What do you reckon? Is this mesmerising image up there with the best recent pictures taken of the Northern Lights?  Shot in Iceland, it shows what looks like a huge phoenix with wings outstretched rising in to the night's sky.  It was captured by photographer Hallgrimur P. Helgason in Kaldársel, who said he had been shooting for an hour when the mythical creature appeared. 

'It's really a thrill shooting the aurora, especially when they are so playful like they were that night,' said the 64-year-old. 'I have to admit that I always get an adrenaline kick when the lights burst out like that - that particular shot was the top one of the night.'

Hallgrimur uses a camera and tripod to photograph the lights and advises snapping in the dark away from city light pollution and never using a flash.  He said that the Northern Lights were mainly showing in green and yellow colours when he was shooting that night but also sported red and blue suggesting that the aurora was strong.

An annual pilgrimage by amateur and professional photographers to Yosemite National Park to capture a unique solar lighting effect has been revived with the recent wet weather.

For a couple of weeks in February, Yosemite's Horsetail Fall gets bathed in the light of the setting sun, creating what is known as a "firefall," with the waterfall and wet rockface creating an orange glow from the reflection.  In recent years, a lack of water or cloudy weather has meant the spectacular effect does not appear during the brief window when the sun is aligned perfectly on the fall. This year, images of the firefall at Horsetail Fall has blanketed social media.

The history of the Yosemite Firefall began with a manmade firefall in the last 19th century, when a campfire at the top of Glacier Point was pushed over the edge of the cliff, treating spectators below to a fiery spectacle. It became an annual event that increased in size and popularity, until it was finally discontinued in 1968.

In 1973, close to the 100-year anniversary of the first Yosemite Firefall, a photographer captured the first known photo of the natural firefall at Horsetail Fall.

Carlos E. Castañeda is Senior Editor, News & Social Media for CBS San Francisco and a San Francisco native

A video was submitted to the Free Thought Project this week that is sure to infuriate all who see it.  In the video, which was originally posted on the Facebook page of Gary Schlesinger of Brooklyn, New York City trash collectors are being ordered around by an NYPD cop. They are picking up dozens of cases of fruits and vegetables — and throwing them into the back of a trash truck.

According to Schlesinger, "NYC [is] cracking down on fruit stores that put out merchandise more than 4 feet from store."  The food was allegedly blocking a sidewalk, so, instead of asking the owner move it, or merely confiscating it from a non-compliant owner and giving it to a food shelter, the government's decision was to put it in a landfill.  The Free Thought Project contacted the New York Police Department and the City of New York on Saturday for a statement on why they are throwing away the food, but we've yet to hear back.

According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, in the 2012-2014 time frame, over 1.4 million New Yorkers - including nearly one in four of the city's children - lived in households that lacked sufficient food. In the Coalition's latest annual survey of hunger in New York City - the most comprehensive of its kind - New York City's emergency food providers (food pantries, soup kitchens, and brown bag programs) reported a 5 percent increase in need for their services, on top of a 7 percent increase in 2014, 10 percent in 2013, 5 percent in 2012, 12 percent in 2011, 7 percent in 2010, and 20 percent in 2009.

In spite of starving children, quite literally within blocks of this video, the NYPD is carrying out its tyrannical enforcement of city codes.  This is what 'just doing your job' has become.

Please share this article so this downright despotic practice of throwing away perfectly good food will be exposed.

It would seem intuitive to every single Human Being in the room that in order to accomplish what you do as Americans in Congress, you must have at least two parties. For that is the way it has always been - the red and the blue.

What if I told you that there will come a time when there will be no parties? You might then say, "Well, that's impossible, Kryon, because you're not Human and you don't know how funding works." You might say, "It has to be a party that creates the power to raise money for the ones who cannot, and then the funding is spread around and this is the way we work. If you didn't have parties, you'd have no funding. Nobody could advertise, and no one could get elected."

Oh, really?

Are you aware right now, that you have a president who was elected on the Internet? He figured it out. When everybody can talk to everyone, you have plenty of funding. A few dollars here, a few dollars there. You talk to millions at the same time, they talk to millions at the same time. It's a new paradigm of communication. The young people know all about it, and you can't stop it. Watch for more from this new paradigm.

It is worldwide communication, one person at a time. It doesn't matter how many laws you pass, and it doesn't matter what you decide about who is in charge of it, you can't stop it. It's out of the bag now, and the communities of the young are going to be communicating. This is how the politicians are going to be communicating to you, literally coming into your home in a holographic form perhaps, explaining their position one by one, without a party. Then you will elect them to your Congress without a party and they will sit in the chairs without a division and there will be no such thing as the "other side of the aisle."

And that, Human Being, is called unity and there is a paradigm that you cannot even imagine. And it's in the works. And then you'll have a Congress that works together and gets things done without the current duality.
 
