House knit from wool makes a cosy home

Annie Belle, 22, of Kalamazoo, Mich., built her own home this year. It's small, open concept, neutral decor, and the best part is that Belle is mortgage free.

A fibre artist, Belle knit her all-wool house as her entry in the ArtPrize festival in Grand Rapids, Mich.

As It Happens co-host Carol Off spoke with Belle, who says her family lost their home to foreclosure when she was 16 and her mother taught her to knit to deal with the stress.

Belle's wool house is about three metres by three metres with a roof on one end, and a knitted couch, chair, ottoman, slippers and lamp.

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Massive dinosaur fossil unearthed by Alberta pipeline crew

A massive dinosaur fossil has been found by a pipeline crew near Spirit River, Alta.

The 30-metre-long fossilized skeleton was found Tuesday when a backhoe operator working on the Tourmaline Oil Corp. pipeline installation moved some earth, inadvertently breaking off a piece of the fossil.

Thinking he had simply chipped off a section of rock, the backhoe operator laid the piece to the side and turned to resume excavation work.

That's when he saw the exposed fossil in the embankment in front of him.

As soon as he saw the fossil, the operator stopped digging and work on the site was shut down until experts could be brought in, said Art Wegner, speaking for the Acuren Group Inc.

Palaeontologists from the Tyrell Museum and National Geographic arrived at the site Wednesday and will soon be joined by Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative head palaeontologist, Dr. Matthew Vavrek.

The fossil was found buried about 1.5 metres deep in the Saddle Hills area southwest of Spirit River.

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Jellyfish force nuclear plant shutdown in Sweden

It wasn't a tsunami but it had the same effect: A huge cluster of jellyfish forced one of the world's largest nuclear reactors to shut down — a phenomenon that marine biologists say could become more common.

Operators of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden had to scramble reactor number three on Sunday after tonnes of jellyfish clogged the pipes that bring in cool water to the plant's turbines.

By Tuesday, the pipes had been cleaned of the jellyfish and engineers were preparing to restart the reactor, which at 1,400 megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator.

All three Oskharshamn reactors are boiling-water types, the same technology at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant that suffered a catastrophic failure in 2011 after a tsunami breached the facility's walls and flooded its equipment.

Jellyfish are not a new problem for nuclear power plants. Last year the California-based Diablo Canyon facility had to shut its reactor two after gobs of sea salp — a gelatinous, jellyfish-like organism — clogged intake pipes. In 2005, the first unit at Oskarshamn was temporarily turned off due to a sudden jellyfish influx.

Nuclear power plants need a constant flow of water to cool their reactor and turbine systems, which is why many such plants are built near large bodies of water.

Marine biologists, meanwhile, say they would not be surprised if more jellyfish shutdowns occur in the future.

"It's true that there seems to be more and more of these extreme cases of blooming jellyfish," said Lene Moller, a researcher at the Swedish Institute for the Marine Environment. "But it's very difficult to say if there are more jellyfish, because there is no historical data."

The species that caused the Oskarshamn shutdown is known as the common moon jellyfish.

"It's one of the species that can bloom in extreme areas that... are overfished or have bad conditions," said Moller. "The moon jelly likes these types of waters. They don't care if there are algae blooms, they don't care if the oxygen concentration is low. The fish leave... and [the moon jelly] can really take over the ecosystem."

Moller said the biggest problem was that there's no monitoring of jellyfish in the Baltic Sea to produce the data that scientists need to figure out how to tackle the issue.
 

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Space watchers seek answer for sky riddle from N.B.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day website is trying to solve a sky riddle from New Brunswick.

A video taken of the night sky at the Hopewell Rocks on Aug. 11 is featured today on the website, which is run by a scientist from NASA and a professor from Michigan Technological University.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day website is asking people for possible explanations for green patches that emerge in the night sky in a video taken at Hopewell Rocks in August. (Kevin Snair/Creative Imagery)

At one point in the video, an unusual green glow appears to cover the sky. The website is turning to citizens for possible explanations as to what might be causing the phenomenon.

The time-lapse video ran from 9:30 p.m. on Aug. 11 until 3 a.m. the following morning, near the peak of the Perseid Meteor shower, and records several meteor and satellite streaks.

Park interpreter Kevin Snair, who took the video, thought his gear had failed him.

"Right towards the very end of it, just as the tide was coming in, we got this weird green glow above the rocks that just wasn't making sense to us. We couldn't make sense of it," Snair said.

That's why he sent the video to two scientists who work with NASA, he said.

"And now there's a giant discussion going on throughout the scientific community, trying to figure out what this green glow is."

But even the experts are stumped, including Robert Nemiroff, a professor of physics with the Michigan Technology University who heads the APOD program.

"I usually can identify what's going on, I didn't know what it was. So then I sent it to some of my collaborators, they didn't know what it was. So then we posted it to a discussion board of people who might know. No consensus," he said.

"One of the things APOD is good for it's not just for showing cool pictures, but it's also sort of a citizen science collective intelligence engine," said Nemiroff.

"I'm not sure whether we're going to reach consensus on this or not, I just don't know."

Some of the popular theories include light reflecting off the rising tide, known as air glow, or illumination from a yet to be identified source, he said.

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Plastic ingredient found on Saturn moon

A flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn's moon Titan was captured in this image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2009. Cassini recently detected a small amount of propylene in Titan's lower atmosphere. (REUTERS)

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found propylene, a chemical used to make household plastic containers, on Saturn's moon Titan, the space agency said.

