Click BibleSearchers.com Logo to Return to Home PageReturn to the Home Page | Translate this Page

Three dimensional cast of the Shroud of Turin

Gleanings on Global News at the Time of the End

 

“Signs at the Time of the End”

By Robert Mock MD

robertmock@biblesearchers.com

www.BibleSearchers.com

May 2005

 

Topics

Earthquakes

Volcanic Catastrophes

Weather and Oceanic Changes

Plagues and Pandemic Crisis

Genetic Alterations and Cloning

Conquering the Heavens

Surprises in History and Science

 

Earthquakes

 

The day U.N. killed 227,000 - Why there was no tsunami warning from agency monitoring seismic activity – May 9, 2005
WorldNetDaily - The U.N. agency charged with monitoring seismic activity around the globe sent all of its 310 employees on vacation the week of the massive earthquake and tsunami in South Asia, preventing any possibility of warning to the 227,000 victims. While the man in charge of the Vienna office of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization claims his staff could probably not have prevented the catastrophe, sources within the agency tell Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin they know differently.

 

Vienna International Centre, headquarters of the U.N. agency

 

Even though there were hours between the time the computers at the agency recorded the massive Dec. 26 quake and the first tsunami, nobody saw the data in the U.N. agency that spends $105 million a year – about 19 percent provided by U.S. taxpayers. They were all permitted to go on holiday at once.

 

The man responsible for that staffing decision is Secretariat Wolfgang Hoffman, 69, a German, who will be leaving the post in August after what one insider at the agency call "nine years of abuse of power." During his tenure, marked by "mismanagement of monumental proportions," he has made about $3 million in salaries and benefits. Asked whether he had any regrets about the extraordinary loss of life, Hoffman's reply is revealing. "We have been doing what we could do under the circumstance, and those who have connections to us and wanted to have the data got the data," he said. "We have to get organized better, and with the help of the states, because we are a service organization. We are not deciding this; we are of service to states and we want to be of service to states, so they have to discuss with us – and we will make proposal for this – how we could help better."

 

Sumatra Quake Shook Earth's Total Surface – May 23, 2005

WASHINGTON (News Yahoo) - December's great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake - the most powerful in more than 40 years and the trigger of a devastating tsunami - shook the ground everywhere on Earth's surface. Weeks later the planet was still trembling. The quake resulted from the longest fault rupture ever observed - 720 miles to 780 miles, which spread for 10 minutes, also a record. A typical earthquake's duration would be 30 seconds. The December quake was the first of its size to be measured and studied by the new worldwide array of digital seismic instruments.  Those results are starting to come in, with a special section of a half-dozen research papers on the quake appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "This is really a watershed event. We've never had such comprehensive data for a great earthquake because we didn't have the instrumentation to gather it 40 years ago," said Thorne Lay, professor of Earth sciences and director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It is nature at its most formidable," Lay said in a statement.

 

The earthquake and resulting tsunami, which swept across the Indian Ocean, killed more than 176,000 people in 11 countries and left about 50,000 missing and hundreds of thousands homeless. The quake occurred where two of the giant plates that form the surface of the Earth grind together. At that spot the Eurasian plate was being pulled downward by the descending Indo-Australian plate. The quake released the edge of the Eurasian plate, which sprang up, lifting the ocean floor and sending the sea water off in the giant wave that killed so many, the researchers reported.  They said the higher sea floor displaced so much water from the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea that sea level worldwide was raised 0.004 inch. "No point on Earth remained undisturbed," wrote Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado. Indeed, ground movement of as much as 0.4 inch occurred everywhere on Earth's surface, though it was too small to be felt in most areas. And the temblor "delivered a blow to our planet" that was felt for weeks, noted a team of researchers led by Jeffrey Park of Yale University. His group calculated that the quake caused the planet to oscillate like a bell, at periods of about 17 minutes, which they were able to measure for weeks afterward. A similar phenomenon was first noted in the 1960 quake in Chile.

 

The initial Dec. 26 Sumatra quake is estimated to have had a magnitude of 9.1 to 9.3 and a second quake to the south on March 28 registered 8.6. By comparison, the 1960 Chile earthquake was magnitude 9.5 and the 1964 Alaska earthquake was magnitude 9.2. California's 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake had a magnitude of 6.9. Among the other findings reported in the various papers: In Sri Lanka, more than 1,000 miles from the epicenter, the ground moved nearly 4 inches. The rupture spread from south to north, resulting in a Doppler effect in instruments measuring it.  Seismometers in Russia recorded the quake at a higher frequency because it was moving toward them, while those in Australia measured a lower frequency as it moved away. When the surface waves from the Sumatra quake reached Alaska they triggered a swarm of 14 local earthquakes in the Mount Wrangell area. In addition to Lay, Bilham and Park, the lead authors of the articles were Charles J. Ammon of Pennsylvania State University, Michael West of the University of Alaska and Roland Burgmann of the University of California, Berkeley. Burgmann's article was published in Science Express, the journal's online edition.

 

Lake Tahoe Tsunami  - May 12, 2005 

Unknown Country - Could Nevada or California experience a tsunami as bad as the one that struck Indonesia in December? Evidence shows that approximately every 3,000 years, the seismic faults underneath Lake Tahoe produce an earthquake with the power to push the ground up or down by 10 feet or more. Scientists are trying to figure out when the last one happened, so they can predict when it will happen again. When geophysicist Graham Kent dug through the sediments at the bottom of the lake down to the bedrock underneath, he found evidence of three major faults that extend beyond the lake, onto the land. 

 

This means a major quake in the area may some day generate a tsunami three stories tall. Near the local elementary school, there's a 30 foot high that was created by past quakes. Scientists have dug a deep trench there in order to count the rings of the remains of trees that can be found there, in order to determine when the last quake occurred. Kent thinks it happened between a few thousand and 20,000 years ago, meaning that a new quake-and the ensuing tsunami-is long overdue. Are some things accidents-or are they preordained? To get the answer, simply ask one of the Treasures from Heaven.

 

Quake in Iran on 12/26/04 and the Asian Quake contain Occult Singature: Were they triggered by either HAARP or Scalar Waves?

Cutting Edge - When you understand the occult numbers and characteristics of these two devastating earthquakes, you will be able to determine for yourself whether HAARP or Scalar weapons waves were used to trigger them. Possibilities are more than interesting; they are staggering.

 

Uranus is 'responsible' for sea quakes – April 1, 2005

Unexplained Mysteries - Uranus may be responsible for recent devastating Asian sea quakes because the mystery-shrouded "planet of calamity" is unusually close to the Earth, tabloid user posted image rnewspaper readers in Germany were warned on Wednesday. Under the front-page headline "Uncanny Uranus", the report in theBild newspaper cited an array of experts, ranging from Nasa scientists to TV astrologers, saying the seventh planet from the sun possesses a "quadripolar" magnetic field that acts as "a giant cosmic vacuum cleaner".This heavenly Hoover is literally sucking the Earth's tectonic plates out of their beddings, according to Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper with more than five million readers.This magnetic pull is strongest along the Earth's equator because the tropics are marginally closer to Uranus than the poles are.The magnetic forces "are strong enough at the equator to suck up electrically charged dust particles", which could, in turn, disturb the Earth's crust and spawn killer sea quakes and resulting tidal waves.The reason these natural phenomena have increased of late is that the distant planet's orbit has brought Uranus uncomfortably close to Earth.Instead of being its usual 3,14-billion kilometres from Earth, Uranus currently is a mere 2,59-billion kilometres away.

And it will remain this close through the year 2012, so Bild warns that we could be in for more uncanny Uranian catastrophes well into the next decade until Uranus slowly retreats back into its proper place in the Outer Solar System."With its 11 rings and 18 moons, Uranus is in fact different from everything else in our Solar System," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist since 1972.The German paper quoted Stone at length, saying that Voyager 2 had raised almost more questions than it had solved. (Full Article)

 

North and South of Equator Said Linked  - April 1, 2005

 Live Science - Earth's equator is sometimes viewed as a bit of a virtual wall that separates the climates of the northern and southern hemispheres. Ocean currents, the main driver of climate, tend to confine themselves to one side or the other. When waters from North and South meet at the equator, they combine lazily and create an utter lack of wind known as the doldrums. But a new study finds the climates in each half of the planet are linked by the oceans over the long run.

 Ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere has in the past adapted to sudden changes in the north, say researchers from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain and the Cardiff University in the UK. Several times in history, when the temperature increased in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere has entered a cooling period, which creates a decrease in the amount of deep water transported to the Atlantic Ocean from the south. When the climate cooled in the North Atlantic, the Southern Hemisphere entered a warmer period, causing water to be transported northwards. The study is detailed in the April 1 issue of the journal Science. 