~ KRYON
through Lee Carroll, the Original Kryon Channel

There's a full Moon tonight, Monday Feb. 22nd. According to folklore, it has a special name--the "Snow Moon." On average, February is the snowiest month in the USA. Full moonlight reflecting from a snow-covered landscape can make the night very bright, indeed. Bonus: On Tuesday, Feb. 23rd, the waning Snow Moon will be in conjunction with Jupiter--a beautiful close encounter: sky map.     www.spaceweather.com

Karli Petrovic : iQ: 15 Feb 2016

Shocked to learn a braille printer can cost $2,000, preventing many blind kids and adults from being able to read braille, one 12-year-old boy used Legos to create a cost-effective option.
When Shubham Banerjee's mother vetoed his initial science fair project idea — an experiment involving colored lights and plant growth — saying he could do better, the then 12-year-old was forced to get creative.

Around the same time, Banerjee found a pamphlet requesting donations for the blind. Intrigued, he asked his parents how blind people learned to read. His busy parents directed him to Google. "So I Googled it, 'how blind people read,' and I found out about braille, braille printers, how much they cost," Banerjee said, shocked that a traditional printer was $2,000. "I've been to India a couple times, and I've seen blind people and a lot of poverty everywhere, and it's very hard for them."

Banerjee empathized when he and a friend closed their eyes in attempts to navigate the world as if they were blind.  "We couldn't walk more than five seconds without thinking there was a pole in front of us," he said.  He knew there must be a better way to help the blind see.  "I felt like they should not pay over $1,000 just to get what they need to become literate."  So he got to work building a better, more affordable braille printer using an unlikely material:Lego Mindstorms EV3.

After seven frustrating attempts to modify Lego cars and mechanisms to create holes necessary for braille, he had a breakthrough. Braigo was born.  Excited but filled with self-doubt, he called out for his mom. It was 2 a.m.  "She was very mad," he said. "I showed it working, and she was really happy. Then she went back to bed."

Despite using his entire summer vacation to craft the $350 Braigo, Banerjee knew the machine needed a "better brain." So he built a second version using Intel Edison technology and Python code.  "The Edison didn't cost too much, and it had built-in wireless, which was super important," Banerjee explained. "I needed the printer to easily communicate directly with the computer."

Banerjee also appreciated the Edison's size, performance and Bluetooth capabilities. When he finished putting the pieces altogether, however, the real reward came from watching other kids use the printer.  "Henry [Wedler] tested both my products," Benerjee said. "I printed out, 'Hello, my name is Shubham,' and he could read that perfectly. That was just amazing, and seeing that it really worked...was just the best feeling."  It also inspired him to keep working and innovating.

"When I saw the braille dots that came out, I started Braigo Labs, a company dedicated to developing 'humanely optimized' technologies that offer affordable solutions to life's most critical problems."

© Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine
Scientists have used 3D-printing technology to create first-of-their-kind structures made of living tissue. The bioprinter breakthrough has shown promise with cartilage, bone and muscle, opening the prospect of creating replacement human body parts.

Researchers using a bioprinter, described Monday in Nature Biotechnology, say that they've found a way to manufacture living muscle, bone and cartilage. They say that this technology can make unprecedented advances in the healing of battlefield injuries by using a combination of living cells and a plastic-like material.

While printed tissue has been accomplished before, scientists have not figured out a way to nourish the tissues by allowing blood vessels to colonize them after they are transplanted.  "Cells simply cannot survive without a blood vessel supply that's smaller than 200 microns [0.07 inches], which is extremely small," Atala told Gizmodo. "That's the maximum distance. And that's not just for printing, that's nature."

So far, the manufactured body parts have only been tested on laboratory animals, but the transplants were stable enough to be considered successful in those tests. "It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape," Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina, said in a statement. "With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation."

The groundbreaking bioprinter creates the custom organs by layering patterns of artificial, biodegradable WHAT? that contains cells from the patient who will receive the implant. Then the device adds a temporary shell that scaffolds the structure together while it is put into the host's body. The artificial materials then slowly degrade while the cells grow strong enough to support themselves. "Our results indicate that the bio-ink combination we used, combined with the microchannels, provides the right environment to keep the cells alive and to support cell and tissue growth," Atala said.

To test the body parts, scientists printed human-sized ears and grafted them to mice and witnessed the circulation of blood and formation of cartilage tissue within two months. They also implanted muscle tissue in rats and noted that nerves began to form within two weeks. Bone implants, which were printed using human stem cells and implanted in rats, triggered the formation of a blood vessel system that could be observed after five months.

While it has yet to be used in humans, Atala and his colleagues say that the bioprinter's principles are the same in people as they are in animals. Replacement pats can be made to order based on 3D body scans, they said.

