A Long Island teenager has earned all 121 merit badges offered by the Boy Scouts of America. It’s an accomplishment the local arm of the organization calls “an almost unheard-of feat.”
Oceanside resident Shawn Goldsmith earned his final badge — for bugling — in time for his 18th birthday in November. He far surpassed the 21 badges required to achieve the elite rank of Eagle Scout.
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The NASA Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, where only designed to operate for 3 months on the Martian surface, but after a five year anniversary, they are still collecting data and exploring the planet.
The rovers are now showing some serious signs of wear and tear.
Spirit has to drive backwards everywhere it goes because of a jammed wheel; and Opportunity’s robotic arm has a glitch in a shoulder joint because of a broken electrical wire.
There have been times also when the vehicles’ have been dangerously short on power because of the dust covering on their solar panels.
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A brother and sister in England spent 40 years trying to find each other — then discovered they lived only 300 yards apart.
Ken Whitty, 64, walked past 62-year-old Yvonne’s house countless times and even saw her in the garden, but did not recognize her. They were reunited only after Whitty wrote to his local paper appealing for help in his search.
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To celebrate the hundredth anniversary, a new New Years Eve Ball has been reveled for this New Years Eve.
The new Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball is a 12 foot geodesic sphere, double the size of previous Balls, and weighs 11,875 pounds. Covered in 2,668 Waterford Crystals and powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDS, the new Ball is capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million vibrant colors and billions of patterns producing a spectacular kaleidoscope effect atop One Times Square.
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Wait a second. The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone’s control. Time will stand still for one second on New Year’s Eve, as we ring in the New Year on that Wednesday night. As a result, you’ll have an extra second to celebrate because a “Leap Second” will be added to 2008 to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks.
By international agreement, the world’s timekeepers, in order to keep their official atomic clocks in step with the world’s irregular but gradually slowing rotation, have decreed that a Leap Second be inserted between 2008 and 2009.
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