On April 8th the first South Korean astronaut will be heading towards the International Space Station aboard a Russian spaceship and along with him will be the first space kimchi, the national food of South Korea. Kimchi is a cabbage dish that is fermented by burying it in the ground. It is aromatic and delicious. But it wasn't easy to make it into a space food. It cost millions of dollars to create a variety that would not turn poisonous due to cosmic rays and other forms of radiation and to make it less than pungent for fellow astronauts. It is a study in culinary delights to make their astronaut feel more at home spinning around the planet. And this is not the first of the culinary adventures in space, Charles Simonyi, who was a civilian guest astronaut had a six course meal prepared by four star chef Alain Ducasse with him when he took off on his space adventure...
Leap year is here. There will be 29 days in the month February and if you don't know it space has everything to do with this anomaly of the Gregorian Calendar. It all has to do with the solar year that fits no molds that measures 365.25 days a year that inspired the plan of adding a day every four years to make up for the quarter day that was lost every year. Even more strange when the astronomer of Pope Gregory the thirteenth advised him that they had lost about ten days of time against the solar year, so the Pope decided to negate ten days form October 4 to October 15 in 1592, in other words the day after October 4 was October 15. I don't know but I think I have to investigate this further...
As we shake and shiver because of the concern of global warming (which I think is happening) it is amazing what other planets deal with in the weather department: on Neptune there are windstorms that blow at 1,500 miles per hour, on Uranus the temperature often dips below 300 degrees Fahrenheit and it was recently discovered that Saturn has a lightning storm the size of the United States that has bolts of lightning that are 1000 times stronger than the strongest bolt that have hit the earth, so when you whistle the tune "the weather outside is frightful" think about the weather on other planets...
It happened in India years ago but still hasn't lost the attention of scientists. The scarlet rain that fell on India was never explained but there was pained reasoning that the redness was actually alien microbes. The research that hasn't stopped has recently found that there is an active gene in the rain that can be stimulated to life. Red rain equals alien DNA, could it be, could it be...