Due to the inaction of state and federal officials, thousands of people in Flint have been exposed to unsafe levels of lead in their water. Now a group of union plumber are taking matters into their own hands.  On Saturday, 300 plumbers from unions across the country descended on Flint to install new faucets and water filters for free. Many Flint residents needed new faucets because their existing faucets were so old they could not accommodate water filters provided by the state. 

The effort was co-ordinated by the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry, known as the United Association. The fixtures were donated by the Plumbing Manufacturers International.

For some in Flint, however, even new faucets with modern water filters won't be enough to fully abate the lead contamination. New tests released recently revealed that, in some Flint homes, the levels of lead "exceed the ability of filtration systems handed." The filters can safely remove up to 150 parts per billion of lead. Some Flint homes were found to have lead levels of more than 4,000 parts per billion.  Residents of Flint, however, are still encouraged to use the filters. For most homes, they will work.

Evan Ackerman : IEEE Spectrum : 01 Feb 2016

No matter how many regulations are put in place, drones are cheap enough now that frequent misuse is becoming the norm. There's no good way of dealing with a dangerous drone: you can jam its radios to force it to autoland, or maybe try using an even bigger drone to capture it inside a giant net. In either of these cases, however, you run the risk of having the drone go completely out of control, which is even more dangerous. Or, you can be like the Dutch National Police, and train eagles to take down drones for you.

The Dutch police (like police everywhere) know that drones are going to become even more of a problem than they already are, so they've been testing ways of dealing with a drone in an emergency, like if a drone is preventing an air ambulance from landing. The police are looking into electronic solutions, but also physical ones, including both nets and trained eagles.

The Dutch police have partnered with Guard From Above, a raptor training company based in The Hague, to determine whether eagles could be used as intelligent, adaptive anti-drone weapon systems. The eagles are specially trained to identify and capture drones, although from the way most birds of prey react to drones, my guess is that not a lot of training was necessary. After snatching the drone out of the sky, the eagles instinctively find a safe area away from people to land and try take a couple confused bites out of their mechanical prey before their handlers can reward them with something a little less plastic-y. The advantage here is that with the eagles, you don't have to worry about the drone taking off out of control or falling on people, since the birds are very good at mid-air intercepts as well as bringing the drone to the ground without endangering anyone.

While the eagles are (unsurprisingly) very competent at taking out something the size of a DJI Phantom, for larger drones the safety of the bird seems like it should be a concern: my guess is that large carbon fiber props could do damage to a bird's legs or toes, and at least here in the United States, that would be a big problem, because eagles and many other kinds of birds are protected species. The video apparently mentions something about designing a protection system for the birds, which is good. Even so, I doubt that using attack eagles as drone interceptors will ever turn out to be a practical solution in most places, but since I got to write an article about using attack eagles as drone interceptors (!), as far as I'm concerned, it's been totally worth it.

According to the Dutch Police, these tests should last a few months, at which point they'll decide whether using the eagles in this way is an effective and appropriate means of preventing unwanted drone use.

The rest of the article can be accessed here.

© Trustees of the British Museum/Mathieu Ossendrijver  :  Ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablet text A provided essential clues to understanding four other tablets numbered text B to text E.

The earliest known examples of mathematical and geometric astronomy have been identified in a series of ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets.

An analysis of the tablets, reported in the journal Science, reveals ancient Babylonians were able to calculate the position of Jupiter using geometric techniques previously believed to have been first used some 1,400 years later in 14th century Europe.

"These texts are the earliest evidence we have from antiquity of mathematical astronomy," said the study's author Dr Mathieu Ossendrijver, a historian on Babylonian astronomy with the Humboldt University in Berlin. "It describes Jupiter's velocity across the sky and how that changes with time."

The tablets, which are housed at the British Museum, are believed to have been unearthed from an archaeological dig in what is now modern day Iraq sometime in the 1800s. The almost completely intact tablets are thought to have been written in Babylon between 350 and 50 BCE.
The tablets are part of a larger collection of 450 astronomy tablets from Babylon and Uruk containing celestial data arranged in rows and columns, together with instructions.

The rest of this article can be found here.

The Great Naked-Eye Planet Show of 2016 is reaching its peak. For the next week, the five brightest planets in the solar system can be seen, all at once, in a great line stretched across the pre-dawn sky. Denis Crute photographed the quintet on Feb. 2nd just before daybreak at Woolgoolga, Australia:

Crute took the picture using a Nikon D5200 digital camera set to ISO 3200 (f3.5) for a 2 sec exposure. Other photographers may wish to note those settings, because there are some excellent photo-ops in the mornings ahead. On Feb. 3rd, the Moon will pass by Saturn in the constellation Virgo: sky map. On Feb. 6th and 7th, the slender crescent Moon will form a lovely shape-shifting triangle with Venus and Mercury: sky map.

Set your alarm for dawn. There's a lot to see.     www.spaceweather.com