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Gaborik’s trick leads Team Chara to All-Star win

Feb 1st, 2012
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Team Alfredsson’s Henrik Sedin scores past Team Chara goaltender Jimmy Howard during the first period of the NHL All-Star hockey game on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012, in Ottawa. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Fred Chartrand)

Team Alfredsson’s Henrik Sedin scores past Team Chara goaltender Jimmy Howard during the first period of the NHL All-Star hockey game on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012, in Ottawa. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Fred Chartrand)

Team Chara’s Marian Gaborik, center, is congratulated following his third goal past Team Alfredsson goaltender Jonathan Quick (32) by teammates Marain Hossa, left, and Dion Phaneuf during the second period of the NHL All-Star hockey game on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012, in Ottawa, Ontario. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Sean Kilpatrick)

Team Chara’s Marian Gaborik celebrates his goal past Team Alfredson goaltender Henrik Lundqvist during the first period of the NHL All-Star hockey game on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012, in Ottawa. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Fred Chartrand)

Mick E. Moose, the Winnipeg Jets mascot, takes in the pre-game ceremonies at the NHL All-Star game Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012 in Ottawa. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson)

Team Alfredsson’s Hendrik Sedin, left, is congratulated byScott Hartnell after scoring past Team Chara goaltender Jimmy Howard during the first period of the NHL hockey All-Star game Sunday, Jan. 29, 2012 in Ottawa, Ontario. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Sean Kilpatrick)

OTTAWA (AP) ? Marian Gaborik got the best of New York Rangers teammate Henrik Lundqvist, and Zdeno Chara scored the winning goal for the NHL All-Star team named after him.

Even in defeat, Daniel Alfredsson rewarded the hometown fans with two goals and an assist, and then the Ottawa Senators captain provided a hint that he might come back for one more season.

For an All-Star game that lacked the league’s top-name talent in Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, there was plenty to keep everyone buzzing on Sunday.

Gaborik scored three times, added an assist and earned MVP honors, and Team Chara used a third-period offensive eruption to secure a 12-9 win over Team Alfredsson.

“We have a lot of fun out there,” said Lundqvist, who allowed three goals on 12 shots in the first period. “A lot of times you might forget because it’s a lot of pressure, and you put a lot of pressure on yourself, but this weekend is all about the game of hockey and having fun with it. So we’ve been enjoying ourselves, and I hope the fans felt the same way.”

What was not to like?

Fans were treated to a wide-open, no-hitting style in a game that featured plenty of nifty passing plays, numerous odd-man breaks and even a penalty shot awarded to Steven Stamkos, who leads the NHL with 32 goals.

Stamkos, however, was foiled on his freebie ? the second in All-Star game history ? when he attempted the same spin-around move he used to beat Carey Price in the skills competition on Saturday night. Jimmy Howard didn’t bite on Sunday, holding his ground and hugging the post to stop Stamkos’ penalty-shot attempt.

“I think I ran out of moves,” Stamkos said. “I tried something fancy and hoped it would work. It didn’t. But I just tried to have fun with it.”

Gaborik enjoyed himself the most, earning bragging rights over Lundqvist after the two spent the past few days playfully going back and forth on Twitter. The mock feud was over Lundqvist ? Alfredsson’s assistant captain ? choosing not to select Gaborik in the All-Star player draft on Thursday.

Gaborik showed just how motivated he was. After opening the scoring 4:34 in on a give-and-go with Pavel Datsyuk, Gaborik circled the net dropped to one knee and pointed his stick machine-gun style at Lundqvist while pumping his fist.

The move was identical to one done by Rangers forward Artem Anisimov earlier this season when he scored against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

This one was all in fun, said Gaborik, the 16th player to score at least three goals ? one short of matching the record ? in the All-Star game. It was the first All-Star hat trick since Rick Nash had three goals in 2008.

“It’s always tough to score on him,” Gaborik said of Lundqvist. “It’s not easy. I was fortunate to be lucky against him, but I think he’s one of the best if not the best goalie in the league.”

Tim Thomas made 18 saves in the final period, and extended his record by winning his fourth All-Star game.

Hossa and Jarome Iginla had a goal and two assists, and Joffrey Lupul scored twice for Team Chara.

For Team Alfredsson, Henrik Sedin had a goal and two assists, and Daniel Sedin, John Tavares, Jason Pominville and Milan Michalek had a goal and assist each.

The outcome was decided in the final period when Team Chara outscored Team Alfredsson 6-3.

With the game tied at 8, Chara, Marian Hossa and Corey Perry scored in a span of 1:22, beating goalie Brian Elliott on consecutive shots.

Gaborik set up Chara for the decisive goal, flipping the puck into the high slot, where Chara slapped it in.

“I was surprised that I was open, and I just put it on net,” Chara said. “It’s nice to get the win. The fans saw some goals, and then as we were going toward the end, you could see that the guys wanted to win.”

