in a blue moon”.

There have also been references to the full moon with blue hue while viewed through the smoke emerging from forest fires or through ashes of erupting volcanoes.

“As we had good rains in many parts across the country the rising full moon of August 31, soon after the sunset should offer a good viewing pleasure. Rains would have washed away the floating dust in the atmosphere and the Moon should look bright and soothing to the eyes,” Paranjpye’s note said.

However, with the on-set of rain over Bangalore and elsewhere leaving a permanent cloud cover over the skies, we could only hope for the curtains to depart to get a glimpse of the Blue Moon on Friday.

Now, charge your phone by simply holding it

LONDON: Next time your cellphone runs out of battery, you can charge it by just holding it in your hand, as scientists claim to have developed a new technology that turns body heat into electricity. Researchers say they have developed a way to turn body heat into electricity using nanotechnology to put tiny carbon tubes into miniscule plastic fibres and made them look like a fabric.

The 'Power Felt' can keep your phone going for up to 20% longer just through the power of touch, meaning simply holding one, or even sitting on it, could recharge the cell, the 'Daily Mail' reported. The technology has been created by professor David Carroll of Wakeforest University's centre for nanotechnology and molecular materials in the US.

According to Carrol, it could be the first wave of inexpensive ways to produce electricity that were far more affordable than current renewables such as solar, which was being held back by the high cost.

This helmet lets you think fake scenes are real

LONDON: Scientists have developed a new 'Inception'-style TV helmet which can decieve the human mind into thinking that fake scenes are real. Using the device, a wearer is unable to differentiate between a live and a recorded feed on TV. Even after the mechanism of the experiment was explained, some test subjects were not able to distinguish between the two.

Scientists said that it was effectively the same process as that which takes place in the movie 'Inception', the high concept thriller from 2010. In the film, Leonardo Di Caprio plays an industrial spy who is hired to plant an idea in the mind of a businessman by one of his rivals, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

The central conceit, is that in a powerful dream state we are unable to tell what is real and what isn't. The test involved a system known as Substitutional Reality which has been developed at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute's Laboratory for Adaptive Intelligence in Japan. Researcher Keisuke Suzuki told 'The Guardian' that it could be a 'powerful tool to investigate how our conscious experiences are constituted in daily scenes'. "In a dream, we naturally accept what is happening and hardly doubt its reality," he said. "Our motivation is to explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying our strong conviction in reality. How can people trust what they perceive? Answering these questions requires an experimental platform which can present scenes that participants believe are completely real, but where we are still able to manipulate the contents," Suzuki said.