Food by Accidents 04

Ice Cream Cone In 1904, Arnold Fornachou, a teenage vendor at World’s Fair in Saint Louis, USA, run out of paper dishes to serve his ice cream, and customers were lining up. He turned to his fellow vendors for help. Ernest Hamwi came to his aid by rolling up his waffle-like pastries and gave them to Fornachou to fill with ice cream. Later, Hamwi received a patent for a cone-making machine and started his own company. There were many vendors who ran ice cream booth at the same fair that claimed similar story. However, many historians believe that the first edible cones were found in Europe before the 19th century.

Herschel space telescope restored to full health

Europe's billion-euro Herschel Space Telescope is fully operational again after engineers brought its damaged instrument back online.

The observatory's HiFi spectrometer was turned off just three months into the mission because of an anomaly that was probably triggered by space radiation.

The Dutch-led consortium that operates HiFi has now switched the instrument across to its reserve electronics.

It says the failure event has been understood and cannot happen again.

"We've had 30 people working on this," said Dr Frank Helmich, the lead scientist on HiFi, from the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

"I don't watch much television but I know Crime Scene Investigation and this was just such an investigation - but in space! We found out what happened and then we designed all the mitigating measures," he told BBC News.

The European Space Agency (Esa) telescope was launched from Earth last May.

Its quest is to study how stars and galaxies form, and how they evolve through cosmic time.

The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HiFi) is one of three scientific experiments onboard.

The high-resolution spectrometer is designed to capture and split light into its constituent wavelengths, creating a kind of "fingerprint" that will reveal information on the chemistry of a light source.

HiFi is expected to bring remarkable new insights into the composition and behaviour of the clouds of gas and dust that give rise to stars.

But the instrument was taken offline in August when it started returning anomalous readings.

The detailed inquiry at SRON traced the fault to a failed diode in a Local Oscillator Control Unit (LCU), which is part of the system that helps process the sky signal received by the instrument.

Even though the investigators and their "crime scene" were separated by 1.5 million km, the SRON team was able to establish that the most likely cause was a cosmic ray hitting a microprocessor.

This upset triggered a sequence of hardware and software actions that ultimately resulted in a powerful voltage being sent through the LCU and killing the diode.

HiFi project leader Dr Peter Roelfsema said: "It turned out to be a very complex technological puzzle that we had to solve based on limited information and under a great deal of pressure.

"But for all researchers involved, quickly finding an answer to this question was a matter of professional pride. We had to - and would - crack the problem with HiFi as soon as humanly possible, but we also had to take the time to be thorough."

Like most space equipment, Hifi has redundant electronics and the instrument is now using its reserve LCU. Measures have also been put in place to ensure another cosmic ray event cannot initiate the same failure sequence.

While Hifi was down, its observing time was used by Herschel's two other instruments - Pacs and Spire - to return stunning new images of the far-infrared and sub-millimetre (radio) Universe.

They will now reciprocate by giving HiFi 50% of the sky time in the next few months.

"We will go into a priority science programme," Dr Helmich told BBC News.

"We do not fear that the LCU will misbehave again but we have lost redundancy in our electronics and so we want to do the most important science observations first.

"One of the first targets will be [star forming regions in] Orion. We expect tens of thousands of [spectral] lines to be seen by HiFi that will all need interpretation."

The Herschel mission is expected to last about three years before the superfluid helium that drives its cooling system boils away. At that point, the instruments' detectors will lose their sensitivity.

Europe cold snap kills dozens across continent

Dozens of people have died across Europe as days of snow storms and sub-zero temperatures swept the continent, causing traffic chaos for millions.

At least 29 people froze to death in Poland as temperatures fell far below freezing, while in southern Germany a figure of -33C (-27F) was recorded.

Moscow said it was deploying 9,000 snow ploughs to clear the city's streets.

Air, rail and road transport links were disrupted across northern Europe where more snow was expected in coming days.

Eurostar services between the UK and the continent were suspended on Monday for a third day, as the company launched an immediate review into train breakdowns which have stranded and delayed tens of thousands of passengers since Friday.

'Saturation point'

The crisis prompted French President Nicolas Sarkozy to call the head of national rail carrier SNCF - the majority stakeholder in Eurostar - to order a normal resumption of service by Tuesday.

Meanwhile Eurotunnel - which carries vehicles under the Channel between England and France - said its terminal at Folkestone was at "saturation point" and closed its shuttle car service to new arrivals.

In Poland, police appealed for people to help if they came across homeless or drunk people lying outside, as temperatures dropped towards -20C in some areas.

Most of the 42 people who froze to death in the country over the weekend were homeless, police said.

Meanwhile, one restaurant owner offered tens of thousands of homeless people a hot meal in Krakow's main square.

"The food is not the only important thing," restaurateur Janusz Kosciuszko was quoted as telling Euronews.

"What is also important is that these people know that someone is thinking about them."

Treacherous travel conditions on roads and railway lines caused a spike in accidents across the continent, with several people reportedly killed in accidents in Austria and Germany.

Fifty people were injured when a train hit a buffer in the Croatian city of Zagreb, while 36 were injured when a passenger train derailed in Paris.

Parts of the continent saw 20in (50cm) of snow over the weekend.

In France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, airport operators struggled to clear runways amid thick snowfall, with major disruption to flight patterns.

In France, a second wave of snowstorms hit the country's north on Sunday with Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport warning as many as one in five flights was likely to be cancelled on Monday.

Germany's third largest airport - in Dusseldorf - was also closed because of Sunday's heavy snow.

In Belgium, the three biggest airports - Brussels, Charleroi and Liege - were completely shut. Severe delays and cancellations were reported at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport.

Temperatures were forecast to rise later in the week.