 

Computer models had predicted the link. But this is the first time actual weather records have revealed it to be true. The climates of Europe and North America are greatly influenced by the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water from the Gulf of Mexico north along the Florida coast, east across the Atlantic and south along the west coast of Europe. The warm water tends to moderate local climates. The strength of the Gulf Stream's current is governed by how much salt is in the southbound water. If salinity decreases, the current weakens. Previously, other scientists had modeled a possible effect of global warming: Melting of the Greenland ice sheet would add fresh water to the Atlantic and weaken the Gulf Stream.

 

That would create a cooler, dryer climate in Europe and North America. But the Atlantic might already be adapting to global warming in the same way as it adapted to climate changes in the past, say the authors of the new study. Southern Hemisphere waters are less salty than those in the northern hemisphere, and this freshwater in the south sinks to the ocean floor and is transported to the rest of the Atlantic, reducing the salinity of the North Atlantic Ocean and the strength of the gulf stream. Lately there has been a decrease in the amount of freshwater sinking to the floor of the South Atlantic Ocean. "Although we don't know where global warming will take us, this could be a sign that the oceans are already adapting to the changes," said study team member Rainer Zahn.

 

Researchers Outline Impact Of Rupture In Puente Hills Fault - Scientists Create 18 Scenarios – May 25, 2005

 

Images: Researchers Present Findings

 

LOS ANGELES (nbc4tv) -- If the Puente Hills fault -- which was not recognized as a major active fault until 1999 -- ruptures, the resulting earthquake could devastate a large area of the Southland, scientists said Wednesday. Seismologists now know that the fault has ruptured at least four times in the last 11,000 years, resulting in earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 7.2 to 7.5, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and USC-based Southern California Earthquake Center. A similar earthquake there today could cause 3,000 to 18,000 deaths, 60,000 to 260,000 injuries and $250 billion in total damages, according to Tom Jordan, director of the SCEC and co-author of a study on the fault published in the May issue of Earthquake Spectra.

 

Between 142,000 and 735,000 people could be displaced if such a temblor hits. "There are a lot of uncertainties in these predictions," said Jordan, explaining the wide range in possible deaths, injuries and displacements.

 

The Puente Hills fault largely runs in an east-west direction. On the western end, it is a couple miles underground, almost directly under USC, said Jordan. The fault continues eastward, dipping under the San Gabriel Mountains. In determining probable losses related to a Puente Hills fault-related quake, scientists created 18 scenarios depicting different possible shaking throughout the region. The scenarios all assumed an earthquake occurring at 2 p.m. during a weekday, when Southlanders are at work. The number of casualties would be "significantly less" if the quake hit at night, when most people are home, researchers said. The magnitude-6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994 resulted in 37 fatalities directly related to the temblor. The predicted losses from a Puente Hills quake are far greater, in part because of the higher potential magnitudes. Also, the Puente Hills fault sits under old and more vulnerable commercial and industrial structures, while the Northridge quake shook up an area of wood-frame residential structures. While most of the damage would be in Los Angele County, residents of San Bernardino and Orange counties -- on the east and south ends of the fault -- may also be affected.

 

Scientists say that a full Puente Hills fault rupture is rare, occurring once every 3,000 years. You have a much greater chance of dying in an auto accident than being killed by an earthquake, said USGS researcher Ned Field. "That being said," Field said, "there are other sources of earthquakes throughout the region, and it's not (a) question of if, but when, so everyone should take necessary safety precautions. "With USGS science, we are striving to prevent these natural hazards from becoming disasters. We live in earthquake country and therefore should always be prepared."

 

Earthquakes caused by underwater oil and gas exploration – April 3, 2005

India Daily - Scientists are scratching their heads to find out the reasons for the increasing amounts of earthquakes under the oceans specially the two mega quakes off the coast of Sumatra. According to a theory called Wadati-Benioff zones, or simply Benioff zones earthquakes tend to be concentrated in certain areas, most notably along the oceanic trenches and spreading ridges. The prominent underwater earthquake zones parallel to the trenches that typically were inclined 40-60° from the horizontal and extended several hundred kilometers into the Earth. Geologists believe that the ocean floor and underwater portion of the earth’s crust are continuously getting recycled. In certain areas, the magma is expanding, creating new ridges and therefore older ridges are moving apart. Based on this, do not assume that earth is expanding. 

 

In certain areas under the ocean, the magma is actually receding. When magma recedes, that part of the world experiences less stress and the porous crust can accumulate fossil oil and gas. Eventually as the magma recedes further, the ocean floor collapses into the magma. On another side of the world thousands of miles away, new ridges are formed and magma comes out to support the theory of expanding or shifting-apart ocean floors. Many Geologists believe, under ocean fault lines are caused by this phenomenon at any instance of time. Within such natural tectonic recycling process, when artificial means are used to extract massive amounts of oil and gas, and the magma continues to recede, the ridges formed millions of years back collapse causing landslides and havoc. The collapses and earthquakes created are non-linear and may or may not cause a Tsunami depending on how the landslide happened. 

The terrestrial rocks generally belong to two groups according to their magnetic properties. One group has so-called normal polarity, characterized by the magnetic minerals in the rock, having the same polarity as that of the Earth's present magnetic field. The other group, however has reversed polarity, indicated by a polarity alignment opposite to that of the Earth's present magnetic field. When earth goes through a gradual but accelerating process of polar reversal, as it is happening now, the electromagnetic interactions of these two types of rocks cause a destabilization of the structural dynamics of the earth’s crust accelerating the landslides caused by collapsing ridges. Underwater oil and gas exploration, shrinking magma, magnetic stripping and polar reversal may be causing the sudden high intensity earthquakes in the same area, making Geologists scratch their heads to find out if the quake was an aftershock or a precursor to a coming larger one.

Evidence Misinterpreted: It has not been the magnetic field of the Earth that has been moving within the planet, as evidenced by the magnetic ghost imprint retained in geological records, mentioned in the article above, but rather the movement of the Earth's outer mantle around the stationary and fixed position of the gyroscopic core, and the magnetic field it projects, that has left a magnetic imprint of previous positions of the outer mantle relative to the core. 

 

The recent earthquakes that have all these scientists scratching their heads, are being caused by the more turbulent movement of the magma convection currents beneath the tectonic plate system, in reaction to the rising temperature of the Earth's central core, and this indicates another pole-shift event will very soon be forthcoming. These scientists simply won't accept the concept of a mobile outer mantle, and a stationary central core, and so they resort to elaborate theories involving a shifting magnetic field, supported by computer simulations that can be made to produce any results. 

 

There are times in the past when the outer mantle of this planet has repositioned itself in relation to the core. The evidence as presented above, would indicate that the outer mantle of the Earth has literally flipped entirely over at some time during it's ancient past. Because of it's smaller diameter, the central core of the Earth is spinning much faster than the outer mantle of the planet, and the gyroscopic force at that level must be tremendous. A gyroscope the size and proportion of the Earth's core, and spinning at such high velocity, would be nearly impossible to change in direction of axis. 

 

Just as a gyroscope within a missile will retain the same direction of axis no matter what direction the missile is traveling, so too must be the interior portions of the planet. These are universal laws that apply to the small as well as to the large. From a gyroscope that stabilizes a missile, to that which is in the center of the Earth. They are the same. Therefore, unless the magnetic field of the Earth can flip flop independent of the core, and computer simulations are not sufficient evidence to support this contention, there is no way the magnetic field of the Earth's core could alter position if it is fixed with the geophysical poles of the core. It therefore becomes apparent, that it must be the outer mantle of the Earth itself that has been moving relative to the position of the core, and the magnetic field it projects.  

 

Volcanic Catastrophes

 

Eruption that could wipe out millions – April 3, 2005

Times On Line - An exploding supervolcano would be a calamity to dwarf an asteroid strike or the Asian tsunami. A VOLCANIC super-eruption that would threaten the future of modern civilisation is up to ten times more likely than a catastrophic asteroid impact, yet it has been ignored by the world’s governments, scientists said yesterday. Vast volcanic blasts that cause global devastation occur on average every 50,000 years — and, as the last one struck 74,000 years ago, at Toba Indonesia, another may be overdue. 

 

The scale of such a cataclysm would dwarf that of the recent Asian tsunami: the eruption could kill millions and the final death toll could reach a billion as dust thrown into the atmosphere triggers a natural “nuclear winter”.Among natural disasters, only the impact of an asteroid a kilometre (0.6 miles) or more across would be comparable, a new report from the Geological Society has found. Asteroids big enough to cause global effects strike at intervals of 400,000 to 500,000 years. Super-eruptions happen about ten times more frequently.The new report, presented to the Government’s Natural Hazard Working Group, was published as the BBC prepares to screen Supervolcano, a two-part factual drama that charts the effects of a super-eruption at Yellowstone National Park in the United States.Yellowstone has produced three super-eruptions in the past — 2.1 million, 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago — the first being the second-largest known to science. A similar event today would lay waste to most of the continental US.In the BBC film, which strictly follows scenarios presented by expert scientific advisers, the eruption causes more than 25 million deaths in the first week alone. 

