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Repeating fast radio bursts found coming from outside our galaxy…

Repeating fast radio bursts found coming from outside our galaxy…

(This one definitely falls under the ‘side streets of life’ category…)

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Schematic illustration of CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope receiving the polarised signal from the new ‘fast radio burst’. Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions.    http://phys.org/news/2015-01-snapshot-cosmic-radio.html )

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Multiple short bursts of radio waves have been found coming from a single location far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy, Cornell astronomers have discovered. It’s the first time researchers have found these enigmatic “fast radio bursts” to repeat, indicating that the waves are coming from a powerful source located many light years away.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, have long been a mystery for astronomers. Only 17 have ever been found, and they usually appear as isolated events —€” flashes of radio waves in the sky that only last for milliseconds at a time. Scientists had theorized that the flashes were caused by events as exotic as the smashing together of neutron stars, but Cornell’s discovery indicates that whatever produces the burst isn’t destroyed in the process. Shami Chatterjee, a senior researcher at Cornell, said that the FRB in question in the paper did not have an explosive origin. “So, either there’s an odd coincidence,” Chatterjee said, “or maybe there are different types of FRBs. Either way, it seems we’ve broken this enigmatic phenomenon wide open.” Read more..

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/2/11150586/fast-radio-bursts-repeating-galaxy

Comic-magician Mike Hammer: From six years of struggle to his own show, theater..

Comic-magician Mike Hammer: From six years of struggle to his own show, theater..

Very nice interview by Robin Leach..

His sarcasm is stunning. His magic mystifies. Put the two together with a healthy helping of irreverence, toss in sassy and rude humor, and you have Mike Hammer, the Don Rickles of charismatic conjuring. Or the George Carlin of the unexplained.

The audiences at his comedy club in Four Queens downtown lap it up and return time and again for more of the silk-gloved insults of his comedy magic show “Get Hammered.” “It’s all in great fun,” said Mike the night I went to see him where one elderly gentleman who’d partied too much for his age fell asleep. It was as if a gift had dropped from heaven for the abrasive comic who wields a magic wand.

Mike leapt off the stage in fake offense and stood over the guest berating his sin of sleep. I haven’t laughed that much in a year of seeing shows here in Las Vegas. The off-kilter, hilarious humor is endless, and everybody was in stitches gasping for air.

Who gets away introducing one audience member as an axe murderer? Who gets away with deflating the tires of a Canadian tractor repairman on his first girlfriend date to Las Vegas?  Read more….

http://lasvegassun.com/vegasdeluxe/2016/mar/01/comic-magician-mike-hammer-from-six-years-struggle/

The science of magic: how tricks are changing real-life research..

The science of magic: how tricks are changing real-life research..

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The small yellow ball disappears from the magician’s left hand, reappearing moments later, plucked out of thin air, by his right.

Hardly a mind-boggling move at a magic show, but this is an academic meeting – and the disappearing act is being used to punctuate the finer points of taxonomy.

As the inaugural conference on the Science of Magic at Goldsmiths, University of London, revealed, the study of magic is not the stuff of Harry Potter – a character mentioned just once in the day, and sarcastically – but an actual research tool, studied in the pursuit of knowledge about perception, belief and even politics.

Such research was presented at the Science of Magic conference last week to around 80 attendees, made up of local students, visiting researchers, creative educators, and magicians themselves. (Where normally bored listeners fiddle with phones, this audience shuffled decks of cards.)

Many attendees were a hybrid of academic and magician. Conference convenor Gustav Kuhn is a senior lecturer in psychology at the south London university, but he’s also been a semi-professional magician since his teens. While the psychological principles used by magicians helped trigger his career path, he realised not far along in his studies that one could inform the other. “I started to draw these links between magic and psychology,” he said. “Quite a lot of the questions that magicians are interested in are actually really quite similar to the kind of things that psychologists study as well.” Read more…

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-02/23/science-of-magic