Chara paid respect to Alfredsson, saying he was rooting for his former Senators teammate to complete his hat trick.

“Alfie’s such a classy guy, obviously a big icon in Ottawa and Sweden, as well, and such a great player to represent this team,” Chara said. “So of course I was pulling for him.”

After falling behind 3-0, Team Alfredsson rallied to tie it before the first period ended. But they didn’t get their first ? and only lead ? until Alfredsson scored twice during a 1:31 span to put his team up 6-5 with just under four minutes left in the second.

His first goal came on a great individual effort in which Alfredsson, dragging the puck behind him, split defensemen Kimmo Timonen and Ryan Suter, and flipped a shot that sneaked inside the right post to beat Price. Alfredsson’s second came on a wonderful passing play courtesy of Daniel and Henrik Sedin, whom Alfredsson was looking forward to play with when he drafted the twins.

That got the crowd chanting “Alfie! Alfie! Alfie!”

He nearly scored his third goal in the third period, only to have a one-timer from the left circle ring off the post.

But it was after the game when Alfredsson sounded upbeat about his future in an interview broadcast on the arena’s scoreboard.

With a smile on his face, and fans cheering his name, Alfredsson said: “Fifty percent yes, and my wife’s going to have to decide the other 50.”

He has one year left on his contract.

It a game built around offense, the goalies still found ways to have fun with it.

Price allowed three goals on 14 shots, and lamented during the first intermission the lack of defense.

“I feel like being a lamb getting led to slaughter,” Price said. “I’m must be holding on for the ride today and hope I don’t get lit up too bad.”

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2012-01-29-All%20Star%20Game/id-4c3cbb17348c48cdbda14bdbf1f79a56

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At New Orleans comic event, mere humans become heroes (Reuters)

Jan 31st, 2012
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NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) ? Vampires drenched in fake blood mingled with sword-toting ninjas. Martian manhunters rubbed elbows with Batman and Wonder Woman.

For the thousands of comic-culture fans who circulated around acres of exhibits at the New Orleans Comic conference on Saturday, the event was a chance to meet, or temporarily become, a hero.

“When I walk out in regular clothes, no one pays any mind,” said attendee Jeff Kent, who was dressed in the gleaming white, robot-like garb of a “Star Wars” storm trooper. “But when I put this on, all of a sudden I’m a rock star.”

The event, one of several staged around the country by comic book and digital publisher Wizard World, continued on Sunday.

Celebrities on hand to meet fans included actors William Shatner (“Star Trek”), Adam Baldwin (“Full Metal Jacket”), Mary McDonnell (“Battlestar Gallactica”), James Marsters (“Buffy: The Vampire Slayer”) and Lou Ferrigno (Incredible Hulk”), along with

legendary comic book creator Stan Lee and a host of comic artists.

Cartoonist and comic book creator Larry Marder, who has published his “Tales of the Beanworld” comics for almost 40 years, told Reuters that at one time the primary focus of these conventions were the comic books and novels that shaped this peculiar segment of American culture.

“It used to be that the stories came first, and people read their monthly comics and were loyal to them,” he said. But over the years, characters like Superman, Batman and Spiderman became brands that reached far beyond their book origins.

“It’s almost as if the characters were real and they had agents who exploited their likenesses across many platforms – like movies, games, TV shows and breakfast cereal,” he said.

Marder said that the launch of “Star Wars” by movie producer George Lucas set the stage for a merchandising industry that widened into toys, video games and action figures. The expansion of the industry made a host of characters into household names, and turned fictional heroes into megapersonalities.

“Superheroes are essentially power fantasies, and the superhero fan has become the backbone of our industry,” Marder said.

Fans such as Chris Labrad support that theory. The Jackson, Mississippi, resident came to the comic conference with fellow members of the Mississippi Mandalorians, a “Star Wars” club he joined four years ago.

“I always saw those characters on television and thought, ‘I wish I could meet those guys,’” he said.

Costumed as a S.H.I.E.L.D Sniper from Marvel Comics’ Avenger Universe at the convention, Labrad said he is also a devoted “Star Wars” fan and has three different Jedi costumes, including Luke Skywalker.

“Events like this give us an excuse to dress up and be these people for a while,” he said.

Many of the fan groups build their activities around charitable causes, with members donning their costumes for fund-raising events.

The man best known for his 1960s television portrayal of a 23rd-century starship commander has a theory about why certain types of people flock to events such as the New Orleans event.

“It’s part of our need for heroes,” Shatner told fans who had jammed into a meeting room for a question-and-answer session with the star of the original “Star Trek” television series and movies. “This is our participation in the mythology of ‘Star Trek.’”

While “Star Trek” and subsequent movie series “Star Wars” were among the older cultural phenomena represented at the convention, their still-strong fan base made Shatner a big draw.

