Nigerians await solar eclipse on Monday, lunar episode July 27, 2018

Nigerians await solar eclipse on Monday, lunar episode July 27, 2018

Solar Eclipse
*Comet responsible for meteor shower could wipe out humanity 2,400 years from now in impact equal to 20m hydrogen bombs

Unlike the United States (US), which will experience total solar eclipse, Nigeria will experience a partial solar episode on Monday August 21, 2017. According to Science News, a partial solar eclipse will be seen from the much broader path of the Moon’s penumbra, including all of North America, northern South America, Western Europe, and some of Africa including Nigeria and north-east of Asia on Monday, August 21, 2017.

Also, Nigeria will experience total lunar eclipse, which would be is fully visible in Lagos. The total lunar eclipse is sometimes called a blood moon, as the Moon turns red.

According to timeanddate.com report on all eclipses worldwide from 1900 to 2100, there will also be total lunar eclipse on July 27, 2018 and January 21, 2019; partial lunar eclipse on July 16/17, 2019; transit mercury eclipse on November 21, 2019; penumbral lunar eclipse January 10, 2020.

Nigeria experienced the last partial solar eclipse on February 26, 2017. The National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) observed the phenomenon.
The country had on Thursday, September 1, 2016, experienced another partial solar eclipse with slight variations in actual timing across the country.

Nigerians had also witnessed the occurrence of an eclipse 11 years ago, on March 29, 2006, when some religious bodies had attributed it to the divine anger of God on Nigerians while some even saw it as a sign of an impending apocalypse.

Before the 2006 total eclipse, an earlier total solar eclipse took place in Nigeria and along West African coast on May 20, 1947.Solar eclipses have often been seen as or the anger of the gods, but it is believed that the real reason for the erratic occurrence of solar eclipses on Earth may finally have been solved because research has confirmed that a solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon’s apparent diameter is larger than the Sun’s, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness.Meanwhile, the die is cast for yet another total solar eclipse after 99 years. The sky will go dark. The temperature will drop. Stars will shine in the middle of the day. For the first time in nearly a century, millions of Americans from coast-to-coast will witness a total solar eclipse. Those who have watched the sun suddenly snuff out say it’s an otherworldly feeling. It can be humbling. It can be spiritual. It can change the course of history.

NASRDA warned that members of the public, pupils and students that they should view the eclipse with specially designed viewing instruments. The agency warned that the eclipse should be viewed with the naked eyes as this could cause permanent damage to human eyes.

The total solar eclipse will be visible in totality within a band across the entire contiguous US; it will only be visible in other countries as a partial eclipse. The last time a total solar eclipse was visible across the entire contiguous United States was during the June 8, 1918 eclipse.

Also, this weekend, the night sky is set to dazzle with up to 150 shooting stars per hour as the Perseid meteor shower (also called shooting stars in this clime) moves into its peak.

The phenomenon comes around every year, all thanks to an icy space rock known as Comet Swift-Tuttle – but, thousands of years from now, that same comet could bring on the worst mass extinction Earth has seen in hundreds of millions of years.Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle completes its orbit around the sun every 133 years, and roughly 2,400 years from now, this will bring it ‘perilously close’ to Earth.

While the likelihood of it slamming into Earth is extremely low, experts say there’s a small chance that its orbit will be offset by a ‘gravitational kick’ from Jupiter, causing an impact with 30 times the energy of that which killed the dinosaurs.

For the next 2,000 years, Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle poses little threat to Earth and its inhabitants, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel assures.But eventually, around the year 4479, it will come ‘perilously close’ to Earth, and a gravitational nudge from Jupiter could push it off its course, resulting in a number of possible scenarios.

It could be sent hurtling into the sun, or even be ejected from the solar system, Siegel explains.Or, it could end up plunging toward Earth.The comet is moving four times faster than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, according to the astrophysicist, and the resulting impact would release 28 times as much energy – or, the equivalent of 20,000,000 hydrogen bombs exploding.

In a new post for the Forbes blog Starts With a Bang, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains that the sheer size and speed of Comet Swift-Tuttle would set our planet up for major catastrophe if a collision were to happen.

The fast-moving comet is massive; at 16 miles wide (26km), it’s 260 per cent the width of the ‘dinosaur-killer.’But, according to Siegel, Swift-Tuttle’s orbit is no great mystery to scientists, and they’ve already determined where it will be for upwards of the next 2,000 years.

It hasn’t crossed into the inner solar system since 1992, and isn’t set to do so again until 2126.According to Siegel, scientists’ calculations of its orbit show Earth is “100 per cent safe’ from the comet for thousands of years to come – but, in the year 4479, it will come terrifyingly close.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will strike, Siegel explains, but the possibility does exist.Once the comet makes its close approach about 2,400 years from now, “there’s still a 99.9999 per cent chance it will miss us,” Siegel writes.

GOOGLE TO LAUNCH ANDROID O DURING SOLAR ECLIPSE ON MONDAY

GOOGLE TO LAUNCH ANDROID O DURING SOLAR ECLIPSE ON MONDAY

Not everyone gets the chance to witness a solar eclipse in their lifetime. Infact, it’s been nearly one hundred years since we’ve seen a solar eclipse at the same scale as the one that is expected yo sweep across the United states

Silicon Valley has finally found the one line that can't be crossed — now it has a bigger problem

Silicon Valley has finally found the one line that can't be crossed — now it has a bigger problem

The violence in Charlottesville has caused many tech companies to rethink their roles.