 

Eighty per cent of the US is covered in volcanic ash and 20 per cent, including most of the rich agricultural lands of the Great Plains, becomes uninhabitable. Emissions of ash and sulphur dioxide bring global temperatures down by between 5C and 15C (9F and 27F), leading to the failure of the Asian monsoon and millions more deaths from famine. Steve Sparks, of the University of Bristol, a lead author of the report and an adviser to the BBC film-makers, said that governments needed to make contingency plans. “This is not just a scientific curiosity,” he said. “These events are rare on a human timescale, but in geological time they are common. The issues involved are similar to preparing for a nuclear war. Countries will have to make plans for food, shelters and evacuation. These sorts of events are extremely rare, and would require enormous investment of resources if we are to have any hope of coping.”The dangers from a super-eruption are also greater than those from asteroids as there is no conceivable method of preventing the event.“Humankind might develop the capability to deflect an asteroid, but we will never develop a way of averting a super-volcano,” Stephen Self, of the Open University, another of the report’s authors, said. “Damage-limitation is the only way forward.”

 

Super-eruptions are different in scale from ordinary eruptions: the first Yellowstone event ejected 2,500 times more gas and molten rock into the atmosphere than the Mount St Helens eruption of 1980.None has taken place during recorded human history, though the Toba eruption may have come close to driving early Homo sapiens to extinction. The human population is thought to have dwindled to a few thousand soon after Toba, and some scientists think that climate change provoked by the volcano was responsible. About 40 supervolcano sites are known, but most are extinct. Yellowstone is the site with the greatest lethal potential because of its position on a heavily populated continent.

 

Mount St. Helens' activity surprises scientists  - January 27, 2005

 VANCOUVER (Seattle Times) - The rock was at least the size of a man's head, and geologist John Pallister cradled it as he would a newborn — which, in a manner of speaking, it was. As little as a month ago, this beefy slab was in liquid form, a pulsating 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and working its way up from five miles below Mount St. Helens to form a chunk of the region's most active volcano. For Pallister, a research geologist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory, evidence of how quickly Mount St. Helens is evolving doesn't get more solid. "It's hard to believe that several weeks ago this was lava flow in the middle of the Earth," he said.

 

Mount St. Helens before the eruption

 

Four months after the volcano stirred back to life, drawing curiosity seekers from across the country, the bulging new oblong dome inside the crater has ballooned to 350 feet high, with nearly a 50-degree slope in places. The dome now contains enough solid material to fill KeyArena more than 100 times. At the peak of the flow, molten magma was being transformed into new rock pushing skyward at a rate of 11 yards per day.

 

Then earlier this month, an unexpected and significant explosion — the biggest since October — caught researchers by surprise and appears to mark some sort of transition on the sleeping giant's path to regrowth. "It makes me think a lot differently about the range of possibilities for the future," Pallister said. "We were anticipating a different event. "Figuring out what it means will take some time." At 3:18 a.m. on Jan. 16, just 36 hours after geologists had walked along the surface of the new dome dodging vents emitting loud, hot blasts, a release of gas blew rocks and debris several hundred feet. It spread ash 8 inches or more thick inside portions of the crater and destroyed a few thousand dollars worth of instruments researchers had put there during their visit. In its aftermath, the tremors at St. Helens have slowed, as the movement of rock creating the new dome slowed. As the sticky, newest sections of the dome are protruding, they are being scraped so hard against the existing surface they are turned white as the friction wears down its surface. "We would have anticipated a different event," said Seth Moran, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist.

 

Volcanologists would not have been surprised if there had been a significant rockfall, a continuing hazard as sections of the new dome jut higher and stretch more than a thousand feet to the side. The explosive release of gas suggested that St. Helen's plumbing is more finicky than first believed, that even slight changes in gas, or moisture below the surface, can trigger a new scenario. "The question is, why now?" Pallister asked. He wondered aloud if there was a more gas-rich flow farther below trying to push its way to the surface. In fact, one of the most predictable things about Mount St. Helens has long been the volcano's unwillingness to act conventionally. It's a reminder, said Jon Major, a research hydrologist at the observatory, that "we've learned an awful lot about what we don't yet understand."

 

Mount Rainier 3rd Most Dangerous Volcano  - May 18, 2005

ORTING, Wash. (News Yahoo) - In the shadow of Mount Rainier, people go about their lives - going to shop, going to school, going to work. One day, though, the routine will be broken by a rumble that sounds like a thousand freight trains. If all works accordingly, sirens will alert the 4,400 residents that they have less than 45 minutes to evacuate - or be buried by an avalanche of mud and debris tumbling off the flank of the 14,411-foot volcano. Scientists know Mount Rainier will eventually awaken as Mount St. Helens did in 1980. It could gradually build up and explode, or part of it may collapse. It could happen in 200 years, or it could happen tonight. "People get burned by these kind of events because they think it can't happen in their lifetime," said Willie Scott of the U.S. Geological Survey. 

 

Mount Rainier

 

The agency ranks Mount Rainier as the third most dangerous volcano in the nation, after Kilauea on Hawaii's Big Island and Mount St. Helens. Both are currently active. Other studies call Rainier the most dangerous volcano in the world - not just for its explosive potential, but because of the 3 million people who live in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area. At least 100,000 people live on top of Rainier mudflows that have solidified. Mudflow poses a serious threat for Orting. Two rivers drain off the mountain, hug the town and converge just beyond it, putting Orting squarely in the mountain's strike zone. The town, in fact, was built atop a 500-year-old mudflow that buried the valley 30 feet deep. 

 

Construction crews working on new housing developments for Orting's growing population have dug up massive tree stumps - remnants of a forest buried there the last time Mount Rainier rumbled. Yet, the risks did not worry Dawn So when she moved here two years ago. She was just looking for a good place to raise her children and open a quilting store. "I wanted to have my kids in a better school district, a smaller town," she said. "I like to let them play in the front yard without having to worry about them." Her family has planned its escape routes, and she's confident they could get to high ground in time. She does not, however, spend much time thinking about Rainier's threat. "It's such a highly improbable situation," she said. "Disasters can happen wherever you're at." The risk of catastrophe every couple thousand years has not stopped brisk development, either. But as scientists identified Rainier as a threat in the decades after Mount St. Helens' eruption, government officials and citizens have begun preparing. Most of the mudflows - also called lahars - from Mount Rainier were triggered by an eruption, Scott said. But the most recent, the Electron mudflow that buried Orting 500 years ago, did not seem to follow that pattern. "Maybe it was just a gradual weakening," Scott said. "That one sort of keeps us honest." Federal, state and local officials gathered last week at Fort Lewis for a simulated emergency response exercise. Later this month, Orting schools will practice a drill familiar to most students by now - evacuating and walking two miles to higher ground. 

 

For years, Chuck Morrison has lobbied to have a path and bridges built so students can head to a bluff about a half-mile away, rather than travel across town for cover. This year's state budget includes $1.7 million to start planning the project. A Tacoma resident, Morrison made the pedestrian bridge his crusade after falling in love with Orting's railroad history and scenic beauty. He understands what draws people to a volcano's backyard. "This place is gorgeous," he said, standing on the edge of the town square, the mountain shrouded by clouds behind him. Though some locals have welcomed Morrison's activism, others roll their eyes. "Don't keep talking about that mountain! I'm sick of hearing about it," said 69-year-old James Nunnally, who'd rather see money spent on roads to handle Orting's growing number of commuters.

 

High-energy particles reveal volcanic interiors – February 22, 2005

New Scientist - Flowing magma could one day be traced beneath the surface of active volcanoes using instruments that detect the high-energy space particles that stream through the rock. Scientists have shown that muons - high-energy particles generated when cosmic rays interact with the Earth's atmosphere - can be used to probe the inner structure of volcanoes. They appear to be able to trace geological activity as it occurs and might one day provide early warnings of a volcanic eruption. Existing methods for probing volcanoes - such as echo-sounding - would be unreliable by comparison. Muons created in the atmosphere speed off in all directions and pass through the Earth at a rate of 10,000 per square metre every minute. They pass harmlessly through ordinary matter but are deflected slightly depending on the density of the material traversed.

 

Active duty - Nagamine Kanetada and colleagues at the KEK Muon Science Laboratory in Japan, are conducting experiments using the particles to probe two active Japanese volcanoes - Mount Asama, on Honshu Island, and Mount Kurokura, south-west of Tokyo. Detectors placed on the side of the volcanoes record muons as they pass through. A computer model then calculates how many particles should be detected if different types of rock are below the surface, making it possible work out what geological features lie inside the mountains. At the moment, the sensors can only be used to peer up to two metres below the surface. But better detectors, particularly ones that record the direction of travel of the muon, should increase this sensitivity dramatically, the team says.

