Angels are the new Vampires
We called the “angels are the new vampires” trend months ago, and already the facts are stacking up to bolster our claims. Disney’s purchase of Lauren Kate’s tween againsty angel book Fallen adds fuel to the sexy angel fire.
THR reported that Disney has picked up the rights to the brand new YA series Fallen. The first book is already out and there are three more yet to come, all of which Disney now own.
The story is strikingly similar to Meyer’s vamp series. A misunderstood girl meets a mysterious boy that she’s strangely drawn to. What’s his ace in the hole? Why he’s a fallen angel, doncha know, hence the title. Plus there’s another angel, also fallen, that she’s also drawn to, and they fight over her, as men are wont to do. Sign me up. And while we’re at it bring on Legion, Hush Hush and Going Bovine.
via THR
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A day in a life of the internet
This is a graphic depicting what the internet goes through on a typical day. It’s pretty freakin’ impressive. But it also made me feel pretty insignificant. Then I realized I’m practically the ringleader of this circus (metaphor magic!) and that’s when I removed the hose from my exhaust pipe.
Giant iceberg heading towards Australia
(CNN) — A massive iceberg — more than twice the size of New York’s Manhattan island — is drifting slowly toward Australia, scientists said Wednesday.
The iceberg, measuring 140 square km (54 square miles), cleaved off an ice shelf nearly 10 years ago and had been floating near Antarctica before commencing on its unusual journey north.
Named B17B, it was about 1,700 km (1,056 miles) off the coast of West Australia, according to the country’s Antarctic Division.
“B17B is a very significant one in that it has drifted so far north while still largely intact,” said Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young, who spotted the slab using satellite images taken by NASA and the European Space Agency.
“It’s one of the biggest sighted at those latitudes.”
It is unlikely to drift too close to the coast in its current form, Young said. The warmer waters will cause it to melt.
“As the water warms up, the iceberg is slowly breaking up, resulting in hundreds more smaller icebergs in the area,” Young said on the Australian Antarctic Division Web site.
In November, an iceberg estimated to be 500 meters wide and 50 meters high was spotted close to Macquarie Island in the southern Pacific drifting towards New Zealand.
Scientists working on the island were astounded by its size.
“We pulled out the binoculars that we use for work on the seals and, sure enough, it was a huge floating island of ice basically and, yeah, it was an incredible sight,” Australian researcher Dean Miller told CNN affiliate TVNZ.
The Australian Antarctic Division said the iceberg was part of a flotilla that would have broken off from a larger ice flow that possibly came from the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica’s largest.
Although shipping lanes in this region are not particularly busy in November, the icebergs prompted Maritime New Zealand to issue navigation warnings.
Three years earlier, another family of icebergs led to a small tourist boom when they drifted along the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island.
Oceanographer Mike Williams told Radio New Zealand the icebergs had “pretty much the same origin” but that some had probably been trapped in the icy seas of Antarctica for longer, before being carried north by the currents.
However he was reluctant to cite global warming as the reason for the large-scale movement of ice. “We do have to a change our position a little because in 2006 we thought this was a ‘once in a lifetime’ event.
“But large ice shelf carvings, where the ice comes from, are still only carving on a 30 to 50-year period.”
Spiralling sky light baffles experts
A giant light spiral in the sky has stunned onlookers in Norway, raising fears of an alien attack and forcing scientists to admit they are baffled by the phenomenon.
The unprecedented display could be seen for hundreds of kilometres in the dark morning sky, prompting thousands of Norwegians to bombard local media with reports of sightings.
Totto Eriksen was driving his daughter to school in the northern town of Tromso when he saw a light that “spun and exploded in the sky”.
“It looked like a rocket that spun around and around and then went diagonally across the heavens,” he was quoted by The Sun as saying.
“People just stopped and stared … it was like something out of a Hollywood movie.”
Top astronomer Knut Jorgen Roed Odegaard said he had never seen anything like it before.
“My first thought was that it was a fireball meteor but it lasted too long,” he said.
“I rang the air traffic control tower in Tromse (and) they said it was over in two minutes … that is far too long to be an astronomical phenomenon.”
He added that the event was not related to aurora borealis — the famous northern lights — and speculated that the light could have been an out-of-control rocket fired out of neighbouring Russia.
This theory has been embraced by other experts, although Russian authorities strongly deny any involvement.
