This amazing photograph shows the flight path of a boomerang.
The boomerang was fitted with a flashing LED and the photograph taken by leaving the shutter open for the duration of the flight.
Tie-dyed roses
Dutch company Happy Colours makes these tie-dyed roses by using syringes to inject coloured dyes directly into the stems of white roses.
You can find more pictures at the Happy Colours website.
US Obesity
Whilst there is some disagreement over whether it is correct to call obesity a disease, the animation from CNN below shows that it certainly shows some signs of spreading like one.
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/fit.nation/obesity.map/spread.2.swf” height=”336″ width=”450″ /]
Slowest to fastest
Slowest – Continental Drift
0.0000000003m/s
The average relative speed of continental drift is about 10mm per year.
At one time all the current continents were joined together in one supercontinent called Pangaea but over Earth’s 4.5 billion year history this was broken apart into the continents we know today.
Fastest – The Speed of Light
299,792,458m/s
Light is so fast that it wasn’t until 1926 and the work of A.A. Michelson that we had a good idea of just how fast it is. Light could travel the distance from London to Sydney (13477 miles) and back seven times in one second.
Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity shows that the speed of light in a vacuum is the absolute fastest it is possible to travel. No matter how much energy you have, no matter how big an engine you create, no matter where you are, it simply isn’t possible: if the Universe really is full of aliens then it’s going to be a very, very long time before we meet.
The Richat Structure
The Richat Structure is a weird circular feature in the Sahara desert of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
Click on the image below for a larger image:
Originally it was thought to be a meteor crater but the current thinking is that the Richat Structure is merely a circular mountain that’s eroded over time.