 
Magma and water - During the Mount Asama study, which began in January 2002, the researchers discovered a cavity inside the volcano, estimated to contain about 30% magma. They will soon return to the same spot to see if this has changed since an eruption occurred in the summer of 2004. At Mount Kurokura, the detector spotted changes that could correspond to water flow below the surface. Kanetada says the experiments so far are a proof of principle and adds that increased sensitivity would yield even more valuable geological information. "If we could get twenty times as much data we could see magma flow over a few days," he told the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, DC. It is an inherently difficult trick to pull off, however, as muon sensors are sensitive to background cosmic ray electrons and gamma rays. To solve the problem, Kanetada developed a sensor with two components - one facing the mountain and another facing the sky, making it possible to identify and eliminate unwanted background noise.
 
Nuclear materials - Muons promise to become a valuable remote-sensing tool in several other areas as well. US researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory plan to use muon detectors to scan shipping containers as they enter the US. They could signal the presence of high-density nuclear materials which could be used to build crude nuclear weapons. "The scattering of muons is very sensitive to the density and atomic number of materials," explains Christopher Morris at LANL. And Arturo Menchaca-Rocha and colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City hope to detect the presence of a royal burial chamber or sacrificial sarcophagus hidden in the Sun Pyramid in Teotihuacan.

 

Weather and Oceanic Changes

 

Britain Faces Big Chill As  Ocean Current Slows  - May 12, 2005

Rense - Climate change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream - the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing. They have found that one of the "engines" driving the Gulf Stream - the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea - has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength. The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. 

Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures. Such a change has long been predicted by scientists but the new research is among the first to show clear experimental evidence of the phenomenon. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, hitched rides under the Arctic ice cap in Royal Navy submarines and used ships to take measurements across the Greenland Sea. "Until recently we would find giant 'chimneys' in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 metres below, but now they have almost disappeared," he said. "As the water sank it was replaced by warm water flowing in from the south, which kept the circulation going. If that mechanism is slowing, it will mean less heat reaching Europe." Such a change could have a severe impact on Britain, which lies on the same latitude as Siberia and ought to be much colder. 

 

The Gulf Stream transports 27,000 times more heat to British shores than all the nation’s power supplies could provide, warming Britain by 5-8C. Wadhams and his colleagues believe, however, that just such changes could be well under way. They predict that the slowing of the Gulf Stream is likely to be accompanied by other effects, such as the complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020 and almost certainly by 2080. This would spell disaster for Arctic wildlife such as the polar bear, which could face extinction. Wadhams's submarine journeys took him under the North Polar ice cap, using sonar to survey the ice from underneath. 

 

He has measured how the ice has become 46% thinner over the past 20 years. The results from these surveys prompted him to focus on a feature called the Odden ice shelf, which should grow out into the Greenland Sea every winter and recede in summer. The growth of this shelf should trigger the annual formation of the sinking water columns. As sea water freezes to form the shelf, the ice crystals expel their salt into the surrounding water, making it heavier than the water below. However, the Odden ice shelf has stopped forming. It last appeared in full in 1997. "In the past we could see nine to 12 giant columns forming under the shelf each year. In our latest cruise, we found only two and they were so weak that the sinking water could not reach the seabed," said Wadhams, who disclosed the findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna. The exact effect of such changes is hard to predict because currents and weather systems take years to respond and because there are two other areas around the north Atlantic where water sinks, helping to maintain circulation.

 

Less is known about how climate change is affecting these. However, Wadhams suggests the effect could be dramatic. "One of the frightening things in the film The Day After Tomorrow showed how the circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is upset because the sinking of cold water in the north Atlantic suddenly stops," he said. "The sinking is stopping, albeit much more slowly than in the film - over years rather than a few days. 

If it continues, the effect will be to cool the climate of northern Europe." One possibility is that Europe will freeze; another is that the slowing of the Gulf Stream may keep Europe cool as global warming heats the rest of the world - but with more extremes of weather. Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

East Antarctica puts on weightIncreased snowfall could slow sea-level rise – May 19, 2005

Nature - Increased snowfall over a large area of Antarctica is thickening the ice sheet and slowing the rise in sea level caused by melting ice.
A satellite survey shows that between 1992 and 2003, the East Antarctic ice sheet gained about 45 billion tonnes of ice - enough to reduce the oceans' rise by 0.12 millimetres per year. The ice sheets that cover Antarctica's bedrock are several kilometres thick in places, and contain about 90% of the world's ice. But scientists fear that if they melt in substantial quantities, this will swell the oceans and cause devastation on islands and coastal lands.

 

.

East Antarctica may be piling on the pounds, but glaciers in the west are accelerating into the ocean© British Antarctic Survey

 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that sea level is currently rising at about 1.8 millimetres per year, largely through melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as a result of global warming. But the panel also expected that climate change would trigger an increase in snowfall over the Antarctic continent, as increased evaporation from the oceans puts more moisture into the air. "This is a phenomenal piece of research, but it is what we expected, " comments David Vaughan, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. "These effects have been predicted for a long time, it's just that no one has measured them before."

Although the results of the satellite survey are in line with the predictions of global-warming models, the thickening of the ice sheet could still be explained by natural weather variability, warns Curt Davis of the University of Missouri, Columbia, a member of the research team. He and his colleagues present their results in the online edition of Science1.

Remote view

 

The team used data from the European Space Agency's radar satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2, which measured changes in altitude over about 70% of Antarctica's interior - more than 8.5 million square kilometres, roughly the same size as the United States.

 

This map shows which areas of Antarctica are thickening. © Science

 

East Antarctica thickened at an average rate of about 1.8 centimetres per year over the time period studied, the researchers discovered. The region comprises about 75% of Antarctica's total land area - but as its ice is thicker, it carries about 85% of the total ice volume. "It is the only large terrestrial ice body that is gaining mass rather than losing it," says Davis.

In contrast, smaller West Antarctica showed an overall thinning of 0.9 centimetres per year. "It's amazing that they can measure such small changes," says Vaughan.

Thick skin

The thickening of the eastern ice sheet should not be seen as a long-term protection against a rise in sea level, warns Vaughan. Glaciers in West Antarctica are accelerating, releasing more and more icebergs into the sea. And the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches towards South America, now regularly hits temperatures above 0 °C in the summer, leading to direct melting of the ice there.

What's more, snowfall over East Antarctica will not continue to increase indefinitely in a warming world, Vaughan adds. Conversely, every extra degree of temperature rise will continue to accelerate glaciers and cause more melting on the western side of Antarctica, swelling the world's oceans further.

Runaway Glacier May Portend Rising Seas  - May 12, 2005

Live Science - The largest glacier in Greenland doubled its forward progress toward the sea between 1997 and 2003, a new study found. The alarming acceleration coincides with a rapid thinning of the colossal structure, adding water to a rising sea at a faster pace than scientific models have been predicting. The extra water in  the ocean is a drop in the global bucket, but cause for concern nonetheless. Jakobshavn Isbrae, as it is known, is not the only glacier that's slipping away. Scientists say a warming climate is causing ancient glaciers to retreat suddenly on both the top and the bottom of the world.

 

Front of a melting glacier.Credit: NOAA/Giuseppe Zibordi

 

Glacial shifts - Glaciers are like giant, slow-moving ice rivers that can be millions of years old. They advance and retreat with climate change. Glacial shifts usually occur at, well, a glacial pace -- over centuries or millennia. But scientists are now watching that scope of change occur in a matter of years.The front edge of the Jakobshavn glacier has been retreating, overall, since at least 1850. Starting in late 2000, its inexorable flow toward the sea sped up. The glacier moved forward at about 3.54 miles (5700 meters) each year between 1992 and 1997. At one point in 2003 its pace was 7.83 miles (12,600 meters) per year. Suddenly, it nearly doubled the amount of ice it discharges into the sea, researchers say. The glacier has thinned rapidly of late, too, losing roughly 49 feet (15 meters) of its vertical thickness every year since 1997. All this suggests glaciers are not as stable as once thought. And that, scientists say, could portend more rapid depletion of global ice stores than has been noted so far. 

 

Dramatic change - "In many climate models glaciers are treated as responding slowly to climate change," said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington. "In this study we are seeing a doubling of output beyond what most models would predict. The ice sheets can respond rather dramatically and quickly to climate changes." As more ice moves from glaciers on land into the ocean, it raises sea levels. And since Jakobshavn Isbrae is a whopper -- it is Greenland's largest outlet glacier, draining 6.5 percent of that continent's ice sheet area.The changes have increased the rate of sea level rise by about .002 inches (.06 millimeters) per year, or roughly 4 percent of the 20th Century rate of sea level increase, according to the new study. "This finding suggests the potential for more substantial thinning in other glaciers in Greenland," added Waleed Abdalati, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who also worked on the investigation. "Other glaciers have thinned by over a meter [3 feet] a year, which we believe is too much to be attributed to melting alone. We think there is a dynamic effect in which the glaciers are accelerating due to warming."

 

Elsewhere ... A pair of separate studies, released in September, showed one mechanism by which melting can accelerate rapidly. The breakup of an Antarctic ice shelf had a snowball effect on the depletion of glaciers it once abutted. In that work, scientists monitored the Larsen B ice shelf, which broke free of the Antarctic Peninsula in 2002. After the breakup, scientists watched nearby glaciers flow into the sea several times faster than before. They say the ice shelf, now gone, served as a dam, and they attributed the whole situation to a warming climate.

 

Core Superheating: The core of the Earth is superheating, and this is affecting the entire magma convection system that circulates between the core and the surface of the planet. These magma currents are a heat exchange system, transferring heat from the central core to the surface of the Earth. The core temperature of the planet is rising as a result of the induction of a greater amount of electrical energy within the interior of the planet, and the excess heat generated by this electrical energy, is transferred to the magma convection currents, and carried to the surface.  In the deep oceans where the Earth's crust is extremely thin, heat easily transfers through the ocean floor, and warms the oceans from below. This is causing the slowdown of the Gulf Stream currents as mentioned in the article above, and the rapid melting of the polar and sea ice, and also affecting global weather patterns, because of the resulting changes to the ocean atmospheric exchange, as related to the trade winds. 

 

The excess heat from the core is also responsible for the rapid melting of the glaciers as mentioned in another article above, and as this heat radiates through the Earth's crust beneath the ice, it is melting the glacial and polar ice from below, and this is resulting in the rapid thinning, and greater movement of the glaciers as described above. This is probably due to the fact that the glaciers are no longer resting on solid frozen ground, but are now sliding on melt water between the warming Earth and the glacier above. The rising temperature of the magma convection system is increasing volcanic pressure within the Earth, and resulting in increased volcanic activity, and bulges in the Earth, as also described in articles above, as well as increased earthquake activity in diverse places around the planet, and in particular those areas of known seismic instability, such as Indonesia, as a result of the more rapid and turbulent movement of these magma currents, causing instability beneath the tectonic plates riding above. 

 

Endless cheap alternate energy from under ocean Earth’s Mantle and below  - April 7, 2005

India Daily - The quest is on for the source of ultimate alternative fuels for the human civilization, as we perceive that fossil fuels are being exhausted. Scientists and engineers are busy finding that alternative fuel. The future human civilization needs a huge amount of energy. The conventional alternatives are solar, hydrogen, wind, and nuclear and biologically generated synthetic fuel. But all these alternatives have limitation. As in Hydrogen, if you have to spend energy to create energy, it is not an alternative. 

 

The solar and wind energy are not concentrated enough. So the researchers looked at alternatives. Soon they realized the amount of energy that is used to move tectonic plates or volcanoes, can feed our civilization for thousands of years. If the energy below earth’s crust can be tapped, it can provide that magic word that we are waiting to hear for years – “cheap unlimited energy forever”.The earths crust is thinner in certain areas under the ocean. Earth’s mantle is less than 30 to 40 miles deep from the oceanic crust in these areas. 

 

Below the crust lies the upper mantle, which is soft and hot. As you travel below you see softer semi rigid mantle and then the liquid outer core. The lower parts of earth’s crust and the upper mantle have enough energy to feed the energy needs of human civilization for many years.Engineers are busy in trying to tap this energy. Once this energy is tapped and converted to electricity, the problem of fuel will be solved. Factories, cars – you name it – all can run with electricity.The problem lies in the fact that we cannot drill any further than five miles in earth’s crust. 

 

The drill bits deform due to the heat. The upper mantle 50 miles below the earth’s crust has a temperature 870 degree Celsius. That temperature is more than enough to generate unending superheated steam. That can create endless amount of electricity in a turbine driven generator. That electricity can be brought to the earth’s crust and used as cheap endless alternate energy. Today, natural gas, coal, diesel or nuclear energy is used to heat the water to generate superheated steam and that runs a turbine to generate electricity. 

 

If the energy below the earths crust in the mantle can be tapped, it will provide unlimited energy.It is a material engineering issue. We need materials that can withstand high temperature and still possess the hardness and tensile characteristics. Engineers are busy modeling these super synthetic materials using complex computer models. Some prototypes are being tested. Synthetic materials will allow running super heated steam driven turbines near the earth’s mantle that will generate unlimited cheap electricity to feed the human civilization for thousands of years to come.

 

Experiment Creates Nuclear Fusion in Lab – May 5, 2005

Los Angeles (News Yahoo) - A tabletop experiment created nuclear fusion — long seen as a possible clean energy solution — under lab conditions, scientists reported. But the amount of energy produced was too little to be seen as a breakthrough in solving the world's energy needs. For years, scientists have sought to harness controllable nuclear fusion, the same power that lights the sun and stars. This latest experiment relied on a tiny crystal to generate a strong electric field. While falling short as a way to produce energy, the method could have potential uses in the oil-drilling industry and homeland security, said Seth Putterman, one of the physicists who did the experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles. The experiment's results appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. 

 

Previous claims of tabletop fusion have been met with skepticism and even derision by physicists. In 1989, Dr. B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England shocked the world when they announced that they had achieved so-called cold fusion at room temperature. Their work was discredited after repeated attempts to reproduce it failed. Fusion experts noted that the UCLA experiment was credible because, unlike the 1989 work, it didn't violate basic principles of physics. "This doesn't have any controversy in it because they're using a tried and true method," said David Ruzic, professor of nuclear and plasma engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "There's no mystery in terms of the physics." Fusion power has been touted as the ultimate energy source and a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels like coal and oil. Fossil fuels are expected to run short in about 50 years.

 

In fusion, light atoms are joined in a high-temperature process that frees large amounts of energy. It is considered environment-friendly because it produces virtually no air pollution and does not pose the safety and long-term radioactive waste concerns associated with modern nuclear power plants, where heavy uranium atoms are split to create energy in a process known as fission. In the UCLA experiment, scientists placed a tiny crystal that can generate a strong electric field into a vacuum chamber filled with deuterium gas, a form of hydrogen capable of fusion. Then the researchers activated the crystal by heating it. The resulting electric field created a beam of charged deuterium atoms that struck a nearby target, which was embedded with yet more deuterium. When some of the deuterium atoms in the beam collided with their counterparts in the target, they fused.

 

The reaction gave off an isotope of helium along with subatomic particles known as neutrons, a characteristic of fusion. The experiment did not, however, produce more energy than the amount put in — an achievement that would be a huge breakthrough.Commercial neutron generators work in a similar way. But the UCLA instrument was "remarkably low-tech" in comparison, Michael Saltmarsh, a retired physicist from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, wrote in an accompanying article. UCLA's Putterman said future experiments will focus on refining the technique for potential commercial uses, including designing portable neutron generators that could be used for oil well drilling or scanning luggage and cargo at airports.

 

The Revolutionary Firestorm Spark Plug  - March 25, 2005

Nexus - FireStorm's Capabilities
First, let's look at what Krupa's FireStorm spark plugs give an internal combustion engine:
• More horsepower;
• 44–50% increase in mpg;
• Dramatic decrease in emissions.
Second, let's see what FireStorm plugs eliminate:
• Smog pump;
• Catalytic converter;
• Radio frequency interference (RFI) and the use of resistors in the centre electrode;
• Gap growth;
• Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) systems;
• Misfire/hesitation/detonation/stutter and stumble.

How, you may ask, is all this achieved? In a word, plasma. The revolutionary design of FireStorm spark plugs creates an electric plasma that fills the entire combustion chamber like a firestorm. It allows you to take an internal combustion engine from the standard 14.7:1 air-to-fuel ratio to an incredibly lean 24:1. At this ratio, all the air/fuel mixture is burned much more efficiently without increasing heat, thus giving an engine more power and fuel economy while creating much less pollution. That's the good news The bad news is that you can't buy a set of FireStorm spark plugs anywhere right now. No spark plug company wants to make them. 

 

Plagues and Pandemic Crisis

 

WHO Says Pandemic Of 2005 May Have Begun  - May 12, 2005

Rense - On Thursday 5 May, WHO officials attended a meeting in Manila in the Philippines with government health representatives from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, to address the current flu situation. It sounds like H5N1 was discussed on Cinco de Mayo in Manila, but WHO will get the bad news on Seis de Mayo. They should hear that WSN/33 in dead Korean pigs is quite real, and flu has opened a second front. Today's New England Journal of Medicine commentary indicated the world was unprepared for a flu pandemic, and the outcome could rival 1918. WHO has acknowledged that the H5N1 bird flu pandemic of 2005 may have begun. The WSN/33 news WHO receives on Friday should ring more alarm bells. This should be a wake-up call, but reaction will likely come when it is too late, which is now. 

 

In Asia, there are hints that the virus is indeed changing. "Incomplete evidence suggests that there may be a shift in the epidemiology of the disease," says Stöhr. "More clusters are being seen than last year, older people are now coming down with the diseases, and more cases are milder." Taken together, these characteristics could indicate that the virus is becoming less virulent and more infectious, he says, which could signal the start of a pandemic. Klaus Stohr's comments above are the first acknowledgement by WHO that the 2005 flu pandemic may have begun. The clearest signal was the simultaneous admission of a family of five in Haiphong on March 22. All five were confirmed to be H5N1 positive and all five recovered. Earlier signals were the transmission from patients to nurse(s) in Thai Binh.

