Halloween

Halloween (also spelled Hallowe'en) is an annual holiday celebrated on October 31. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holy day of All Saints. It is largely asecularcelebration but some have expressed strong feelings about perceived religious overtones.

The colours black and orange have become associated with the celebrations, perhaps because of the darkness of night and the colour of fire or of pumpkins, and maybe because of the vivid contrast this presents for merchandising. Another association is with the jack-o'-lantern. Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, wearing costumes and attending costume parties, ghost tours,bonfires, visiting haunted attractions, pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.

Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while "[s]ome folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, [it is] more typically [l]inked to the celtic festival of Samhainor Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)", which is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end". A similar festival was held by the ancient Britons and is known as Calan Gaeaf(pronounced kalan-geyf).

Snap-Apple Night by Daniel Maclise showing a Halloween party in Blarney, Ireland, in 1832. The young children on the right bob for apples. A couple in the center play a variant, which involves retrieving an apple hanging from a string. The couples at left play divination games.

The festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darker half", and is sometimes regarded as the "Celtic New Year".

The celebration has some elements of afestival of the dead. The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family's ancestors were honoured and invited home whilst harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. Their purpose was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm. In Scotland the spirits were impersonated by young men dressed in white with masked, veiled or blackened faces. Samhain was also a time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Bonfires played a large part in the festivities. All other fires were doused and each home lit their hearth from the bonfire. The bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames. Sometimes two bonfires would be built side-by-side, and people and their livestock would walk between them as a cleansing ritual.

Another common practise was divination, which often involved the use of food and drink.

The name 'Halloween' and many of its present-day traditions derive from the Old English era.

Origin of name

The term Halloween, originally spelled Hallowe’en, is shortened from All Hallows' Even – e'en is a shortening of even, which is a shortening ofevening. This is ultimately derived from the Old EnglishEallra Hālgena ǣfen. It is now known as "Eve of" All Saints' Day, which is November 1st.

A time of pagan festivities, Popes Gregory III (731–741) and Gregory IV (827–844) tried to supplant it with the Christian holiday (All Saints' Day) by moving it from May 13 to November 1.

In the 800s, the Church measured the day as starting at sunset, in accordance with the Florentine calendar. Although All Saints' Day is now considered to occur one day after Halloween, the two holidays were once celebrated on the same day.

On All Hallows’ eve, many Irish and Scottish people have traditionally placed a candle on their western window sill to honor the departed. Other traditions include carving lanterns from turnips or rutabagas, sometimes with faces on them, as is done in the modern tradition of carving pumpkins. Welsh, Irish and British myth are full of legends of the Brazen Head, which may be a folk memory of the ancient Celtic practice of headhunting. The heads of enemies may have decorated shrines, and there are tales of the heads of honored warriors continuing to speak their wisdom after death. The carving ofpumpkins is associated with Halloween in North America where pumpkins are both readily available and much larger- making them easier to carve than turnips. Many families that celebrate Halloween carve a pumpkin into a frightening or comical face and place it on their doorstep after dark. The American tradition of carving pumpkins preceded the Great Famine period of Irish immigration and was originally associated with harvest time in general, not becoming specifically associated with Halloween until the mid-to-late 1800s.

Halloween spiders at a row house in Washington DC

The imagery surrounding Halloween is largely a mix of the Halloween season itself, works of Gothic and horror literature, in particular the novels Frankenstein and Dracula, and nearly a century of work from American filmmakers and graphic artists, and British Hammer Horror productions, also a rather commercialized take on the dark and mysterious. Modern Halloween imagery tends to involve death, evil, the occult, magic, or mythicalmonsters. Traditional characters include the Devil, the Grim Reaper, ghosts, ghouls, demons, witches,goblins, vampires, werewolves, zombies, skeletons, black cats, spiders, bats, and crows.

Particularly in America, symbolism is inspired by classic horror films (which contain fictional figures likeFrankenstein's monster and The Mummy). Elements of the autumn season, such as pumpkins, cornhusks, and scarecrows, are also prevalent. Homes are often decorated with these types of symbols around Halloween.

The two main colors associated with Halloween are orange and black.

Spider glue may spin bio based adhesives

U.S. scientists have analyzed the sticky substance in spider webs and say their findings might lead to development of a new generation of bio-based adhesives.

The University of Wyoming researchers say their findings are an advance toward bio-based "green" adhesives and glues that could replace existing petroleum-based products for a range of uses.

Omer Choresh and colleagues note much research has been done on spider web silk, but scientists know comparatively little about the glue that coats the silk threads and is among the world's strongest biological glues. Past studies revealed that spiders make web glue from glycoproteins, or proteins with bits of sugar attached.

