"Marvels & Tales"--All Issues Available Digitally

“Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies” is happy to announce that all issues from its twenty-six year history are now available online—including those edited by Jacques Barchilon under the title “Merveilles et contes” during the journal’s first ten years (1987-96). Content is available through JSTOR, Digital Commons, and Project Muse, through institutions and libraries that have subscriptions to these services. Digital Commons also allows for individual purchases and subscriptions. Here are our direct links to those sites:


1987-2008 via JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=marvelstales


1997-present via the journal’s Digital Commons website at http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/



2001-present via Project Muse (2001-present) at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mat/



Donald Haase

Editor, "Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies"

Wayne State University


dhaase@wayne.edu

These Bridges For Animals Are Insanely Clever And Beautiful

Wildlife bridges are special crossings that help animals get across highways safely.
Lush foliage, soil and streams lure bears, deer, moose, panthers and other wildlife over or under busy roadways so as not to get crushed by cars. The crossings aren't just for protection. They also help connect habitats that are broken up by roads.
Here's an image of a crossing over a highway in the Netherlands posted to Reddit. The country is actually home to more than 600 of these friendly animal footbridges. Pretty clever, huh?

LIDAR Maya

Above the jungles of Central America, a device aboard an aircraft used millions of laser pulses to penetrate the thick forest canopy and map ancient Mayan settlements in 3-D. That demonstrated the power of LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), a technology that has transformed archaeology over the past five years.







LIDAR's ability to image everything down to 1.2 inches (3 centimeters) means that archaeologists can create detailed reconstructions of everything from the siege works outside old U.S. forts to underground tunnels from World War I in France.

"Thirty years ago, using photographs and plain old pen and pencil to survey would take weeks," said Tony Pollard, director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. "Now, LIDAR can do it in minutes."

The technology can even measure subtle differences in crop height that may reveal buried features in everything from ditches to buildings, said Sarah Parcak, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. She added that using such 3-D mapping power with satellite imaging could give archaeologists a powerful combination of tools for the future

P/2010 A2

First Small-Body Collision between Asteroids

On 6 January 2010, the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project discovered a mysterious X-shaped Solar System body, named P/2010 A2, traveling at 11,000 mph. The object has confused astronomers because it shows characteristics of both an asteroid and a comet. It has the orbit of a main-belt asteroid and the tail of a comet. For this reason, P/2010 A2 was originally listed as a main-belt comet.

Within a month of the discovery, analysis of the images captured by the Hubble telescope suggested that P/2010 A2 was generated from a recent head-on collision between asteroids. It was the first time a small-body collision by asteroids had been observed. The evidence was supported by the position of the object’s nucleus, which is offset from the axis and outside of the dust halo. P/2010 A2 has no sign of an active nucleus, which has caused scientists to believe it was moved in an impact event.

NASA determined that the nucleus was the “surviving remnant of a hypervelocity collision,” when two small and previously unknown asteroids hit. This event created a shower of debris that is being swept back into the tail by the pressure of the sunlight. The X-shaped debris pattern of P/2010 A2 is unusual and has confused scientists.

Before it was determined that P/2010 A2 came from an asteroid collision, some speculated that it may be a rare carbonaceous asteroid located in the inner main belt. If true, this would suggest that there are more volatile-rich asteroids closer to Earth. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with the Flora asteroid family, which was produced more than 100 million years ago. The Flora family of asteroids may be the source of the K/T impactor, which is the likely culprit in the extinction of the dinosaurs. The discovery of P/2010 A2 has spawned a collection of conspiracy theories regarding the collision hypothesis.

Solar Storm of 1859

First Observed Solar Flare

A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a massive burst of solar wind. They are often associated with other forms of solar activity, most notably solar flares. A solar flare is a sudden brightening observed over the Sun, which has been interpreted as a large release of energy. The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions and atoms through the corona into space. These clouds typically reach the earth a day or two after the event. Most ejections originate from active regions on the Sun’s surface, such as sunspots. During the solar maximum, which is the time when the Sun shows the greatest amount of activity, the Sun produces about 3 CMEs every day, whereas near solar minimum there is about 1 CME every 5 days.

