Stockland's Hidden Talent Rocks Queensland

Watch out Bernard Fanning… Stockland has a secret musical star in its Kawana Waters office in Queensland. A secret until last weekend that is.

Design Manager Malcolm Holz rocked his colleagues with the launch of his new CD on Saturday night, showcasing his amazing song writing and instrumental talents in a spellbinding one-hour performance.

Around 100 people attended the exclusive launch of the album, titled Southern Crossings by Black Holz, and were treated to a mix of original blues, ballads and good old fashioned rock.

"Much of my song writing is about relationships, about people and place, and the themes that connect us," Malcolm said during his first set.

A number of the songs on the album are inspired by and dedicated to his wife Wanita, proving to be some of the most popular with the crowd.

Malcolm's original artwork also graces the cover of Southern Crossings, and if you pop into the Kawana Waters office with a copy he might even sign it for you!.

Black Holes Could Be Major Power Source

Black holes, those invisible matter-sucking drains thought to lurk in galaxies' hearts, may be the force behind half the energy released since the universe began, scientists reported on Friday.

Astronomers have presumed for years that black holes emitted a bit of energy, but nothing like the monstrous power spewed by stars. This latest research means that black holes could give stars serious competition on the cosmic power grid.

Up to now, the thinking was that in the visible universe, all the energy has been released from the center of stars. This new research suggests that there's a lot more energy being released and it's been hidden by dust and gas. meeting.

(Deborah Zabarenko in www.space.com 100999)

Opportunistic Black Holes Are No Suckers

Despite their common depiction as gravity sinks and suckers of all things, black holes are no more capable of luring distant meals than any other object of equal mass. They are opportunistic, however, and anything that comes close will be captured in a black hole's eternal clutches.

Black holes have plenty of mass, and they are incomprehensibly dense. Though they might occupy a space no larger than a small city (some theorists say the space is actually infinitely small) a black hole can harbor the same amount of material that exists in a normal star, or even that of thousands or millions of stars.

(Robert Roy Britt in www.space.com 050601)

The Music of Black Holes

Some scientists say music is ubiquitous in Nature... and shows up in the arrangements of the planets, in seascapes, and even in our brainwaves. A few researchers have gone so far as to suggest, without any observational studies done of in-shower singing, that humans are born musical.

And in the 1970s, researchers found ‘flicker noise’ in jazz, classical and other forms of manufactured music.

One scientist said the music of a black hole could be called improv, where ‘flicker noise’ is used to randomly generate pieces called ‘stochastic music’.

(Robert Roy Britt in www.space.com 090402)