Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Independence Day

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake."

- Rabindranath Tagore in Gitanjali

Friday, August 6, 2010

Fastest big solar

One of the fastest big solar eruptions in years has been observed streaking away from the sun at more than 2.2 million mph by two NASA spacecraft.

The flare occurred Aug. 1 and created a massive sun eruption called a coronal mass ejection that struck Earth's magnetic field Tuesday, creating dazzling aurora displays. NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft recorded the eruption and beamed images of the sun storm back to Earth. ( Photo of the sun eruption.)