Something Disturbing

Watch the following video in the following time, in which a top will appear: 11:15, 26:30, and 49:10. There is a top moving, and for a very LONG time.

What the @!*&$ is in that black box?! Is it the bump on it? Is there some magnet in there that keeps it moving?

Zerg and Extragalactic Planet

I found two cool stuffs. First, a cool video of a weird creature which I have no idea what it is. PZ suggests tubifex worms, though:

I call it zerg, though, because it looks so much like the Starcraft creature’s egg, like the one in the upper left of the image.

For some weird reason, some of those youtube commenters think it is an alien. I swear, if I read any more youtube comment,  my brain cells will cry out in a wave of apoptosis.

Now, the second stuff, it is about a news that came out  a month ago, but which is still pretty cool. Basically, some Italian astronomers believe they detected planet by microlensing. The coolest part about this is that the planet they detected was in the Andromeda galaxy! Basically, the way the detection work is in the way they use the gravitational field of some huge objects, say a star, in order to see what is behind. Gravity is like a magnifying lens, it bends the light behind it and focus it. The reason for that is that basically, gravity pulls on the light and bend it. Or as Einstein’s general relativity described it, the mass bent space-time around it, thereby curving the path which the light takes. The following is a simplified version of gravitaional lensing which you and I understand:

An analogy to that is like the convex lens below:

Such phenomena can produce cool things like this: