Science Roundup

This is a picture of “earthquake lights”:

As early as 373 BC, people have claimed to see similar aurora-like lights in the sky during (and sometimes before) earthquakes. Scientists are at a loss for what those lights might be. Some think that they’re electrically charged gasses released into the atmosphere by fissures in the earth’s crust. Others think that stress on the tectonic plates from the earthquake somehow messes with the earth’s magnetic field and causes the lights. Since the lights are often seen in China, some geologists guess that the lights might be caused by sparks from compressed quartz in the ground. At the end of the day, no one really knows, so your guess is almost as good as someone with a PhD from MIT… which is kind of cool.

And what the hell is this:

According to this article in the Daily Mail, it’s a photograph of some as yet unidentified creature snapped by teenagers in Panama. The creature is drawing comparisons with the Montauk Monster, an unidentified creature found on Long Island, New York in July 2008. However, there were several immediate candidates for what the Montauk Monster might have been: a raccoon, an unusually large opossum, a dog, or perhaps a rodent (whatever it was, it has spent a considerable amount of time in the water, which altered its appearance and made identification difficult). No such guessing is possible for this strange creature, although many are calling it an outright prank or a “lost film prop” (the teenagers claimed to beat it to death with sticks, so if that’s true, then “film prop” is right out).

And finally, there are new pictures from Hubble and the first pictures from the Planck telescope to feast your eyes on.