The Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles from our sun.

New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.
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In some cultures, those flying mammals called bats are a common part of the diet. Inhabitants in places such as Ghana, China, Thailand, Guam and Australia not only consume bats but commonly see the Chiroptera featured on café menus. One caveat: medical research indicates that people who eat bats suffer increased instances of SARS, Ebola and dementia. I do think that I would have to develop dementia prior to eating bats.

George the First was king of Great Britain from 1714 to 1727. He barely spoke English and he was a native of Hanover (Germany). This George Ludwig succeeded Queen Anne to the throne even though there were 50 living relatives that were more closely related to Anne. All those in line to inherit the crown before George were Catholic and thusly ineligible for kingship as a result of the Act of Settlement (1701). The whole jumbled disarray resulted in a distant second cousin living in Deutschland becoming the new English sovereign. This sequence of events likely seemed completely logical in the early 1700’s.
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