The next solar maximum is predicted to occur sometime between January and May 2013. When a coronal mass ejection is directed towards the Earth, the wave of particles can create a geomagnetic storm that may disrupt the magnetosphere. The process can cause strong auroras around the Earth’s magnetic poles, known as the Northern and Southern Lights. Coronal mass ejections and solar flares can disrupt communication lines, radio transmissions, and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission facilities, resulting in massive and long-lasting power outages on Earth. Humans in space or at high altitudes, in airplanes for example, risk exposure to intense radiation.

The solar storm of 1859 occurred during solar cycle 10. It was the most powerful solar storm in recorded history. The largest flare, observed by Richard Christopher Carrington, became known as the Carrington Super Flare. On 1 September 1859, Carrington and Richard Hodgson, another English amateur astronomer, independently made the first published observations of a solar flare. It should be noted that Scottish physicist Balfour Stewart recorded a super flare on the evening of 28 August 1859, at the Kew Observatory, and presented his findings in a paper on 21 November 1861. Despite this fact, Richard Carrington has been given the designation of being the first to demonstrate the existence of solar flares.

In 1859, the largest flare was caused by a coronal mass ejection directed toward Earth. The CME took only 18 hours to arrive. This is remarkable because such a journey normally takes three to four days. On 1–2 September 1859, the Earth experienced a huge geomagnetic storm. Auroras were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean and Rocky Mountain. In the wake of the storm, telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies. A similar event in 2013 could devastate the world’s infrastructure.

Website: Historic Map Works, LLC

Based in Portland Maine, Historic Map Works, LLC is an Internet company formed to create a historic digital map database of North America and the world. Drawing on the largest physical collection of American property atlases of its type, it is our aim to be the single best online destination for map enthusiasts and researchers alike.

In addition to our own atlas collection, we incorporated our scans of the antiquarian world map collection from the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education located at the University of Southern Maine. Combining these collections allows site visitors a vast amount of information spanning several centuries of cartographic information.

Historic Map Works's map collection includes:

• United States Property Atlases
• Antiquarian Maps
• Nautical Charts
• Birdseye Views
• Special Collections (Celestial Maps, Portraits, and other historical images)
• Directories and other text documents

The vast majority of our database was created by scanning an original map at a high resolution by our team of highly skilled image technicians. After scanning, this team processes out the major imperfections while maintaining the look of an antiquarian map.

Click here for a video demonstration.
Maps are then uploaded and cataloged for viewing on our website. Our technicians geocode each map to a modern map to enable the search by address function. Linking the historic images in our database with geocode data allows visitors to search by modern day address or latitude and longitude coordinates. Other methods to view our maps include browsing by geographic location as well as searching our maps via keywords, town names, makers names, or simply by year.

Prints and giftware are offered for the vast majority of images on our site. A Giclee printing process is used to create the images ordered from our site ensuring an archival print that will remain vibrant for years to come.

Historic Map Works has two websites which host our maps. The first is www.historicmapworks.com which is aimed at individual subscribers and the second is Historic Map Works Library Edition which is distributed by ProQuest to public libraries and universities.

Our map collection numbers over 1,595,425 individual images (click here for detailed statistics of maps available online) for you to explore. Track your ancestors to their homes; see the roads they traveled on, and the names of the neighbors they talked with. Multiple layers allow you to see an area change through time, and our Geocode feature allows you to compare historical and modern maps.

Website: Old Maps

Reproductions of historic town maps, state maps, birds eye views, and more. www.old-maps.com    (with a dash)

Old Maps  is the name of a small business that was established in 1980 to republish historical maps. We started with printed volumes of Cheshire County, NH, but our focus has since expanded to offering digital and printed reproductions of maps from all over New England.

We do our best to provide free content, such as compressed maps that are more easily downloaded by people with dialup internet. If you find any of the maps useful, please support us by buying a print or CD!