 

Slaughtered chickens are displayed for sale at a market in Kuala Lumpur Tuesday morning. (AP photo

 

Although samples were collected from over 30 individuals, the results have yet to be released. The same is true for the neighbors of the Haiphong family and the patients at Vietnam Sweden hospital in Thai Ninh. 1000 samples were collected, and those results were not announced either, but the shipment of samples to CDC for analysis was a very big red flag and these changes correlated with an amino acid loss, presumably in the HA cleavage site, are a clear signal that the H5N1 in northern Vietnam was a recombinant. The virus clearly has all of its ducks in a row, and humans are simply sitting ducks, unaware or unconcerned about the looming mayhem in the fall....(Click to Open More)

 

Bird flu virus 'close to pandemic'  - Expert warns estimate of 7.5m global deaths is optimistic – May 26, 2005
The Guardian - A leading scientist warned yesterday that the avian flu virus is on the point of mutating into a pandemic disease and says that current estimates that such a pandemic could cause 7.5m deaths may understate the threat. His warnings come as experts writing in today's edition of Nature voice concerns about the world's inability to manufacture sufficient vaccines for a pandemic and warn of the impact that the virus - H5N1 - could have on the global economy. In an accompanying editorial Nature argues that so far such warnings have "fallen on deaf ears". It backs a call by Prof Osterhaus and his colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Centre, in Rotterdam - one of the world's leading virus research labs - for a global taskforce to strengthen agencies on the ground.

 

There have been 90 human infections in south-east Asia , from which 54 people have died. But while culling and the vaccination of poultry appears to have slowed outbreaks in Thailand and other parts of south-east Asia, this year Vietnam has seen a worrying number of human infections in the same family groups. According to Prof Osterhaus such clustering could mean the virus is becoming more efficient at infecting humans - a precondition for a pandemic. Another concern are reports which emerged from China last weekend that H5N1 was responsible for the deaths of 178 migratory geese at a wildfowl reserve in the western province of Qinghai earlier this month. Prof Osterhaus says the geese's deaths could be another indication that the virus is mutating and becoming more virulent. The problem is that countries such as China and Vietnam are not providing animal and human health officials with enough data, leaving scientists in the dark.

 

According to the WHO, within a few months of the pandemic 30 million people would need to be hospitalised, and a quarter could be expected to die. In his Nature commentary, Prof Osterhaus describes current estimates that a pandemic could infect 20% of the world's population and cause 7.5m deaths as "among the more optimistic predictions of how the next pandemic might unfold". Such pandemic viruses emerge every 30 years or so. The most virulent was the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which is believed to have claimed 40 million lives worldwide. By contrast the 1957 Asian flu pandemic and 1968 Hong Kong flu claimed less than one million lives each. Prof Osterhaus wants the WHO, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation and the World Organisation for Animal Health to set up global teams of vets, medics, virologists and agriculturalists to respond rapidly to outbreaks.

 

His comments are backed by the other experts in Nature, who also criticise the WHO and international efforts to develop vaccines against H5N1 and other strains of avian influenza. According to Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota, antiquated vaccine manufacturing systems mean that countries like the US are unable to protect their populations against annual flu strains, let alone pandemic ones.

What is avian flu? – January 20, 2004
The Guardian - With the latest outbreak of avian flu having taken the lives of five people in Vietnam, Alok Jha assesses the level of risk to humans  

Last weekend, an eight-year-old girl in northern Vietnam fell victim to an outbreak of avian flu that has, so far, claimed four other lives in the country. Nine further children with respiratory ailments are also being tested for the virus.  As the name suggests, the flu results from a type of virus in birds that is loosely related to the influenza virus in humans. Despite its similarities, though, avian flu very rarely jumps species and infects humans. "There have been very few and far cases of any human infection with that virus," says Stephen Lister, a veterinary surgeon who specialises in bird health. "The number of cases you can count on the fingers of one hand."

 

Since it was first discovered in 1959, there have been 20 or so large outbreaks of the disease among bird populations around the world; the last major outbreak happened in Holland last year. Many millions of chickens died or had to be destroyed as part of the epidemic and even a vet involved in the clean-up operation was thought to have succumbed to the disease. Like human flu, there are several strains of the avian disease. "They vary from viruses which don't cause any problems to viruses which are highly contagious and highly lethal," says Lister. "You can have viruses [that] can cause anything up to 100% mortality."

 

Once a bird is infected with a particularly virulent strain, it could well die very quickly. "It gets very high temperature, it will show respiratory signs and often the temperature goes so high you often get death within a matter of hours or days," says Lister. And if they do somehow jump the species barrier, as they seem to have done in Vietnam, Lister says that the risk of the virus spreading between people is minimal. Indeed, the World Health Organisation has already said that it is highly unlikely that the victims passed the latest strain, called H5N1, to each other; rather they are thought to have each caught the virus independently from infected chickens. The disease has hit the southern parts of the country hard - around two million chickens have already been killed in an effort to stop the spread of the virus.


Scientists Scramble to Destroy Flu Strain – April 13, 2005

Illustration - flu virusYahoo News - Scientists around the world were scrambling to prevent the possibility of a pandemic after a nearly 50-year-old killer influenza virus was sent to thousands of labs, a decision that one researcher described as "unwise."Nearly 5,000 labs in 18 countries, mostly in the United States, were urged by the World Health Organization to destroy samples of the dangerous virus because of the slight risk it could trigger a global outbreak. The labs received the virus from a U.S. company that supplies

 

Influenza Virus

Close window

 kits used for quality control tests. "The risk is low and we've taken appropriate action," said Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the influenza branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Her counterpart at WHO, Klaus Stohr, agreed but said, "If someone does get infected, the risk of severe illness is high, and this virus has shown to be fully transmissible."

 

The germ, the 1957 H2N2 "Asian flu" strain, killed between 1 million and 4 million people. It has not been included in flu vaccines since 1968, and anyone born after that date has little or no immunity to it. The WHO said Tuesday that there have been no reports of infections in laboratory workers associated with the distribution of the samples and that "the risk for the general population is also considered low." Still, the decision to send out the strain was described by Stohr as "unwise" and "unfortunate." The CDC learned Friday that test kits prepared by Meridian Bioscience Inc. of Cincinnati contained the virus. The company makes kits for at least four groups that help labs do proficiency testing, which involves identifying viruses to check a lab's quality controls or to acquire certification. The largest of those groups, the College of American Pathologists, said it had sent 3,747 kits to various labs starting last year and ending in February. Dr. Jared Schwartz, an official with the pathology college, said Meridian was told to pick an influenza sample and chose from its stockpile the deadly 1957 strain, which it had received from a "germ library" in 2000.

 

Other test kit providers also used the strain. Schwartz identified them as Medical Lab Evaluators, the American Association of Bioanalysts and the American Association of Family Practitioners. Officials at Meridian could not immediately be reached for comment late Tuesday after business hours. Most of the labs that received the test kits were in the United States. The vials also were sent to labs in Belgium, Bermuda, Canada, Chile, Brazil, France, Germany, Chile, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Taiwan. Some of the labs outside the United States have already incinerated their samples, Stohr said, and WHO hoped the rest of the vials would be destroyed by Friday. The kits contain blind samples that labs must correctly identify to pass the test. The influenza virus included in the kits typically is one that is currently circulating or has recently circulated. 

 

A Canadian laboratory detected the 1957 pandemic strain on March 26 in a sample that was later traced to a test kit. The WHO notified health authorities in countries that received the kits and recommended that all samples be destroyed. The College of American Pathologists asked labs to incinerate the samples immediately and confirm their actions in writing. The virus' presence in thousands of labs focused fresh attention on the safe handling of deadly germs — an issue that led to toughened U.S. rules after anthrax was sent in the mail in 2001, killing five Americans. Cox said officials strongly doubt someone deliberately planted the dangerous germ. "It wouldn't be a smart way to start a pandemic to send it to laboratories because we have people well trained in biocontainment," she said. But Stohr said the test kits are not the only supplies of the 1957 pandemic strain sitting in laboratories around the world. "The world really has to think what routine labs should be doing with these samples they have kept in the back of their fridges," he said.

 

Clue Found to How HIV Invades Cells  - February 26, 2005

News Yahoo - Researchers at the Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School in the United States have shown that the virus, which has infected 40 million people worldwide, alters its shape and triggers changes that allow it to enter cells. They obtained a three-dimensional image of a protein called gp120, part of HIV's outer membrane or envelope, before it transforms and binds to so-called CD4 receptors on the cells it wants to infect. "Knowing how gp120 changes shape is a new  route to inhibiting HIV -- by using compounds that inhibit the shape change," Stephen Harrison, head of the research team, said.  Peter Kwong, of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, described the research as a "technical tour de force" because scientists have sought the structure of the gp120 protein before it binds to CD4 receptors for almost 20 years. "In terms of vaccine design, the structure ... reveals the envelope at its potentially most vulnerable," he said in a commentary. Antiretroviral drugs can prolong the lives of AIDS sufferers but they are expensive and beyond the reach of millions of people in the developing world.

