- Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a bizarre brain condition where your perception of the world is wayyyy off Boing Boing
- Alice in Wonderland syndrome: From seeing people with dragon faces to objects moving too slow or too fast, here’s all about it | The Times of India timesofindia.com
- Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: A Not so Popular Disorder The Epoch Times
- The mystery of Alice in Wonderland syndrome BBC
- Alice in Wonderland syndrome: From seeing people with dragon faces to objects moving too slow or too fast, here’s all about it Times of India
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars – Otherworldly Holiday Scene With Cube-Shaped Snow
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured these images of sand dunes covered by frost just after winter solstice. The frost here is a mixture of carbon dioxide (dry) ice and water ice and will disappear in a few months when spring arrives. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet’s coldest season.
When winter comes to
Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet’s elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.
Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too.
Two Kinds of Snow
Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.
“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.”
HiRISE captured these “megadunes,” also called barchans. Carbon dioxide frost and ice have formed over the dunes during the winter; as this starts to sublimate during spring, the darker-colored dune sand is revealed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
How We Know It Snows
Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and surface missions can’t survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars’ north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.
NASA scientists can measure the size and shape distribution of snow particles, layer by layer, in a storm. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission is an international satellite project that provides next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Ryan Fitzgibbons
Cubic Snowflakes
Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.
“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”
The HiRISE camera captured this image of the edge of a crater in the middle of winter. The south-facing slope of the crater, which receives less sunlight, has formed patchy, bright frost, seen in blue in this enhanced-color image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Jack Frost Nipping at Your Rover
Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning Sun.
HiRISE captured this spring scene, when water ice frozen in the soil had split the ground into polygons. Translucent carbon dioxide ice allows sunlight to shine through and heat gases that escape through vents, releasing fans of darker material onto the surface (shown as blue in this enhanced-color image). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Winter’s Wondrous End
Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to “thaw” and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.
This “thawing” also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.
Mars is a ‘winter wonderland’ in this frosty photo
A newly released image of Mars shows an icy scene, with ribbons of red and white dancing across a frosty landscape near the planet’s south pole.
While the snowy scene may evoke the feeling of a “winter wonderland” on the Red Planet, it was actually captured by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter on May 19. This means that the frigid image actually represents spring in the Martian southern hemisphere and the Martian ice was beginning to recede.
Just six days before much of Earth marks a new year, on Dec. 26, the Red Planet will commence its own new year, which will last 687 Earth days. The planet has four seasons, winter, spring, summer and autumn, and just like on Earth, the Red Planet’s winter is cold and summer warm, although winter is much colder than ours, with temperatures on Mars dropping as low as minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 60 degrees Celsius).
Related: This icy crater near Mars’ north pole is a winter wonderland (photos)
The yuletide period is special for Mars Express too: Christmas Day 2022 marks 19 years since the spacecraft arrived at Mars.
Arguably the most prominent features in the newly released image are two massive impact craters, banded with alternating layers of water ice and sediments called “polar layered deposits.” These deposits can also be seen in the ridge that stretches between the two craters.
As the ice is depleted, more elevated regions appear frost-free, and throughout the image dark dunes poke through the surface frost in other areas. Dune fields appear as sharp ridges that run parallel to the most prevalent wind direction and in line with the shape of the underlying features.
Scientists think that the dust that fills these dunes is dark because it originates from buried material from volcanoes that erupted in Mars’ ancient history that was eventually exposed to strong Martian winds that easily carried it across the Red Planet’s surface.
Other dark spots in the image represent this dust and the action of jets that erupt through the icy surface when underlying carbon dioxide ice is transformed straight into gas, a process called sublimation. These jets cause geysers of dust to launch into the Martian atmosphere, then settle in dark splotches on the surface of the planet.
These aren’t the only elements in the image caused by sublimation, however. The polar region is punctuated by a number of large, irregularly shaped features produced by sublimating ice. These look like empty lakes gouged into the surface of Mars, with a pronounced example of this visible in the upper left-hand corner of the new image.
Monitoring these features from orbit means that scientists can observe the processes that are shaping the Martian surface and changing the appearance of the polar regions.
But the picture of spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars isn’t just replete with surface features. Also visible are hazy clouds over the Martian surface. Particularly visible across the center of the image, these clouds contain water ice and their trajectory is, in part, influenced by the topography of the surface terrain beneath them.
During the Martian winter, carbon dioxide is deposited at both Martian poles as ice, which then thaws and sublimates in springtime. The release of gas back into the Martian atmosphere increases atmospheric pressure and causes strong winds.
In turn, these winds drive the tremendous exchange of material between the surface and atmosphere of Mars throughout the Martian year.
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NASA explores a winter wonderland on Mars
Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet’s coldest season.
When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the season’s sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planet’s poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).
Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet’s elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.
Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASA’s robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things they’ve discovered:
Two kinds of snow
Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.
“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.”
How we know it snows
Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and surface missions can’t survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars’ north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.
Cubic snowflakes
Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.
“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”
Jack Frost nipping at your rover
Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning sun.
