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The peryton is a mythological hybrid animal combining the physical features of a stag and a bird. The peryton was first named by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1957 Book of Imaginary Beings, using the fictional device of a supposedly long-lost medieval manuscript.
The peryton is said to have the head, neck, forelegs and antlers of a stag, combined with the plumage, wings and hindquarters of a large bird, although some interpretations portray the peryton as a deer in all but coloration and bird's wings.
According to Borges, perytons lived in Atlantis until an earthquake destroyed the civilization and the creatures escaped by flight. A peryton casts the shadow of a man until it kills one during its lifetime, at which time it starts to cast its own shadow. A sibyl once prophesied that the perytons would lead to the downfall of Rome. [1]
Some historical versions of the heraldry of King Charles VI of France featured winged stags as heraldic supports, [2] as did some versions of the late medieval battle standard of the Dukes of Bourbon; [3] Borges is thus clearly not the inventor of the concept, though the name 'Peryton' may be his addition.
Perytons are found or used in modern literature and games.
The term peryton is also used for radio signals of terrestrial origin that mimic fast radio bursts, pulses that appear to be coming from outside of our galaxy. This was assigned to this source type by the scientist that first identified them in the data, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, because they demonstrated some properties that appeared man-made and some that appeared natural [8] These perytons were found to be the result of premature opening of a microwave oven door, which releases a frequency-swept radio pulse, which mimics a fast radio burst, as the magnetron turns off. [9]
A bestiary is a compendium of beasts. Originating in the ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals and even rocks. The natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson. This reflected the belief that the world itself was the Word of God and that every living thing had its own special meaning. For example, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a living representation of Jesus. Thus the bestiary is also a reference to the symbolic language of animals in Western Christian art and literature.
The phoenix is an immortal bird that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. While it is part of Greek mythology, it has analogs in many cultures, such as Egyptian and Persian mythology. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor. Some legends say it dies in a show of flames and combustion, while others that it simply dies and decomposes before being born again. In the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, a tool used by folklorists, the phoenix is classified as motif B32.
Annwn, Annwfn, or Annwfyn is the Otherworld in Welsh mythology. Ruled by Arawn, it was essentially a world of delights and eternal youth where disease was absent and food was ever-abundant.
Bahamut, or Bahamoot, according to Zakariya al-Qazwini, is a monster that lies deep below, underpinning the support structure that holds up the earth.
Parkes Observatory is a radio astronomy observatory, located 20 kilometres (12 mi) north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia. It hosts Murriyang, the 64 m CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope also known as "The Dish", along with two smaller radio telescopes. The 64 m dish was one of several radio antennae used to receive live television images of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Its scientific contributions over the decades led the ABC to describe it as "the most successful scientific instrument ever built in Australia" after 50 years of operation.
An astronomical radio source is an object in outer space that emits strong radio waves. Radio emission comes from a wide variety of sources. Such objects are among the most extreme and energetic physical processes in the universe.
The crocotta or corocotta, crocuta, leucrocotta, or leucrotta is a mythical dog-wolf of India or Aethiopia, linked to the hyena and said to be a deadly enemy of men and dogs.
Astropulse is a volunteer computing project to search for primordial black holes, pulsars, and extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Volunteer resources are harnessed through Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. In 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory launched SETI@home, which would rely on massively parallel computation on desktop computers scattered around the world. SETI@home utilizes recorded data from the Arecibo radio telescope and searches for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space, signifying the presence of extraterrestrial technology. It was soon recognized that this same data might be scoured for other signals of value to the astronomy and physics community.
The caladrius, according to Roman mythology, is a snow-white bird that lives in the king's house. It is said to be able to take the sickness into itself and then fly away, dispersing the sickness and healing both itself and the sick person. The caladrius legend formed part of medieval bestiary materials, which typically provided a Christian moralization for the animals they discussed.
The Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary is a city park in the Mississippi River corridor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Just east of the city's downtown district, the sanctuary includes towering limestone and sandstone bluffs that date back more than 450 million years, spring-fed wetlands, abundant bird life, and dramatic views of the downtown Saint Paul skyline and Mississippi River. The park was opened to the public on May 21, 2005, and was named after its early supporter U.S. Representative Bruce Vento.
"One for Sorrow" is a traditional children's nursery rhyme about magpies. According to an old superstition, the number of magpies seen tells if one will have bad or good luck.
The Rochester Bestiary is a richly illuminated manuscript copy of a medieval bestiary, a book describing the appearance and habits of a large number of familiar and exotic animals, both real and legendary. The animals' characteristics are frequently allegorised, with the addition of a Christian moral.
In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst (FRB) is a transient radio pulse of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond, for an ultra-fast radio burst, to 3 seconds, caused by some high-energy astrophysical process not yet understood. Astronomers estimate the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in three days. While extremely energetic at their source, the strength of the signal reaching Earth has been described as 1,000 times less than from a mobile phone on the Moon.
In radio astronomy, perytons are short man-made radio signals of a few milliseconds resembling fast radio bursts (FRB). A peryton differs from radio frequency interference by the fact that it is a pulse of several to tens of millisecond duration which sweeps down in frequency. They are further verified by the fact that they occur at the same time in many beams, indicating that they come from Earth, whereas FRBs occur in only one or two of the beams, indicating that they are of galactic origin. The first signal occurred in 2001 but was not discovered until 2007. First detected at the Parkes Observatory, data gathered by the telescope also suggested the source was local. The signals were found to be caused by premature opening of a microwave oven door nearby.
Bibliography of speculative fiction writer Seanan McGuire and her pseudonyms Mira Grant and A. Deborah Baker.