Fantastic time-lapse video made from images shot from the International Space Station showing what auroras look like from space.

[Read more →]

I’m trying to get to an event. It’s an evening event, part work and part leisure, and I really want to get there, especially since it’s the first in a regular series which I am hoping to attend. It involves a very straightforward train journey – one stop down the line, just five minutes away, then a 20-minute wait, then a change onto a branch line. The whole journey should take 40 minutes and this will be the first time that I have made it.

[Read more →]

This is a truly spectacular Northern Lights video, made from thousands of still photographs, by Tromso resident Ole Christian Salomonsen (that’s at a latitude of nearly 70 degrees north). It needs to be watched – full screen, with the speakers on – rather than talked about, so here it is.

[Read more →]

Like the common cold, the advance fee fraud (or 419) scammers keep adapting to survive. Here’s a cautionary tale from The Register which seems to involve almost every trick in the scammers’ book

[Read more →]

This is one that the publisher of the below-mentioned magazine really should have seen coming: the so-called Chinese classical poem illustrating its cover is reputedly an ad for a Macau brothel.

[Read more →]

Allow me to introduce you, via the wonders of the modern Internet, to this talented woman, yoga teacher Esther Ekhart from Bantry in Ireland.

[Read more →]

Particle physicists advise: live the next two days as if they were your last, just in case they are. CERN, the giant research laboratory in Switzerland that invented the internet and provided much food for thought for novelist Dan Brown, is about to switch on a new piece of kit that causes black holes.

[Read more →]

Sorry to be so intensely cynical about this. But I’m afraid I agree with the commenter on this Daily Telegraph story who says it looks every bit as much like a Dementor as the Virgin Mary.

[Read more →]

A previously unacknowledged earthquake threat to New York City has been discovered. But wait, there’s more. And it’s even worse news. The Indian Point nuclear power plant, in upstate New York, is sitting right on top of an earthquake hotspot.

[Read more →]

With just 365 (or so) days in any given year, the probability of two similar things happening on the same date is perhaps not so great. But, as this screengrab from the BBC’s On This Day archive feature shows, sometimes a kind of reverse serendipity can be at work, where tragic events from the past are echoed by unfortunate events from the present.

[Read more →]

On the subject of crazy, illegal art projects.. you’d have to go some way to beat the one detailed in the new documentary Man on Wire. But this film reveals a pathos completely unintended by the artist at the point of creation.

[Read more →]

Artists Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto, and six of their friends, noticed an architectural anomaly in the giant shopping mall being built in their town – Providence, Rhode Island, USA. As the project progressed, it became clear that this added up to “750 square feet of underutilized space inside of the mall.”

[Read more →]

Here’s an abject piece of ridiculousness – from no less a person than the Prime Minister. Who would have thought it?

[Read more →]

Here’s a truly bizarre news item. Jane Espenson is a very highly-regarded Hollywood producer and screenwriter who has worked on shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. She has a blog called Jane in Progress which aims to give writing and career advice to people wanting to follow the same career path.

[Read more →]

Today The Independent visits Dorset where, in among all the ‘piddles’ that have discreetly been converted to ‘puddles’ is, apparently this gem. What is it with this county and its lavatorial associations?

[Read more →]