“Star Trek” devotees will never forget the actor’s portrayal of the morally grounded commander of the Starship Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk. Shatner purports to be sick of his decades-long association with Kirk, but he clearly enjoys having fun with it.

“Do you boldly go where no man has gone before?” a fan asked him, hearkening to the mission of the Starship Enterprise.

“It depends on the girl,” the 80-year-old Shatner quipped.

(Reporting by Kathy Finn; Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Greg McCune)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120129/us_nm/us_comedy_neworleans

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Astrophile: Stopped clocks deepen pulsar enigmas

Jan 2nd, 2012
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Astrophile is our weekly column covering curious cosmic objects, from within the solar system to the furthest reaches of the multiverse

What: Pulsar
Distance: 23,000 light years away

In 1967, suspiciously regular pulses of radiation were detected coming from space ? so regular that their discoverers thought they could be signals from an alien civilisation. That hypothesis was soon abandoned and the source was named a pulsar, or pulsing star. Since then, the metronomic emissions of gamma rays, X-rays or radio waves from pulsars has made them cosmic chronometers.

That’s why Fernando Camilo, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York, was astounded when the radio pulsar he had discovered and had been observing for a year ? PSR J1841-0500 ? suddenly stopped beaming its regular bursts. “At first I had a hard time believing what I was seeing,” he recalls. “For the past year, the pulsar had been so reliable, pulsing brightly once every 1.9 seconds. I thought there must be an error with the equipment.”

Intrigued, Camilo kept observing the star at 5-minute intervals once a month either at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, where it had been discovered, or at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. A year and a half later, his hard work paid off when the star came back to life, pulsing just as brightly as before.

Other pulsars have switched off for short periods, but Camilo’s has taken by far the longest break ever seen, raising new questions about just how reliable these cosmic clocks are. The finding also adds to the mystery surrounding pulsars, as exactly what makes them tick in the first place isn’t well understood either.

Celestial lighthouses

A pulsarMovie Camera is a spinning neutron star ? the dense neutron-rich core left over when a dying star explodes in a supernova. It has a very strong magnetic field, stronger than that of any known object in the universe.

Details are elusive, but we know that the rotating magnetic field accelerates charged particles on the star’s surface, somehow producing a beam of radiation along the magnetic field axis. This axis is at an angle to the pulsar’s rotational axis, so it sweeps through space like the light in a lighthouse. If Earth lies in the beam’s path, a pulse of radiation flashes in our sky once every rotation.

The beam of some X-ray-emitting pulsars is so regular that they rival atomic clocks for precision. This property is useful when searching for the effects of gravitational wavesMovie Camera and in satellite navigation.

Some pulsars go dark, though, and Camilo’s was not the first. In the 1970s, some regular pulsars were spotted switching off for a few seconds to a few minutes, a phenomenon known as “nulling”. And in the past decade, a new class of pulsars has been found , in which the silences can range from minutes to a few hours. They were dubbed rotating radio transients, or RRATs. Around the same time, a pulsar was found that pulsed for about a week and then switched off for about a month before repeating the cycle.

Premature aging

With an “off” period of 580 days, Camilo’s pulsar has taken by far the longest break seen so far. Having switched back on only in August this year, it is too early to tell whether the year on/year-and-a-half off cycle is a regular thing, but Camilo says it makes him wonder what other pulsars are hiding.

“Is it possible that some pulsars can turn off for decades or centuries at a time? Is it possible that pulsars that we know and love, those that we have known since 1967 and those that are important for the study of all sorts of phenomena, will turn off at some point? A pulsar like this one makes you wonder,” he muses.

Camilo suggests that some of the unpredictability of pulsars may be due to old age. As pulsars get older, the rate at which they rotate gradually slows down as their energy is lost into space. This makes it harder for the charged particles to be accelerated to the high speeds needed to maintain the beam.

RRATs do seem to be fairly old. The pulsar Camilo discovered and another intermittent cousin are middle-aged, though, so what is going on? “It is possible that these pulsars are behaving in their relative youth in ways that mimic the ultimate way in which they will start turning off in old age and eventually die ? like a young person having an unexpected heart attack,” says Camilo. “The reality is that we don’t really know”.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1111.5870

Read previous Astrophile columns: Wounded galaxy is crux of cosmic whodunnit, Did comet killing spark Christmas light show?, Blinged-out stars were born rich, Supercritical water world does somersaults, Attack of the mystery green blobs, Undead stars rise again as supernovae, The sticky star cluster that’s mostly black hole, The rebel star that broke the medieval sky, Star exploded? Just another day in Arp 220, Giant star comes with ancient tree rings, Frying pan forms map of dead star’s past, The most surreal sunset in the universe, Saturn-lookalike galaxy has a murky past.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.


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