The new study identified two new glycoproteins in the glue and showed that domains of those proteins were produced from opposite strands of the same DNA.

"Once the cloned genes are over expressed in systems such as insect or bacterial cell cultures, large-scale production of the glycoprotein can be used to develop a new bio-based glue for a variety of purposes," the researchers said.

A report on the study appears in the journal Biomacromolecules.

Controversial Moon Origin Theory Rewrites History

The moon may have been adopted by our planet instead of descended from it.

If a new twist on a decades-old theory is right, conditions in the early solar system suggest the moon formed inside Mercury's orbit and migrated out until it was roped into orbit around Earth.

The idea flies in the face of scientific consensus, known as the giant impact hypothesis, which holds that the moon formed from red-hot debris left over after a Mars-sized object collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

However, the moon has several curious traits that go unexplained with that theory, and Robert Malcuit of Denison University has argued for decades for an alternative view of our moon's history.

Malcuit's version of events is tantamount to cosmic blasphemy, but scientists have recently found 4 billion-year-old minerals in Australia that suggest our planet was too cool to have sustained a cataclysmic moon-forming impact early in its history.

"Everything in the giant impact model is hot, hot, hot," he said. "It's incompatible with what we see in the geologic record. Earth is cool enough at that time to have ocean water on its surface."

Malcuit's computer modeling studies, which he has worked on since the 1980s, show that it is possible for Earth's gravitational pull to capture the moon.

At first, the moon's orbits would have been highly elliptical, swinging close to Earth and then far away about eight times a year.

The gravitational pull from each pass would have stretched the planet 18 to 20 kilometers (11.2 to 12.4 miles) near the equator, churning the hot mantle and crust. Rocks closer to the poles, like those found today in Australia, would have been spared. The upper layers of the newly-captured moon would have melted from gravitational friction, until the satellite's orbit stabilized about 3 billion years ago.

Malcuit presented his theory at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Ore.

Traditionally, scientists cite the moon's low density and a lack of iron as reasons why it came from Earth -- the giant impact skimmed light material off Earth's upper layers and flung it into orbit.

"I think this it is highly unlikely," that Malcuit's idea is correct, Jack Lissauer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Moffett Field, Calif., said. "Capture is very, very difficult. You have to have just the right velocity and very special parameters to all be just right."

Lissauer allowed that the current giant impact theory of the moon's formation may yet be revised, even replaced, but probably not by Malcuit's capture model. The fact that Earth was cool 4 billion years ago doesn't mean the moon was captured.

"Heat from the impact dissipated very quickly," he said. "It wouldn't take 100 million years, and it certainly wouldn't take 500 million. The impact is not going to affect Earth at 4 billion years ago."

The 2009 Orionid Meteor Shower

The false-color images above are composite images from 2009 Orionids meteor shower observations, as seen in the skies over Huntsville, Ala.

"Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Halley's Comet, the source of the Orionids," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

"Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour."

The best time to look was before sunrise on Wednesday, Oct. 21st. That's when Earth encountered the densest part of Halley's debris stream.

Orionids appear every year around this time when Earth orbits through an area of space littered with debris from the ancient comet.

Normally, the shower produces 10 to 20 meteors per hour, a modest display. The past few years, however, have been much better than usual. "Since 2006, the Orionids have been one of the best showers of the year, with counts of 60 or more meteors per hour," says Cooke.

Nobel Prize-Winning Science - Springboard For Planet Hunting

The University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been awarded a $495,000 grant to look for Earth-like planets around other stars using technology based on 2005 Nobel Prize-winning research conducted at JILA, a joint institute of the two Boulder institutions.

The funding from the National Science Foundation is to develop a precise "laser ruler" to measure tiny changes in infrared light caused by the gravitational wobble of small, cool stars as they are tugged back and forth by their rocky planets.

The comb makes it possible to measure minute changes in the light waves created by the motions of small, relatively cool M stars as they interact with planets by providing a precise calibration for spectrographs that analyze light coming from stars and planets.

The gravitational dance depends on the size of the star and the size of the planet and produces changes in the star's radial velocity - the speed it is moving toward or away from Earth during such faint wobbles, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Steve Osterman, principal investigator on the project.

While astronomers have used the radial wobble of stars to detect several hundred planets outside our solar system, almost all have been giant, gaseous planets orbiting extremely close to their parent stars, said Osterman.

The new technology involves devices known as mode-locked lasers that deliver ultrashort pulses of infrared laser light less than a billionth of a second long, enabling a much more precise planet detection system, he said.

Linked to an atomic clock, the laser ruler consists of thousands of closely spaced "tick-marks" representing successive infrared light frequencies that resemble the teeth of a comb, said NIST scientist Scott Diddams, a co-investigator on the effort who is collaborating with Osterman.