The protests in Charlottesville last weekend and the violence that accompanied them have encouraged tech companies to rethink their responsibilities.  (REUTERS/Joshua Roberts)
In the aftermath of last year's presidential election, tech execs were unanimous in denying that their various platforms had anything to do with the spread of falsehoods, fake news, and outright lies that allegedly contributed to President Trump's unexpected election.

"Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, it's a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said less than a week after the election.

How wrong he was.

Even after it was apparent that the spread of fake news did play a role in the outcome of the election, the tech world wasn't sure it could or should stop it. One tech executive told me last December that so much content is uploaded to various tech platforms every day that properly policing all of it would be impossible. Plus, there are all those free speech issues the tech companies would have to navigate. There was just no way to fix the problem, the tech industry said.

Keep in mind these statements were coming out of Silicon Valley, where, supposedly, the greatest technological and entrepreneurial minds of our time love to brag about their intelligence and how great they are at solving problems. Yet they failed to see the responsibility that comes with managing the various services that have become the dominant form of news consumption for many people.

Now, nine months later, you're hearing a strikingly different tone from the tech world. Apparently, they draw the line at Nazis.

Following the horrific events in Charlottesville last weekend, a slew of tech companies both large and small made moves to eliminate the spread of hate, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, Nazism, and all sorts of other nasty things from their various platforms.

Let's recap:

Apple and PayPal stopped supporting payments on sites that sell white supremacist merchandise.
GoDaddy and Google canceled the domain registration for the extremist site Daily Stormer. The moves followed Daily Stormer's decision to publish a horrible story about Heather Heyer, the woman killed during the Charlottesville protests.
Cloudflare dropped Daily Stormer as a customer, ending the protection it provided to the site against denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Facebook removed links to hateful articles about Heather Heyer in the News Feed.
The chat app Discord shut down some of the servers that white supremacists used to organize the protests in Charlottesville.
Airbnb reiterated it wouldn't allow white supremacists to use its app to organize lodging for protests.
Spotify removed "hate bands" from its music library.
On top of all that, there was a chorus of tech leaders, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who denounced the events in Charlottesville and called out Trump for his misleading "many sides" response.

What a difference a few months of a heated culture war and the killing of an innocent woman can make in the tech world's perspective.

I think tech companies have finally realized a certain responsibility comes with owning the platforms and services that deliver news, information, and entertainment to billions every day. Just like editors of a newspaper have to carefully vet content for truth, platforms also have to discover ways to edit the information that's posted on their sites — but on a massive scale.

It's a welcome change of heart. Better late than never.

But it's not ideal, either. Some have rightfully raised concerns that the kind of policing we've seen over the last week could lead to a slippery slope where content and users are booted off certain platforms on a whim, without some kind of process. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a great recap of those arguments this week, saying the moves tech companies used to silence white supremacists could "soon be used to silence others."

While tech companies have a right to control their platforms, doing so could lead us to a place where their responses are influenced by headlines or public outcry rather than being the result of a deliberate process. Even Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince admitted his decision to stop working with Daily Stormer was emotionally charged; he dropped the site as a customer, because he was in a "bad mood."

That's fine when you're leaving Nazis in the dust, but it could set a harmful precedent if it encourages other tech CEOs to drop customers whose political views they disagree with. Even if their hearts are in the right place, jumping on the bandwagon isn't always the right answer. (OkCupid learned that Thursday when it kicked a white supremacist off its dating service.)

Tech companies are going to have to strike a delicate balance, and I don't think they'll figure it out right away. Finding that balance is going to take months of experiments, screwups, and horror stories before the tech companies put the right plans in place. EFF's recommendation that tech firms "have a process, don't act on headlines" feels like a good start.

In the meantime, it's going to be messy. For the first time in human history, the entire world is connected in a way that lets people bypass the traditional — and typically carefully curated — sources of news and information. On top of that, there are now apps that make it easy for bad actors to organize.

And tech companies will likely be facing a constant game of cat-and-mouse. Boot the fake news purveyors and supremacists from one service, and they'll find another or even build their own.

But the good news is that bad actors like those are finally getting kicked off the services that matter.

Google finally enables Bluetooth audio streaming for Home speaker

Google finally enables Bluetooth audio streaming for Home speaker

Google has enabled Bluetooth audio streaming for Google Home, according to Android Police. The feature that was touted when the smart assistant was announced at Google I/O back in May. Google enabled the feature by accident back in June, but it seems this time everything is official.

The update means Google Home owners can stream local music, podcasts, and streaming services that may not be supported by Home to their speakers at will. However, it may not be that great for people wanting pristine audio quality, as there are users complaining about the notable lag over the connection.

The update is reportedly rolling out gradually, so everyone should have it within the next few days. To activate Bluetooth audio streaming head to settings in the Home app, tap Paired Bluetooth devices and pair your device to the Home speaker.