TechInScience

  Tetraphobia    is a   fear   of the number   4 . It is a   superstition   found most often in   East Asian  areas like   China ,   Japan ,   Korea , and   Taiwan . An elevator in Shanghai – floor numbers 4, 13 and 14 are missing The Chinese word for  four  (四, pinyin: sì, jyutping: sei), sounds very similar to the word for  death  (死, pinyin: sǐ, jyutping: sei). Chinese people take care not use the number 4 during important holidays, or if someone in the family is sick. Numbers such as 14, 24, and so on, are not used because they also have the number 4 in them. Buildings sometimes do not have floors with these numbers, apartments and hotels do not have rooms with number 4, 14, 24 and so on. Table number 4, 14, 24, may be often left out in wedding dinners or other social activities in ...

On the night of July 9, 1958, an earthquake along the Fairweather Fault in the Alaska Panhandle loosened about 40 million cubic yards (30.6 million cubic meters) of rock high above the northeastern shore of Lituya Bay. This mass of rock plunged from an altitude of approximately 3000 feet (914 meters) down into the waters of Gilbert Inlet (see map below). The impact generated a local tsunami that crashed against the southwest shoreline of Gilbert Inlet. The wave hit with such power that it swept completely over the spur of land that separates Gilbert Inlet from the main body of Lituya Bay. The wave then continued down the entire length of Lituya Bay, over La Chaussee Spit and into the Gulf of Alaska. The force of the wave removed all trees and vegetation from elevations as high as 1720 feet (524 meters) above sea level. Millions of trees were uprooted and swept away by the wave. This is the highest wave that has ever been known Detail Map: Lituya Bay, Alaska Lituya Bay is an ice-...

The fastest-spinning neutron star ever found has been discovered in a crowded star cluster near the centre of the Milky Way, a new study reveals. The star rotates 716 times per second – faster than some theories predict is possible – and therefore may force researchers to revise their models. Neutron stars form when a massive star explodes at the end of its life and leaves behind a super-dense, spinning ball of neutrons. These stellar corpses emit intense beams of radio waves from their poles and are called pulsars. Most pulsars rotate just a few times per second, but some spin hundreds of times faster. These so-called millisecond pulsars whip around so quickly because they are thought to have stripped mass – and angular momentum – from companion stars at some point in their histories. Astronomers led by Jason Hessels of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, used the 100-metre Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, US, to clock the newly discovered pulsar at 716 rotations ...