 

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

 

A vaccine is considered the Holy Grail in the battle against the AIDS epidemic but efforts to find one have been hampered by HIV's ability to mutate. "The findings also will help us understand why it's so hard to make an HIV vaccine, and will help us start strategizing about new approaches to vaccine development," Harrison explained in a statement. Scientists had already deciphered the structure of the protein after it binds to the cell it wants to attack. 

The findings published in the science journal Nature provide information about how the molecule rearranges itself before it attacks. "We can now compare the bound and unbound forms and try to understand whether there are any immunologic properties that differ and that might provide a route to new vaccine or drug strategies," said Harrison. The scientists uncovered the shape of the unbound protein by aiming an X-ray beam through a crystallized form of gp120 from a monkey virus similar to HIV.

 

Marburg Virus Toll In Angola Crosses 300 Mark – May 23, 2005

Luanda – (Agense France Presse) - The world's worst outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus has claimed 311 lives in Angola, a joint statement by Angola's health ministry and the World Health Organisation said. Three hundred deaths were recorded in the northern province of Uige, the epicentre of the outbreak, it said, adding  that 337 cases had been detected since October last year. A week ago, Angolan Health Minister Sebastiao Veloso said the southern African nation was gaining the upper hand in its battle against the deadly virus. "Everything indicates we are on the road towards controlling the epidemic. 

 

Marburg Virus

 

We are no longer in the same situation which we were in just three weeks ago," he told Lisbon-based Radio Renascenca. There is no cure for the virus, whose exact origin is unknown and which was first detected in 1967 when West German laboratory workers in the town of Marburg were infected by monkeys from Uganda. It spreads through contact with bodily fluids such as blood, excrement, vomit, saliva, sweat and tears but can be contained with relatively simple hygenic precautions, according to experts. The most serious outbreak of Marburg until now had been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 123 people died between 1998 and 2000.

 

Genetic Alterations and Cloning

 

Human embryo cloned for first time in Britain – May 19, 2005

Embryo researchBBC News - A human embryo has been cloned for the first time in Britain, where such work is strictly regulated, scientists announced. Scientists at Newcastle University, the first in Britain to obtain a licence to carry out therapeutic cloning for stem cell research, said they had successfully produced a blastocyst -- a tiny, early-stage embryo consisting of a hollow ball of cells -- cloned from a human cell using nuclear transfer. Scientists hope the work will eventually lead to  successful treatments for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, or for the paralysed victims of spinal injuries.

 

The announcement came on the same day that a team of South Korean scientists announced they had developed the first lines of patient-specific stem cells, designed to match the DNA of a specific person. This research marks a significant stride in work aimed at making it possible one day to transplant healthy cells into humans to replace cells ravaged by illnesses such as Parkinson's, said the researchers. The British scientists said they were "delighted to hear of the great progress" made by the Koreans. "They have shown conclusively that these techniques can be successful in humans. The promise of new treatments based on stem cell technology is moving nearer to becoming a realistic possibility," two members of the British team, Professor Alison Murdoch and Dr Miodrag Stojkovic said in a joint statement."During the past nine months in Newcastle, our research in nuclear transfer has progressed well. Our preliminary data will be published soon.

Reproductive cloning is banned in Britain, and a breach can result in a 10-year prison sentence.

 

 

US House passes embryonic stem cell bill  - May 24, 2005

China’s People Daily Online - The US House of Representatives voted Tuesday to lift restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, despite that President George W. Bush has threatened to veto it. The House passed the bill by a 238-194 vote, far short of the two-thirds majority needed to sustain a veto. Bush has repeatedly said he would veto the bill. "This bill would take us across a critical ethical line by creating new incentives for the ongoing destruction of emerging human life," Bush said Tuesday when meeting a group of parents who adopted their children in the embryonic stage. "Crossing this line would be a great mistake," he added.

 

The bill would lift Bush's 2001 ban on federal funding for new research using stem cell lines derived from embryos since August 2001. Embryonic stem cells can grow into any tissue or cell in the body. Scientists believe embryonic stem cells would enable tailored cures for spinal cord injury and such diseases as childhood diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. But culling stem cells from embryos destroys embryos. Supporters of the bill said the bill intends to use the otherwise discarded embryos for study. Bush said Tuesday that there are no "spare embryos." An alternative bill offered by Republican leaders was also approved by a vote of 430-1. The bill focuses on the use of stem cells derived form adults and umbilical cords rather than from embryos.

 

Stem cells in the blood from newborns' umbilical cords are the type to produce blood in the way transplanted bone marrow does in treating diseases like leukemia. This bill would provide 79 million US dollars for stem cell research using umbilical cord blood and establish a national database for patients looking for matches. It also would clear the way for studies on stem cells derived from adults.

 

Human babies 'grown in lab' – May 8, 2005 

This is London - Human eggs which could grow into embryos have been created in a laboratory for the first time, scientists announced yesterday. They were created by scraping stem cells off the surface of ovaries and exposing them to a chemical which stimulated growth. The breakthrough suggests limitless supplies of eggs could be grown, solving the problem of the acute shortage of donor eggs for infertile women wanting IVF treatment. 

 

But the idea has horrified pro-life groups after scientists admitted they could use the technique to 'farm' embryos for their research. The procedure was tested by a University of Tennessee team, which took ovarian stem cells from five women aged 39 to 52. Cells which were treated with a type of oestrogen called phenol red grew into healthy eggs. The US researchers say their technique offers hope to cancer sufferers who become infertile through chemotherapy. They also believe they could extend the fertility of a woman nearing the menopause by between ten and 12 years. Prof Antonin Bukovsky said it offered 'new strategies' for treatment of female infertility. Fertility watchdogs will have to approve the technique for use in Britain but welcomed its apparent medical benefits. But pro-life campaigner Matthew O'Gorman said: 'The artificial harvesting of eggs is synonymous with the intention to manufacture human beings for research. This is unethical, unnecessary and unacceptable.' 

 

Genetic Mingling Mixes Human, Animal Cells – May 5, 2005

Reno, Nevada (Yahoo News) - On a farm about six miles outside this gambling town, Jason Chamberlain looks over a flock of about 50 smelly sheep, many of them possessing partially human livers, hearts, brains and other organs. The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab. He can't wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus' brain about two months ago. "It's mice on a large scale," Chamberlain says with a shrug. As strange as his work may sound, it falls firmly within the new ethics guidelines the influential National Academies issued this past week for stem cell research. In fact, the Academies' report endorses research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people.

 

Doctors have transplanted pig valves into human hearts for years, and scientists have injected human cells into lab animals for even longer. But the biological co-mingling of animal and human is now evolving into even more exotic and unsettling mixes of species, evoking the Greek myth of the monstrous chimera, which was part lion, part goat and part serpent. In the past two years, scientists have created pigs with human blood, fused rabbit eggs with human DNA and injected human stem cells to make paralyzed mice walk. Particularly worrisome to some scientists are the nightmare scenarios that could arise from the mixing of brain cells: What if a human mind somehow got trapped inside a sheep's head? The "idea that human neuronal cells might participate in 'higher order' brain functions in a nonhuman animal, however unlikely that may be, raises concerns that need to be considered," the academies report warned.

 

In January, an informal ethics committee at Stanford University endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells. Stem cell scientist Irving Weissman said his experiment could provide unparalleled insight into how the human brain develops and how degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson's progress. Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who chaired the ethics committee, said the board was satisfied that the size and shape of the mouse brain would prevent the human cells from creating any traits of humanity. Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice's behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior. The Academies' report recommends that each institution involved in stem cell research create a formal, standing committee to specifically oversee the work, including experiments that mix human and animal cells.

 

Weissman, who has already created mice with 1 percent human brain cells, said he has no immediate plans to make mostly human mouse brains, but wanted to get ethical clearance in any case. A formal Stanford committee that oversees research at the university would also need to authorize the experiment. Few human-animal hybrids are as advanced as the sheep created by another stem cell scientist, Esmail Zanjani, and his team at the University of Nevada-Reno. They want to one day turn sheep into living factories for human organs and tissues and along the way create cutting-edge lab animals to more effectively test experimental drugs. Zanjani is most optimistic about the sheep that grow partially human livers after human stem cells are injected into them while they are still in the womb. Most of the adult sheep in his experiment contain about 10 percent human liver cells, though a few have as much as 40 percent, Zanjani said.

