Mail Online

• 2013 was the year of the Twitpic with ISS astronauts sharing hundreds of incredible images of Earth from space
• Amateurs gave space agencies a run for their money with close-up images of the sun taken from their back garden
• Meanwhile, billion pound telescopes explored the darker reaches of our galaxy revealing some unexpected shapes

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Up until this year, images taken of Saturn’s hexagonal storm have been in infrared wavelengths, showing false-colour shades of red, orange and green. In October, Cassini, which has been orbiting the planet for over nine years, captured the northern hexagon in its true, incredible colours
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The sun may be 93 million miles away from Earth, but that didn’t stopped amateur astronomer Ralph Smith capturing these stunning close-ups from his garden earlier this year. Shown here is a close up of the sun showing a solar prominence on its surface.

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The Golden Gate Bridge is visible from space in this incredible shot of San Francisco Bay taken by astronaut Chris Hadfield. In an exclusive interview with the MailOnline, the Canadian astronaut revealed that he took over 40,000 photos during his five month stint on the ISS
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While this picture was taken in 2012, it went viral this year as the greatest selfie of all time. Aki Hoshide took the image at the International Space Station
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This image from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory shows the cloud associated with the Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the Monoceros, or Unicorn, constellation
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Black-sand dunes on the floor of Mars’ crater have been formed from cooled lava rock. This is one of the first sand dune fields ever recognised on Mars. In winter, these dunes are covered by frost and CO2 ice
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Ivan Eder, from Hungary, took this wonderful shot of M81 and M82 galaxies – twelve million light years from Earth. Most of the emission at infrared wavelengths originates from interstellar dust. This dust is found primarily within the galaxy’s spiral arms
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This image of Mars’ ‘Grand Canyon’, taken by ESA’s Mars Express, captured the imagination of space enthusiasts in 2013. The deep valley, named Hebes Chasma, is a strange 315 km scar that sits almost right in the middle of the Martian equator on the northern edge of the Valles Marineris canyon
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This image was taken from the International Space Station 200 miles above Earth. It reveals a mass of storm clouds churning over the Atlantic Ocean near Brazil and the Equator. A Russian spacecraft, docked to the orbiting outpost, partially covers a small patch of sunlight on the ocean waters in a break in the clouds
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The sun fired off its strongest solar flare of the year this week causing a wide-area blackout of high frequency signal. Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of an X3.3-class solar flare that peaked at 5:12 pm EST (10:12 pm GMT) on Tuesday. The long streak of light is likely due to solar protons saturating the imager

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This image shows the great salt desert in Iran. Central in the desert lies the Kavir Buzurg (or Great Marsh), and in the west, a vast salt lake called Darya-ye Namak contains large salt plates in a mosaic-like shape
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The picture takes in 404,880 miles across Saturn and its inner ring system, including its rings out of the E ring, which is the planet’s outer-most ring
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‘This morning, over Africa, my breath was taken away’, tweeted Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield when he shared this photo on Twitter. Hadfield claims he never got tired of looking at Earth while on the ISS

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The construction workers at the Heritage Landing construction site are big Winnipeg Jets fans.  A Jets flag hanging from the crane.

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The bottom of the 25 story building is starting to take shape.

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Who needs a real fireplace when there is a continuous one 24/7 on TV?  And some guy keeps adding logs. The crackling sounds like firecrackers.

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The Onion

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OAK CREEK, WI—Turning on the television while unpacking tablets, iPhones, and laptops from their suitcases, members of the McPherson family communed from across the nation this holiday season for several straight days of staring into electronic screens while in the same room together, sources confirmed Friday. “Nothing puts me in the Christmas spirit more than sitting down on the couch with my parents and siblings, turning on the TV, and then proceeding to either look at the screen or gaze down into my glowing tablet display for hours on end,” 28-year-old Andrew McPherson told reporters, adding that he always felt most connected to his relatives when they were both silently gazing into glowing screens of some kind. “It’s just great to get home for a while and spend some quality time not speaking a single word to my relatives, whether that’s by sipping hot cocoa with my sister while we both check our emails, or by gathering the whole clan for a nice holiday meal where everyone is fixedly looking down at the text messages on their phones—’tis the season, you know?” McPherson noted he was sad, however, that Grandpa Sam would not be there to stare into screens with them this year.

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BBC

Killed by a coffin

Henry Taylor died an ironic death. He was a pall bearer in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery, and was midway through a funeral when he caught his foot on a stone and stumbled. As he fell to the ground, the other bearers let go of the coffin, which fell on poor, prone Henry.

“The greatest confusion was created amongst the mourners who witnessed the accident,” said the Illustrated Police News in November 1872, “and the widow of the person about to be buried nearly went into hysterics.”

 

Killed as a zombie

The funeral was in full swing when the lid of the coffin lifted, and the corpse began to climb out.

This was, needless to say, an unexpected turn of events. White-faced with fear, the priest and the mourners alike ran from the church of their Russian village and scattered to their homes, bolting their doors. The ghoul lurched after them, bursting into the house of an old woman who had not been quite so nimble with her lock.

As the priest collected his senses, he realised the rampaging corpse was actually a coma patient who’d regained consciousness. Too late. The peasants in his parish had plucked up their nerve, armed themselves with guns and stakes and set off for an exorcism. By the time the priest arrived on the scene, the zombie had been successfully returned to the other side, and the body thrown into a marsh.

