"As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the "turn over cart" at approximately 7:15 PDT today, it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. The 18' long spacecraft was about 3' off the ground when it fell."
The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster. These ripples are evidence for sound waves that have traveled hundreds of thousands of light years away from the cluster's central black hole. [...]
In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C. For comparison, a typical piano contains only about seven octaves. At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe.
Update: danfuzz notes:
A little calculation reveals that the period of the "sound wave" is about 20 million years. Yay google calculator:
1 / ((middle c / (6th root of 2)) / (2^57))
= 19 593 253.1 years"middle c / (6th root of 2)" is the b-flat below middle c.
Charles McKinley found a unique way to save a few bucks getting to his parents' house: He crawled into a wooden airplane cargo crate and succeeded in shipping himself from New York to Texas. After hours of traveling, McKinley, 25, of New York City, pried open the crate with a crowbar Saturday morning. He popped up outside his parents' doorstep in the south Dallas suburb of DeSoto, shook the hand of a shocked deliveryman and walked away.
The deliveryman called DeSoto police, who arrested him on outstanding Texas warrants. The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration are investigating. [...]
Officials said McKinley's crate was put aboard a pressurized Boeing 727 from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Fort Wayne, Ind. The crate was transferred to a second plane bound for Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. A ground shipping company picked up the crate and delivered it to the residence of McKinley's parents. McKinley spent at least half a day in the crate and broke out just in time for the deliveryman to see him.
Samurai swim:Mutsuo Koga wades through water while wearing traditional Japanese Samurai armour and helmet weighing 33 pounds during the Japanese-style swimming championships in Shuzenji. (AFP/Toshifumi Kitamura)
