What fell on the Krypton Street post office?
HAS space junk been falling on Holland? According to a report in the newsletter of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, a 3-kilogram metallic object fell from the sky on the village of Ede, the Netherlands, on 4 March, piercing the ceiling of a post office.
The object, a metallic ball of about 13 by 18 centimetres, was initially thought to be part of a rocket or a satellite that had survived re-entry into the atmosphere. However, when Dutch police sent it to the European Space Agency for investigation, ESA scientists identified the ball as a cast-iron, manufactured object they were quite sure had formed no part of any aerospace construction and which in any case showed no sign of re-entry surface melting.
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So what was it? How did it come to fall through the ceiling of the Ede post office? Above all, are we to make anything of the fact that this post office is located in Krypton Street?
VISITING the UK from Australia and shopping in “a large supermarket called Sainsbury in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire”, Mike Watson was surprised to find an adhesive label on an iPod amplifier bearing the words “Security protected – please remove prior to putting in microwave.”
“Is electronic equipment meant to be put into the microwave?” he asks reasonably. Feedback suspects the sticker contains an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag – which would explode (possibly for some small value of “explode”) in a microwave. We have previously noted this warning on DVDs from the same shop (31 October 2009) and debunked an urban legend that Euro notes contain RFID tags – microwaving a €5 note produced expensive smoke, but no telltale pinhole burn (7 August 2004).
We must of course advise readers who have shopped at Sainsbury’s, or elsewhere, against carrying out any experiments at home. Note to our lawyers: you can stop slapping us now.
MORE advertising aimed at the credulous wings its way from Australia, hot on the heels of the Power Balance bracelet that we reported on last autumn (20 November 2010). Nigel Taylor sends an ad from the 14 November edition of Melbourne newspaper, The Age, for “Fat-busting Brazilian undies”. It quotes a “Dr Tim Nielsen” as saying that Far Infra Red Rays have been “scientifically proven to… melt away… subcutaneous fat and smooth out the skin”. The single other online reference we find to Dr Nielsen is on a .
The web page at explains: “Although the exact composition of Scala’s Active BioCrystals is a trade secret, what we can tell you is… that they are an amalgam of several different kinds of ceramics mixed together with ultrafine and ultra-pure particles of various mineral oxides (such as alumina, magnesium oxide and silica)… capable of emitting Far Infra Red Rays.” There are footnotes, so it must be good.
Gosh. Warm thing emits radiation, as predicted by physics… but did we say “radiation”? Oh dear…
Sub-atomic particles and cheese
READING the instructions in the Slimming World recipe book, Chris Gibson was surprised to find that one of the ingredients in the haddock pie he was making was “quark”. He had not heard of quark as a foodstuff, only as a sub-atomic particle, so he did a search for it. Sure enough, Wikipedia revealed it to be a form of cottage cheese that goes under a variety of names such as paneer. So Chris wrote out his shopping list and headed for his local supermarket.
He wandered the aisles until he reached the cheese department, then asked one of the staff where he could find quark. He couldn’t resist mentioning to her that he was more familiar with the sub-atomic particle than the cheese version of quark. To his delight, she agreed with him, telling him how confused about this she herself had been when she started the job. So saying, she pulled a tub of quark cheese from among the yogurts in the cooler and handed it to him.
FINALLY, Superantispyware is, as far as Feedback can tell, a legitimate program for removing spyware from your computer. We do sympathise with the anonymous reviewer at PC Hell who wrote “I know, it sounds just like all the other bogus antispyware tools being loaded on your computer without your permission” – see . However, the reviewer also describes the program as “fantastic” and fully endorses it.
Stephen Hemmings, however, was alarmed, on visiting , to find on which it promotes itself as being capable of removing itself: “SUPERAntiSpyware can safely remove SUPERANTISPYWARE.EXE,” it proclaims.