"This is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than Earth," NASA said.

A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan's lower atmosphere by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, which measures heat radiation, the agency reported in Monday's edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

By isolating the same signal at various altitudes within the lower atmosphere, researchers identified the chemical's unique thermal fingerprint with a high degree of confidence, NASA said.

"This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene," said Conor Nixon, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the paper.

"That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom — that's polypropylene."

The chemical is also used to make car bumpers and other consumer products.

The discovery could help scientists understand the "chemical zoo" that makes up Titan's hazy brownish atmosphere, said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

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Jimmy Kimmel and Kanye West are feuding — or are they?

Jimmy Kimmel and Kanye West either are engaged in a bitter feud or a wild parody of one.

A skit poking fun at West on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday provoked an irate call from the rapper about an hour and half before Thursday's show, Kimmel said in his monologue.

"He is very angry because of a bit we aired this week," Kimmel said, in which a child re-enacted an interview that West gave to Britain's BBC. It was "pretty innocuous," the late-night host said.

But West ordered him to make a public apology and said Kimmel's life would be "much better" if he did so, Kimmel said, adding that West also called himself the most powerful voice in media.

Then came more than a half-dozen tweets posted on West's official Twitter site. One called Kimmel out of line for spoofing what West called "the first piece of honest media in years," and another referred to photographers trying to get shots of West's baby daughter with Kim Kardashian.

"Jimmy Kimmel, I don't take it as a joke. ... You don't have scum bags hopping over fences trying to take pictures of your daughter," West tweeted. Other tweets used profanity and coarse language, while one mocked Kimmel by saying his former girlfriend Sarah Silverman is funnier than him.

"Finally, I'm in a rap feud. I always wanted to be in a rap feud," a smiling Kimmel said.

Representatives for Kimmel in Los Angeles and West in New York didn't immediately respond to requests for comment made early Friday, outside of business hours.

In a tweet Kimmel posted before the show, he said West's attack was "not a prank, I promise," unless West was playing one on him. Kimmel has done his share of high-concept comedy, including a show in which Matt Damon tied him up onstage and took over as host.

West is known for his outbursts, not his humour.

The incident capped a big week for Jimmy Kimmel Live, with shows including Hollywood street concerts with Paul McCartney and Justin Timberlake.

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Behold: the world's longest gourd

A Nova Scotia man has grown what is believed to be the longest gourd in the world. The excitement comes amid a bumper year that has P.E.I. farmers bringing in gigantic pumpkins.

At the Annapolis Valley Giant Vegetable Growers Association's annual competition in Waterville, N.S., this weekend, Fred Ansems won three prizes. The Annapolis Valley man produced:

• The longest gourd
• The heaviest watermelon
• The heaviest squash

Ansems's lengthy gourd was judged by Great Pumpkin Commonwealth officials to be the largest ever recorded. A Chinese gourd claims to be longer, but that has not been registered with the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. The Chinese gourd is the Guinness World Record holder. 

Ansems's was measured at more than 3.5 metres.  

Association member Paul Ferguson says there are a few tricks to growing a super-sized gourd.               

"The long gourd, it loves the heat. You have to have a long enough trellis so that it can grow up and then grow down," he said. "It takes a lot of care, a lot of getting the right nutrients into the soil. And some of it is luck."

Meanwhile, P.E.I. farmers are reporting big crops too.

Tania MacKenzie owns a vegetable farm in Stratford.

"Some of them are probably, I'm going to take a guess, up to 40 pounds. They're pretty heavy," she said. "I can get my hands under them — just barely — and I'm almost hugging them just to try and pick them up."

MacKenzie said a bit of rain in July followed by a dry August made for perfect pumpkin conditions.

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Jimmy Kimmel and Kanye West are feuding — or are they?

Jimmy Kimmel and Kanye West either are engaged in a bitter feud or a wild parody of one.

A skit poking fun at West on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live on Tuesday provoked an irate call from the rapper about an hour and half before Thursday's show, Kimmel said in his monologue.

"He is very angry because of a bit we aired this week," Kimmel said, in which a child re-enacted an interview that West gave to Britain's BBC. It was "pretty innocuous," the late-night host said.

But West ordered him to make a public apology and said Kimmel's life would be "much better" if he did so, Kimmel said, adding that West also called himself the most powerful voice in media.

Then came more than a half-dozen tweets posted on West's official Twitter site. One called Kimmel out of line for spoofing what West called "the first piece of honest media in years," and another referred to photographers trying to get shots of West's baby daughter with Kim Kardashian.

"Jimmy Kimmel, I don't take it as a joke. ... You don't have scum bags hopping over fences trying to take pictures of your daughter," West tweeted. Other tweets used profanity and coarse language, while one mocked Kimmel by saying his former girlfriend Sarah Silverman is funnier than him.

"Finally, I'm in a rap feud. I always wanted to be in a rap feud," a smiling Kimmel said.

Representatives for Kimmel in Los Angeles and West in New York didn't immediately respond to requests for comment made early Friday, outside of business hours.

In a tweet Kimmel posted before the show, he said West's attack was "not a prank, I promise," unless West was playing one on him. Kimmel has done his share of high-concept comedy, including a show in which Matt Damon tied him up onstage and took over as host.

West is known for his outbursts, not his humour.

The incident capped a big week for Jimmy Kimmel Live, with shows including Hollywood street concerts with Paul McCartney and Justin Timberlake.

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