Most of the houses along Washington Highway and Berryman Drive have taken down their Christmas lights, but are now sporting green or yellow icicles. The sides of houses are splashed with a deep brown substance and sidewalks are also spotted with the stuff.

Residents say the material appeared between 9 a.m. and midnight last Tuesday.

Initial suspicions focused on “blue ice,” the frozen human excrement known to fall from passing jetliners, but the FAA investigated and quickly dismissed that possibility.

“The local flight standards inspectors investigated the situation and determined it was not from an aircraft,” FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac.

The Amherst Town Supervisor’s Office said that they are looking into the situation.

“We have contacted our emergency services people and we also have a waste water treatment plant in town and the interim engineer for that is trying to get the debris tested,” said Lisa Kistner, a spokeswoman for the town supervisor.

One resident provided Kistner with her own theory.

“We received a call this morning from a woman who owns a house on the same street, Washington Highway. She gave us her explanation because it happened to her last year,” Kistner said.

“She said it’s actually because the seagulls eat fast food at McDonald’s, which upsets their digestive tract. They were eating French fries out of paper bags… As soon as she got the fast food restaurants to make sure all of their trash was cleaned up in their parking lots, she no longer had that problem,” Kistner said. “She suggested that someone check the fast food parking lots because that is probably the root cause of this issue.”

Bird experts who have seen pictures of the goo agree that they resemble bird droppings.

“The splotches we see on the siding are consistent with what we would expect from a large flock of birds such as European starlings, a species that is found in large numbers in upstate New York at this time of year,” said Miyoko Chu, a spokesperson for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology after looking at video of purple splotches on house sidings.

But after seeing additional video showing green and yellow gunk on homes, Chu was baffled.

“More recent footage shows larger areas of greenish yellow wash, and we do not know what that is,” she said.

Chu wasn’t so sure about the French fry-eating seagull theory.

“The size of the droppings would suggest to me that it’s a smaller bird than a seagull. Small numerous droppings on siding are not what you expect to see from seagulls, which are larger birds,” she said.

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At its center, nearly every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole surrounded by a big bulge of stars. But whether the black hole or the bulge formed first has long been a chicken-and-egg question in astronomy.

Henize 2-10 is small and irregularly shaped, and it’s actively forming stars, which means it’s very similar to early galaxies, researchers say. The new finding therefore suggests that early galaxies also formed their central black holes before developing bulges.

“This is certainly evidence that the black holes came first,” said Amy Reines, the doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia who discovered the black hole.

But “I wouldn’t say it’s a done deal, because we don’t know for sure there’s only one path to galaxy formation.”

Meg Urry, a Yale University astronomer who was not involved in the current research, called the study well done, noting that “they have a lot of data.”

But as for whether Henize 2-10 is a key to unlocking the early universe, “you can never hang much on one object. They’ve done as well as can be done with only one object.”

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Scientists have long known that the magnetic pole moves. James Ross located the pole for the first time in 1831 after an exhausting arctic journey during which his ship got stuck in the ice for four years. No one returned until the next century. In 1904, Roald Amundsen found the pole again and discovered that it had moved–at least 50 km since the days of Ross.

The offset between the magnetic and true north varies with the particular location on the earth and is referred to as the magnetic declination.

When you take into consideration that the magnetic pole is moving toward Russia at a rate of 40 miles per year, changes have to be made.

They have shifted so much that a runway at Tampa International Airport has been shut down.

The runway markings and designations need to be changed so the airplanes can approach and land safely.

This was not the first change, in 2002. Minnesota airport had to make the same changes and in 2009. london’s Stansted airport made them too.

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For centuries people living in the Middle East have dreamed of turning the sandy desert into land fit for growing crops with fresh water on tap.

Metro Systems International, the company reportedly in charge of the project, boasted in a video presentation it created rainstorms in the deserts outside of Abu Dhabi.

Fifty rainstorms were created last year in the state’s eastern Al Ain region using technology designed to control the weather.

The secret project, which reportedly cost nearly $11 million, was funded by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE and leader of Abu Dhabi.

Most of the storms were at the height of the summer in July and August when there is  no rain at all.

The device consists of lampshade-shaped “ionizers” which generate fields of negatively charged particles that create the clouds that lead to rain, the company claims.

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Turanor is the brainchild of Raphael Domjam, a former Swiss ambulance driver. The name “Turanor“, which means “Power of the Sun,” has been inspired from JRR Tolkein’s novel, Lord of the Rings.

The 31-metre-long multi-hull vessel is topped by scores of photovoltaic panels, with a total area of more than 600 sq metres, that covers most of the catamaran’s surface. Additional panels are attached to outriggers on its starboard, port and stern sections, that can be retracted in stormy weather. This is possible by not riding the waves in the classic way.

The solar energy, which will be stored in the largest lithium ion battery in the world, will power the vessel’s silent, pollution-free electric motor.

The voyage is intended not so much to revolutionise sea travel but to prove the under-exploited potential of solar energy.

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Respectable team of Ukrainian and American scientists has used the second law of thermodynamics, proposing a novel “pyroelectric” method to power tiny devices using waste heat.

Using tiny structures called ferroelectric nanowires, they can rapidly generate an electrical current in response to any change in the ambient temperature, harvesting otherwise wasted energy from thermal fluctuations.

Pyroelectrictricity can play key role in consumer electronics and could be extremely useful for powering specific tasks in biological applications, medicine and nanotechnology, particularly in space because they perform well in low temperatures.

