An interobject is a phenomenon of dreams, in which there is a perception of something that is “between” two objects. Interobjects differ from typical dream manifestations in which two objects are fused into one. Instead, the object is incomplete. An example from the literature on dreams includes “something between a record player and a balance scale.” Interobjects are new creations derived from partially-fused blends of other objects.

Interobjects, like disjunctive cognitions, would sound bizarre or psychotic as perceptions in waking life, but are accepted by most people as commonplace in dreams. They have implications for both the theory of dreaming and the theory of categorization. Interobjects show the dreaming mind grouping items together whose connection may not be apparent to the waking mind. “Something between an aqueduct or a swimming-pool” reveals the category of “large man-made architectural objects that contain water.” “Something between a cellphone and a baby” reveals a category combining a relatively new piece of technology and a live infant: both make noise when you don’t expect it, both are held close to your body, and both can give you a feeling of connectedness.

Most adults tend to regularize interobjects when discussing them in waking life. Children are better able to sustain interobjects in their original form. A child told his father a dream in which he was in trouble at sea and a seal swam up to them. They thought it was just a seal, but then they looked and under the water it was a whole boat, it was huge, so they climbed onto the seal/boat, and it brought them to the shore of the mainland. When the boy told his father the dream in the morning, the father, speaking like an adult who cannot tolerate contradictions, said to him: “So really, it was a boat, a big, safe boat.” The child, holding fast to the integrity of his dream, said, “It was a boat, but it was still a big, friendly seal.” This child had not yet learned to regularize his perceptions to fit the way the world works. Adults may learn to reject interobjects in waking life, but still retain them in their dreams.

Interobjects may have an elementary function in human thought. By transgressing the normal mental categories described by Eleanor Rosch, interobjects may be the origin of new ideas that would be harder to come by using only fully-formed, secondary process formations. They may be one example of “Oneiric Darwinism” in which new thought-mutations are created during dream-life and rejected or retained in waking life depending on their usefulness.

The 2007 Siberian orange snow was an anomalous phenomenon that happened on February 2, 2007 when an orange-tinted snow fell across an area of 580 square miles in the Siberian Federal District in Russia, as well as into the neighbouring oblasts of Tomsk and Tyumen. It was most likely caused by a heavy sandstorm in neighbouring Kazakhstan. 

This orange snow was malodorous, oily to the touch, and reported to contain four times the normal level of iron. Though mostly orange, some of the snow was red or yellow. It affected an area with about 27,000 residents. It was originally speculated that it was caused by industrial pollution, a rocket launch or even a nuclear accident. It was later determined that the snow was non-toxic. However, people in the region were advised not to use the snow or allow animals to feed upon it. Coloured snow is uncommon in Russia but not unheard of, as there have been many cases of black, blue, green and red snowfall. 

The phenomenon was most likely caused by a heavy sandstorm in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Tests on the snow revealed numerous sand and clay dust particles, which were blown into Russia in the upper stratosphere. The speculation that the colouration was caused by a rocket launch from Baikonur in Kazakhstan was later dismissed, as the last launch before the event took place on January 18th.

Russia’s environmental watchdog originally claimed that the coloured snowfall was caused by industrial pollution. It stated that the snow contained four times the normal quantities of acids, nitrates, and iron. However, it would be nearly impossible to pinpoint a culprit if pollution were the cause, as there are various industries nearby, such as the city of Omsk, which is a centre of the oil industry in Russia.

Earworm is a term for a portion of a song or other musical material that repeats compulsively within one’s mind, known colloquially as “music being stuck in one’s head”. The Germans use the word Ohrwurm (rhymes with “door worm,” where the “w” is pronounced like a “v”) to denote these cognitively infectious musical agents. Use of the English translation was popularized by James Kellaris and Daniel Levitin.

Kellaris’ studies demonstrated that different people have varying susceptibilities to earworms, but that almost everybody has been afflicted with one at some time or another. The psychoanalyst Theodor Reik used the term “haunting melody” to describe the psychodynamic features of the phenomenon. Another scientific term for the phenomenon, involuntary musical imagery, was suggested by the neurologist Oliver Sacks in 2007.