The comb makes it possible to measure minute changes in the light waves created by the motions of small, relatively cool M stars as they interact with planets by providing a precise calibration for spectrographs that analyze light coming from stars and planets.

The technique will allow the team to observe the stars in the near-infrared spectrum where they shine the brightest, according to the researchers.

The key to finding Earth-like planets is measuring the Doppler shift of the stars as they wobble during planet interactions, said Osterman. When a star is moving toward Earth, its wavelengths "bunch up" and shorten, and when the star is moving away from Earth, the wavelengths stretch out. By detecting extraordinarily faint wobbles, the researchers should be able to deduce the size of the planets and the distance of their orbit from the parent star, said Osterman.

"We have come up with a good ruler for measuring changes in the wobble of these small stars in the near-infrared wavelength of the spectrum," said Osterman of CU-Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. "Since these M stars are much more common than larger stars, this gives us a lot more targets and should make it easier for us to detect rocky and perhaps even habitable planets."

The new technology was spun off from research by JILA's John Hall and Theodor Hansch of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich, Germany, who shared in the 2005 Nobel Prize in physics for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique.

Osterman said M stars can be as small as one-tenth the mass and significantly older than Earth's Sun. "We think our new calibration technology will make it as much as 10 to 20 times easier to detect habitable planets around these M stars," he said.

Astronomers are particularly interested in the habitable zones of planets around other solar systems - zones marked by relatively moderate temperatures and which have the potential to host liquid water. While at least one rocky planet slightly larger than Earth was recently identified by a French-led team, it orbits so close to the parent star that high temperatures and high radiation preclude the chances for life as we know it, said Osterman.

The Boulder researchers plan to take the new laser instrument to the Apache Point Observatory northeast of Las Cruces, N.M., in spring 2010 and integrate it with a new planet-finding instrument being developed at the University of Florida, said Osterman. "This will begin our search for Earth-like planets around these tiny stars."

CU-Boulder is part of a consortium of seven universities that are conducting research using a 3.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory. CU-Boulder shares in the cost of operations and maintenance and is annually allotted one-eighth of the available telescope observing time.

In addition to looking for Earth-like planets around low-mass stars, the comb technology will allow researchers to peer through the dust clouds of young stellar systems more clearly, said co-investigator John Bally of CASA. The technology may make it possible to learn more about the movements of massive, Jupiter-like planets in young planetary systems as they migrate toward their parent stars, he said.

Other projects that will be made possible by the technology include studies of the atmospheres of young or cool stars as well as precise near-infrared observations of planetary atmospheres in our own solar system, according to the team.

Nanotechnology used in biofuel processing

U.S. scientists say they are using nanotechnology to improve the cellulosic ethanol processes involved in producing biofuels.

Louisiana Tech Professors James Palmer, Yuri Lvov, Dale Snow and Hisham Hegab say biofuels will play an important part in sustainable fuel and energy production solutions for the future. But the professors say the nation's appetite for fuel cannot be satisfied with just traditional crops, such as sugar cane or corn. But they note emerging technologies are allowing cellulosic biomass (wood, grass, stalks, etc.) to also be converted into ethanol.

The researchers said the nanotechnology processes they developed can immobilize the expensive enzymes used to convert cellulose to sugars, allowing them to be reused several times, significantly reducing the overall cost of the process.

Savings estimates range from approximately $32 million for each cellulosic ethanol plant to a total of $7.5 billion if a federally established goal of 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol is achieved.

The technology is to be highlighted Nov. 5 during Louisiana Tech's Energy Systems Conference in Shreveport, La .

Toshiba launches portable fuel-cell for mobiles

For people fed up with their mobile telephone or iPod batteries running out, Japan's Toshiba Corp. announced Thursday the launch of a portable fuel-cell that can power up digital gadgets on the move.

With an injection of methanol, the fuel-cell generates electricity through a chemical reaction with oxygen to recharge mobile digital electronic devices via a USB cable.

The high-tech giant, which sees a bright future for fuel cells, said battery exhaustion had become a "major concern" due to the rising power consumption of mobile electronic devices.

It said the palm-sized fuel-cell, called Dynario, "delivers almost instant refuelling that untethers electrical equipment from AC adapters and power outlets."

A single refill of methanol from a dedicated cartridge can generate enough power to charge two mobile telephones, said Toshiba, which describes itself as a world leader in the development of fuel-cells for handheld gadgets.

The company will put 3,000 of the devices on sale in Japan through its direct-order website at a price of 29,800 yen (326 dollars) each. The fuel cartridges cost an additional 3,150 yen for a set of five.