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Officials said there were no problems in the satellite itself.

It’s designed to give the Air Force its first full-time, space-based surveillance of satellites and debris in Earth’s orbit. It monitors them for possible collisions.

“Every day, threats to our nation’s valuable satellites and space platforms are growing,” said Col. J.R. Jordan, vice commander of the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center’s Space Superiority Systems Wing. “SBSS will revolutionize our ability to find and monitor objects that could harm the space assets we depend on for security, communications, weather forecasting and many other essential services.”

Launch will be at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. A command center at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo., will oversee day-to-day operations once in orbit.

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But, in a chilling echo of the computer Hal with an artificial intelligence from the iconic film, scientists have developed future robots that are able to deceive humans and even hide from their enemies.

An experiment by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology is believed to be the first detailed examination of robot deception.

The team developed computer algorithms that would let a robot ‘decide’ whether it should deceive a human or another humanoid robot and gave it strategies to give it the best chance of not being found out.

The development may alarm those who are concerned that robots who are able to practice deception are not safe to work with humans.

But researchers say that robots that are capable of deception will be  valuable in the future, particularly when used in the military.

Robots on the battlefield with the power of deception will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe.

‘Most social robots will probably rarely use deception, but it’s still an important tool in the robot’s interactive arsenal because robots that recognise the need for deception have advantages in terms of outcome compared to robots that do not recognise the need for deception,’ said the study’s co-author, Alan Wagner, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

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Many people talk about cement when they mean concrete. Cement is a fine-grained compound that turns into a solid when mixed with water. Cement is used to bind mixtures of materials into a composite solid. Concrete is a mixture of cement, sand and gravel. That is, cement is the glue of concrete.

Now that that’s clear, let’s talk about cement. Cement begins with lime.

Lime, the First Cement

Lime is a substance used since ancient times to make useful things like plaster and mortar. Lime is made by burning, or calcining, limestone—and that’s how limestone gets its name. Also a greenhouse gas is produced in great quantities by the cement industry.

Lime is also called quicklime or calx (from Latin, where we also get the word calcium). In old murder mysteries, quicklime is sprinkled on victims to dissolve their bodies because it is very caustic.

Concrete made with lime cement is known from archaeological sites in both the New and Old World, some more than 5000 years old. It works extremely well in dry conditions. It has two drawbacks:

• Lime cement takes a long time to cure, and while the ancient world had lots of time, today time is money.
• Lime cement does not harden in water but stays soft, that is, it is not a hydraulic cement. So there are situations where it cannot be used.

Ancient Hydraulic Cement

The Pyramids of Egypt are said to contain a hydraulic cement based on dissolved silica. If that 4500-year-old formula can be confirmed and revived, it would be a great thing. But today’s cement has a different pedigree that is still quite ancient.

Around 1000 BCE, the ancient Greeks were the first to have a lucky accident, mixing lime with fine volcanic ash and getting C-S-H.

C-S-H is still a mysterious substance today, but we know it is an amorphous gel without any set crystalline structure. It hardens fast, even in water. And it is more durable than lime cement.

The ancient Greeks put this new cement to use in new and valuable ways, building concrete cisterns that survive to this day. But Roman engineers mastered the technology and constructed seaports, aqueducts and temples of concrete as well. Some of these structures are as good as ever today, two thousand years later. But the formula for Roman cement was lost with the fall of the Roman empire.

Modern Hydraulic Cement

While lime cement continued in use throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, true hydraulic cement was not rediscovered until the late 1700s. English and French experimenters learned that a calcined mixture of limestone and claystone could be made into hydraulic cement. One English version was dubbed “Portland cement” for its resemblance to the white limestone of the Isle of Portland, and the name soon extended to all cement made by this process.

Shortly thereafter, American makers found clay-bearing limestones that yielded excellent hydraulic cement with little or no processing. This cheap natural cement made up the bulk of American concrete for most of the 1800s, and most of it came from the town of Rosendale in southern New York. Rosendale was practically a generic name for natural cement, although other manufacturers were in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Kentucky. Rosendale cement is in the Brooklyn Bridge, the U.S. Capitol building, most 19th-century military buildings, the base of the Statue of Liberty and many other places. With the rising need to maintain historic structures using historically appropriate materials, Rosendale natural cement is being revived.

True portland cement slowly gained popularity in America as standards advanced and the pace of building quickened. Portland cement is more expensive, but it can be made anywhere. It also cures faster, an advantage when building skyscrapers a floor at a time. Today’s default cement is some version of portland cement.

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The ranking criteria reflect the demands of Greenpeace’s Toxic Tech campaign to the electronics companies to:

• Clean up their products by eliminating hazardous substances.
• Takee-back and recycle their products responsibly once they become obsolete.
• Reduce the climate impacts of their operations and product

While Nokia ranks top of the list, their score did drop just slightly from the last report, due to “failing to do proactive lobbying for the revised RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances in electronics) Directive to adopt a methodology for further restrictions of hazardous substances, and immediately ban chlorinated and brominated substances.”

Sony, Toshiba, Philips and Apple rank next, in that order. And falling at the very bottom of the list are Lenovo and Nintendo at a measly 1.4. Not surprising…Nintendo always ranks last.

You can check out how other companies ranked and descriptions for why they received their particular score at Greenpeace’s Green Electronics Guide.

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