People with obsessive-compulsive disorder are more likely to report being troubled by ear worms. In some cases medications can minimize the effects. Earworms should not be confused with endomusia, which is a serious affliction in which someone actually hears music that is not playing externally.

Indian summer is an informal expression given to a period of sunny, warm weather in autumn in the northern hemisphere, typically in late October or early November, after the leaves have turned but before the first snowfall.

The origins of the term Indian Summer are most commonly thought to have derived from the timing of Summer in India to correlate with good weather in Autumn in the Western world.

In former times in Europe, Indian summer was called Saint Martin’s Summer, referring to St. Martin’s day, November 11, when it was supposed to end. 

In Bulgaria, the phenomenon is sometimes called Gypsy Summer and in some places Gypsy Christmas and refers to unseasonably warm weather in late fall, or a warm spell in between cold periods.

In Sweden it is called brittsommar, which is derived from Birgitta and Britta, who have their name day in the Swedish calendar on October 7. That is when Britt Mass, an official fall open-air market, was held.

In Germany and Austria it is called Altweibersommer (Old Ladies Summer) because the many white spider silks seen at this time of the year have been associated with the norns of Norse folklore or medieval witches.

There are around 43 different theories concerning the origin of the term.

Multistable perceptual phenomena are a rare form of visual perception phenomena which is characterized by an unpredictable sequence of spontaneous subjective changes.

Perceptual multistability can be evoked by visual patterns that are too ambiguous for the human visual system to recognise with one unique interpretation. Famous examples include the Necker cube, structure from motion, monocular rivalry and binocular rivalry, but many more visually ambiguous patterns are known. Since most of these images lead to an alternation between two mutually exclusive perceptual states, they are sometimes also referred to as bistable perception.

Transitions from one percept to its alternative are called perceptual reversals. They are spontaneous and stochastic events which cannot be eliminated by intentional efforts, although some control over the alternation process is learnable. Reversal rates vary drastically between stimuli and observers, and has been found to be slower for people with Bipolar disorder due to “sticky” interhemispheric switch in bipolar disorder. 

Human interest in these phenomena can be traced back to antiquity. The fascination of multistable perception probably comes from the active nature of endogenous perceptual changes or from the dissociation of dynamic perception from constant sensory stimulation. Multistable perception was a common feature in the artwork of the Dutch lithographer M. C. Escher, who was strongly influenced by mathematical physicists such as Roger Penrose. 

Photographs of craters, from either the moon or other planets including our own, can exhibit this phenomenon. Craters, in stereo imaging, such as our eyes, should appear to be pit-like structures. However in mono-vision, such as that of photographs, the elimination of our depth perception causes multistable perception to take over, and this can cause the craters to inverse their depth values and instead look like plateaus rather than pits. Sometimes rotating the image so that the photographic direction of the source of light matches a light source in the room can cause the correct perception to suddenly switch.

Deviancy amplification spiral is a media hype phenomenon defined by media critics as an increasing cycle of reporting on a category of antisocial behavior or other undesirable events. According to theory, the spiral starts with some deviant act. Usually the deviance is criminal but it can also involve lawful acts considered morally repugnant by most of society. The mass media report what they consider to be newsworthy, but the new focus on the issue uncovers hidden or borderline examples which themselves would not have been newsworthy except inasmuch as they confirm the “pattern”.

Reported cases of such deviance are often presented as just “the ones we know about” or “the tip of the iceberg,” an assertion that is nearly impossible to disprove immediately. For a variety of reasons, what is not frightening and would help the public keep a rational perspective (such as statistics showing that the behavior or event is actually less common or harmful than generally believed) tends to be ignored.

As a result, minor problems begin to look serious and rare events begin to seem common. Members of the public are motivated to keep informed on these events. The resulting publicity has potential to increase deviant behavior by glamorizing it or making it seem common or acceptable.