 

Killed by a drunken bear

A quick quiz. You are offered a bear to keep as a pet. Do you:

a) Turn it down. It’s cruel to keep a bear as a pet

b) Accept it. Perhaps you might teach it to drink booze too

In Vilna (now Vilnius), then in Russia, in 1891, there was a man who would have answered b). The bear was large but tame, but it had a taste for vodka. One day it bustled into a village tavern and grabbed a keg of vodka. The owner of the inn, Isaack Rabbanovitch, objected, and tried to snatch it back.

It would be an understatement to say this was an error. In the chaotic scenes that ensued the infuriated animal hugged to death the tavern keeper, then did the same to his two sons and daughter. The villagers found the drunken animal asleep on the floor in a pool of blood and alcohol, surrounded by its victims. The bear was immediately shot.

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Laughed himself to death

Almost 80 years before Monty Python’s Ernest Scribbler created the funniest joke in the world, farmer Wesley Parsons had a deadly gag all of his own. He was joking with friends in Laurel, Indiana, in 1893, when he was seized by fits of uncontainable laughter, and couldn’t stop. He laughed for nearly an hour, when he began hiccupping. Two hours later he died from exhaustion.

 

Killed by a bet

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. In the Spanish region of Navarre in 1879, two Frenchmen struck a bet to see which was the hardiest. The terms were these. After fasting for a day, they’d drink 17 glasses of wine each, then walk from Pamplona to a village six miles away. It was the height of summer, just to make it that extra bit more interesting.

As one was far younger than the other, they hit on a handicap system – for every year’s advantage the twenty-something had over his middle-aged rival, he’d carry a pound of dirt. So off they went. Both lurching towards their goal – one staggering under the extra burden of 16lbs of earth.

They hadn’t gone far, needless to say, when the wager took a dark turn. The elder man collapsed and died. The younger, reported the Manchester Evening News at the time, “escaped death only by the skin of his teeth”.

 

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CBC

    Christmas without light: Tens of thousands still have no power

About 69,800 Toronto customers without power. Some could be in the dark until the weekend.

• Hydro Quebec says some 21,000 customers still without electricity.
• In Nova Scotia, number of outages cut to 300, then all restored Wednesday
• In New Brunswick, just under 21,000 customers still in the dark.
• Ice storm linked to at least 14 deaths in U.S., Maine and Michigan among states with no power

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Toronto officials said Wednesday afternoon that 69,800 customers were still without electricity, from a high of about 300,000. The ice storm slammed into southern Ontario last weekend before moving east and causing havoc in the Maritimes, and in the northeastern U.S.

At a news conference Wednesday morning, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said workers from other utilities in Ontario, as well as Manitoba, have been working around the clock. The cleanup of all the tree branches that have either fallen or been removed, along with other debris, could take four to six weeks.

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The vehicle insurance companies are going to take a beating.

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People desperate to keep warm are also engaging in some dangerous practices.

Early Christmas morning, two children and two adults in east-end Toronto were taken to hospital to be treated for carbon monoxide poisoning, reportedly after the occupants of an apartment were burning coal to keep warm.

The incident follows the death of two people in Newcastle, Ont., after carbon monoxide apparently seeped into their home from the garage where a gas generator was in use, prompting authorities to caution people against using  generators, charcoal stoves and barbecues indoors.

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WIKIPEDIA

This is a list of countries by coal production in 2011, based mostly on the Statistical Review of World Energy published in 2012 by British Petroleum, ranking nations with coal production larger than 4 millions tonnes. Shares are based on data expressed in tonnes oil equivalent.

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Coal plant in Germany.

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     Coal production (million tonnes)

Rank	Country/Region	Coal production (million tonnes)	share of total (%)
—	World	7,695
1	China	3,520.0	49.5
2	United States	992.8	14.1
3	India	588.5	5.6
—	European Union	576.1	4.2
4	Australia	415.5	5.8
5	Russia	333.5	4.0
6	Indonesia	324.9	5.1
7	South Africa	255.1	3.6
8	Germany	188.6	1.1
9	Poland	139.2	1.4
10	Kazakhstan	115.9	1.5
11	Ukraine	86.8	1.1
12	Colombia	85.8	1.4
13	Turkey	77.2	0.4
14	Canada	68.2	0.9
15	Czech Republic	57.9	0.5
16	Greece	57.5	0.2
17	Vietnam	44.5	0.6
18	Serbia	39.1	0.5
19	North Korea	37.5	0.5
20	Bulgaria	37.1	0.2
21	Romania	35.5	0.2
22	Mongolia	30.0	0.4
23	Thailand	21.4	0.2
24	Estonia	20.6	0.3
25	United Kingdom	18.3	0.3
26	Mexico	15.7	0.2
27	Bosnia and Herzegovina	12.8	0.2
28	Hungary	9.6	0.1
29	Venezuela	8.7	0.2
30	Philippines	7.9	0.1
31	Macedonia	7.8	0.1
32	Spain	6.6	0.1
33	Brazil	6.2	0.1
34	Slovenia	5.0	0.1
35	New Zealand	4.9	0.1

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MTS Centre roof.  Home of the Jets.

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