Winter’s wondrous end
Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to “thaw” and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.
This “thawing” also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.
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John Mayer reveals inspiration for ‘Your Body Is a Wonderland’
CNN
—
John Mayer has put to rest the theory that “Your Body Is A Wonderland” is about one of his former celebrity girlfriends.
In a recent conversation on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast’s holiday special, the singer and songwriter talked about his hit 2002 single, which won him a Grammy.
“That was about my first girlfriend,” the 45-year-old Mayer said of the tune. “That was about the feeling, which I think was already sort of nostalgic… I was 21 when I wrote that song and I was nostalgic for being 16.”
There had been speculation that it was about actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, whom Mayer dated after it was released. Podcast host Alex didn’t suggest names but brought up that it was believed the song was inspired by a celeb.
“No, that’s one of those things where people just sort of formed that idea,” said Mayer. “It gets reinforced over the years, no, no, no. I had never met a celebrity when I wrote that song.”
He also said he doesn’t date much anymore.
“I look at it like this: Dating is no longer a codified activity for me,” he said. “It’s not patterned anymore.”
And since giving up drinking six years ago, Mayer said he no longer has “the liquid courage” when it comes to relationships.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands Players Trolled By Powerful, Rare Loot
Loot shooter series Borderlands is about picking up a shiny new gun one minute and throwing it away for something more powerful the next. TIny Tina’s Wonderlands continues this trend, but with a few added wrinkles that can end up trolling unsuspecting players who aren’t paying close enough attention.
Loot is a numbers game, and like past entries, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands throws so much new loot at you that it’s not even worth looking at each piece individually. One of the biggest ways to optimize the grind is to just hoard the most powerful stuff you find and then junk the rest at a vending machine between dungeons. The game knows this, and in two subtle ways, one a clever developer nod, the other an accidental bug, it will make you pay for going on autopilot.
It’s not unusual, for instance, to be so ruthless in junking stuff that you end up with only guns that are above your current power cap. I’ve played every Borderlands and at some point I always accidentally curate an arsenal full of awesome weapons that I’m just two or three levels away from actually being able to equip. In Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, however, players have discovered some weapons that are simply impossible to equip.
Read More: 13 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
The game’s current level cap is 40, but players have already found loot drops above that (via GamesRadar). “Isn’t the cap 40,” posted one player on the Tiny Tina’s subreddit. “I feel cheated. I wanna cry.” Another shared a screenshot of a level 43 submachine gun called “Burgeoning Blazing Volley of the Churning Void” that dealt massive burn damage. Neat! Alas. “Damn, you started grinding for next month’s expansion,” someone replied.
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Some players are in fact already hoarding the impossible loot in their vaults until Gearbox eventually raises the game’s level cap. It appears a bug is the cause of the overpowered loot, and while Gearbox has outlined four upcoming DLC expansions for Wonderlands, there’s no roadmap at the moment showing when the first one will arrive.
Elsewhere players have spotted a more intentional troll: an expensive gun that loses its value once you fire it. “Shot the gun without reading the description,” wrote the player who found it on Reddit. “Safe to say, I got trolled. If it seems too good to be true it usually is.” Another player wrote in response, “Mental Note: Be extremely careful of anything with the label ‘antique.’”
Of course Wonderlands’ biggest troll of all is that the text is too small to read any of this stuff anyway. Well played, Gearbox.
Overwatch teases unreleased Winter Wonderland Ashe and Mercy skins
Overwatch’s celebration of the holidays just might have given us a preview of new skins for Mercy and Ashe.
The Winter Wonderland event is in full swing for 2021, but Overwatch might have given us a bonus treat — a preview of some future holiday skins.
On December 24, Overwatch tweeted a picture of Ashe, B.O.B. Mercy and Genji celebrating the holidays together, and some players noted Mercy and Ashe had brand new looks going on.
New Mercy and Ashe Winter Wonderland skins teased
If you look closely, you can see Reaper looking in on this cozy scene from outside.
Mercy has a knitted sweater-like getup we’ve never seen before that definitely has plenty of holiday spirit. She’s got reindeer ears and antlers as well, which would make this look a hit with all the Mercy Mains out there.
Ashe has on a black outfit with red gloves and fur lining that’s just perfect for her character. A Santa hat tops it all off, for a skin we could definitely see being added during Winter Wonderland.
Of course, we can’t forget about B.O.B. who has been transformed into a ginger bread version of himself. To be completely honest, we’re surprised Blizzard hasn’t added this as a skin already. It’s just too good.
The Mercy/Ashe image reminds us a lot of this pic from the first ever Winter Wonderland event in 2016.
Genji could certainly be previewed here as well, but his look here does resemble the “Young Genji” skin, except with a holiday sweater and some red-nosed slippers.
There are a few reasons these could be previews of new skins instead of just some festive art. First off these aren’t looks we’ve ever seen for any of the heroes included before (except poor Reaper), and they were tweeted out by the official Overwatch account.
So, save that image and tuck it away until next year, when we could see these new holiday skins arrive. And if they don’t — you have our permission to drop in and remind us how wrong we were.