In the next stage, supporters of the theory contend, public concern about crime typically forces the police and the whole law enforcement system to focus more resources on dealing with the specific deviancy than it warrants. Judges and magistrates are under public pressure to deal out harsher sentences. Politicians pass new laws to deal with the perceived threat. All this tends to convince the public that any fear was justified while the media continue to profit by reporting police and other law enforcement activity, which further perpetuates the spiral.

The theory does not contend that moral panics always include the deviancy amplification spiral. In modern times, however, media involvement is usual in any moral panic, making the spiral fairly common.

Time travel is the concept of moving between different moments in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either sending objects or information backwards in time to a moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience the intervening period at the normal rate. 

Time travel has not been proven to be impossible nor possible. Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to achieve time travel is known as a time machine.

Some interpretations of time travel also suggest that an attempt to travel backwards in time might take one to a parallel universe whose history would begin to diverge from the traveler’s original history after the moment the traveler arrived in the past. Although time travel has been a common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the future is arguably possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity, it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel.

Several experiments have been carried out to try to entice future humans, who might invent time travel technology, to come back and demonstrate it to people of the present time. Events such as Perth’s Destination Day or MIT’s Time Traveler Convention heavily publicized permanent advertisements of a meeting time and place for future time travelers to meet.

In 1982, a group in Baltimore, identifying itself as the Krononauts, hosted an event of this type welcoming Visitors from the Futures. These experiments only stood the possibility of generating a positive result demonstrating the existence of time travel, but have failed so far. No time travelers are known to have attended these events.

It is theoretically possible that future humans have traveled back in time, but have traveled back to the meeting time and place in a parallel universe. Another factor is that for all the time travel devices considered under current physics, it is impossible to travel back to before the time machine was actually made.

An iceberg is a large piece of freshwater ice that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice or come to rest on the seabed in shallower water. The word iceberg is a partial loan translation from Dutch ijsberg, literally meaning ice mountain. Icebergs are often referred to simply as bergs.

Typically, only one-tenth of the volume of an iceberg is above water. The shape of the under water portion can be difficult to judge by looking at the portion above the surface. This has led to the expression “tip of the iceberg”, generally applied to a problem or difficulty, meaning that the visible trouble is only a small manifestation of a larger problem.

Icebergs generally range from 3–250 feet above sea level and weigh 100,000 to 200,000 tons. The tallest known iceberg in the North Atlantic was 550 ft above sea level, making it the height of a 55-story building. 

Though usually confined by winds and currents to move close to the coast, the largest icebergs recorded are calved, or broken off from, the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica. Icebergs in the Antarctic area sometimes have stripes, formed by layers of snow that react to different conditions. Blue stripes are often created when a crevice in the ice sheet fills up with meltwater and freezes so quickly that no bubbles form. When an iceberg falls into the sea, a layer of salty seawater can freeze to the underside. If this is rich in algae, it can form a green stripe. Brown, black and yellow lines are caused by sediment, picked up when the ice sheet grinds downhill towards the sea.

When an iceberg melts, it makes a fizzing sound called “Bergie Seltzer.” This sound is made when compressed air bubbles trapped in the iceberg pop. The bubbles come from air trapped in snow layers that later become glacial ice. Ice campers who camp on top of flat or hollowed icebergs are known as icebergers.

There was no system in place before 1912 to track icebergs to guard against ship collisions. The sinking of the RMS Titanic, which caused the deaths of more than 1,500 of its 2,223 passengers, created the demand for a system to observe icebergs. For the remainder of the ice season of that year, the United States Navy patrolled the waters and monitored ice flow. 

Aerial surveillance of the seas in the early 1930s allowed for the development of charter systems that could accurately detail the ocean currents and iceberg locations. In 1945, experiments tested the effectiveness of radar in detecting icebergs. A decade later, oceanographic monitoring outposts were established for the purpose of collecting data. These outposts continue to serve in environmental studies.