 

Because the human liver regenerates, the research raises the possibility of transplanting partial organs into people whose livers are failing. Zanjani must first ensure no animal diseases would be passed on to patients. He also must find an efficient way to completely separate the human and sheep cells, a tough task because the human cells aren't clumped together but are rather spread throughout the sheep's liver. Zanjani and other stem cell scientists defend their research and insist they aren't creating monsters — or anything remotely human."We haven't seen them act as anything but sheep," Zanjani said. Zanjani's goals are many years from being realized. He's also had trouble raising funds, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is investigating the university over allegations made by another researcher that the school mishandled its research sheep. Zanjani declined to comment on that matter, and university officials have stood by their practices.
Allegations about the proper treatment of lab animals may take on strange new meanings as scientists work their way up the evolutionary chart. First, human stem cells were injected into bacteria, then mice and now sheep. Such research blurs biological divisions between species that couldn't until now be breached. Drawing ethical boundaries that no research appears to have crossed yet, the Academies recommend a prohibition on mixing human stem cells with embryos from monkeys and other primates.

 

But even that policy recommendation isn't tough enough for some researchers. "The boundary is going to push further into larger animals," New York Medical College professor Stuart Newman said. "That's just asking for trouble." Newman and anti-biotechnology activist Jeremy Rifkin have been tracking this issue for the last decade and were behind a rather creative assault on both interspecies mixing and the government's policy of patenting individual human genes and other living matter.

Years ago, the two applied for a patent for what they called a "humanzee," a hypothetical — but very possible — creation that was half human and chimp.The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office finally denied their application this year, ruling that the proposed invention was too human: Constitutional prohibitions against slavery prevents the patenting of people. Newman and Rifkin were delighted, since they never intended to create the creature and instead wanted to use their application to protest what they see as science and commerce turning people into commodities. And that's a point, Newman warns, that stem scientists are edging closer to every day: "Once you are on the slope, you tend to move down it."

 

Australia Scientists Grow Stem Cells from Nose – March 25, 2005

SYDNEY (News Yahoo) - With the help of the Catholic Church, Australian researchers have successfully grown adult stem cells harvested from the human nose, avoiding the ethical and legal problems associated with embryonic stem cells. Australia bans creating human embryos to harvest stem cells but scientists may use embryos left over from IVF (in-vitro fertility) treatment. Stems cells harvested through other means, such as from the nose, is legal. Head researcher Alan Mackay-Sim of Griffith University said the adult stem cells taken from inside the nose could potentially be used to grow nerve, heart, liver, kidney and muscle cells. "We have got an adult stem cell which is accessible in everybody and we can grow lots of these cells and turn them into many other cell types," Mackay-Sim told Reuters. "Apart from neural and brain cells, they look like they can turn into blood cells, heart muscle and to skeletal muscle," he said in an interview. Scientists believe stem cell research could eventually lead to cures for a range of serious ailments, including Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injuries.

 

The Catholic Church, which views the use of embryonic stem cells as a form of destruction of human life, helped fund the research through a A$50,000 ($39,500) grant, which was approved by Sydney's Catholic Archbishop George Pell. "The significance of this is manifold. This represents a significant advance and I think this will bring a great blessing for people," Pell told Reuters on Thursday. Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott said the new nose adult stem cells avert the ethical problems surrounding embryonic stem cell research. "It seems at least on the basis of this research that we may well be able to obtain multi-potent stem cells from adults and that we don't need to use embyros to obtain these important cells," Abbott told reporters.

 

T rex fossil has 'soft tissues'  - March 25, 2005

BBC News - Dinosaur experts have extracted samples of what appear to be soft tissues from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone. The US researchers tell Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels. In the hotly contested field of dino research, the work will be greeted with acclaim and disbelief in equal measure. What seems certain is that some fairly remarkable conditions must have existed at the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago. Normally when an animal dies, worms and bugs will quickly eat up anything that is soft. Then, as the remaining bone material gets buried deeper and deeper in the mud, it gets heated, crushed and replaced by minerals - it is turned to stone. Fine-scale process 

 

Tyrannosaurus rex

 

The form, and nothing else, is all that is left of the original. On the outside, the hindlimb fossil designated MOR (Museum of the Rockies specimen) 1125 has this appearance. But when Dr Mary Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University, dissolved away the minerals, she found something extraordinary inside. She discovered transparent, flexible filaments that resemble blood vessels. There were also traces of what look like red blood cells; and others that look like osteocytes, cells that build and maintain bone. "This is fossilised bone in the sense that it's from an extinct animal but it doesn't have a lot of the characteristics of what people would call a fossil," she told the BBC's Science In Action programme. "It still has places where there are no secondary minerals, and it's not any more dense than modern bone; it's bone more than anything." Dr Schweitzer is not making any grand claims that these soft traces are the degraded remnants of the original material - only that they give that appearance. She and other scientists will want to establish if some hitherto unexplained fine-scale process has been at work in MOR 1125, which was pulled from the famous dinosaur rocks of eastern Montana known as the Hell Creek Formation. 

 

Protein route

"This may not be fossilisation as we know it, of large macrostructures, but fossilisation at a molecular level," commented Dr Matthew Collins, who studies ancient bio-molecules at York University, UK. "My suspicion is this process has led to the reaction of more resistant molecules with the normal proteins and carbohydrates which make up these cellular structures, and replaced them, so that we have a very tough, resistant, very lipid-rich material - a polymer that would be very difficult to break down and characterise, but which has preserved the structure," he told the BBC. But if there are fragments, at least, of the original dinosaur molecules, their details could provide new clues to the relationship between T. rex and living species, such as birds. Inevitably, people will wonder whether the creature's DNA might also be found. 

 

But the "life molecule" degrades rapidly over thousand-year timescales, and the chances of a sample surviving from the Cretaceous are not considered seriously. "I actually don't work with DNA and my lab is not set up to do that," said Dr Schweitzer. "Our goal is more to look to see what we can find with respect to the proteins that are coded by the DNA. "To a large degree, most of the chemical studies that have been done suggest proteins are more durable than DNA and they have almost the same kind of information because they use DNA as their template." Dr Collins added: "I would agree that proteins are the molecules to go for - they are the major macromolecules in bone. "We've got some very interesting research coming out from a number of labs looking at stable isotopes (different forms of the same atom) in bones and clearly information about diets which comes from such isotopes may now be amenable from these dinosaur materials." However, he cautioned that the great age of MOR 1125 may put such detail beyond the investigating scientists. 

 

Is carbon dating accurate?

After reading the article above, it makes me wonder just how accurate the process of carbon dating is when applied to fossil dating. One would expect to find such evidence of soft tissue in a fossil dating back thousands of years ago, and not 68 million years as this fossil is presumed to be. Could dinosaurs have existed in the more recent past than previously thought? This discovery makes me wonder. 

 

Conquering the Heavens

 

Hints Of A Cosmic Crash At Serpent Mound  - April 26, 2005

Cincinnati (Rense) - Sifting through rocks snagged from twin boreholes punched deep into the planet's crust, scientists have detected an unearthly substance hidden for eons in Ohio's basement. And its presence 1,412 feet beneath the forests and farmlands near Serpent Mound in south-central Ohio -- already on par with Britain's Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids as one of Earth's most mysterious manmade structures -- adds to a puzzle shrouded in legend and lore for centuries. When scientists peered into the geo-strata that emerged from beneath the mound, they were confronted with pure, weird data. Under their microscope, they saw quartz crystals with flaws like those found at nuclear test sites and in moon rocks brought back by astronauts. It pointed toward a massive energy burst that left behind telltale traces of a cosmic crash.

 

Serpent Mound Postcard

 

Now, those findings are rattling through the world of geology, shaking up long-held conceptions and misconceptions about Ohio's distant past. "I think we can say with authority today that this is an impact from a meteorite," said Mark T. Baranoski, a state geologist. "It affected the region in a spectacular way." Rock samples from beneath the mound contain significantly higher than normal concentrations of iridium, an extremely rare metal. Because it is so heavy, iridium seldom shows up anywhere but near the planet's molten core. At Serpent Mound, the levels measured were 10 times beyond what is usually present in the Earth's crust.

 

Occasionally, volcanoes bring it up in lava. But there are no lava fields in Ohio. So the questions started. Where did the iridium-rich rocks come from? While iridium is scarce on Earth, the silver-gray metal is common in asteroids and comets. In other words, it often is a strong sign that the sky has fallen. Geologists, including researchers from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, describe the recent discovery as powerful new evidence that Serpent Mound sits upon a slightly oblong crater created when a massive extraterrestrial object slammed into Earth.

 

They have reported that the heavy metal find is "good evidence for an impact origin" and that dark, stony material recovered from the deepest borehole has a "significant enrichment" that must have come from outer space. Iridium is already at the center of another scientific mind-bender - the disappearance of the dinosaurs. In a widely accepted doomsday scenario, an asteroid the size of Manhattan plunged into the sea off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The explosion devastated the planet and unleashed a worldwide wipeout that caused 70 percent of all living things to die. 

 

Scientists say they have found an iridium line in the Earth's crust that few species crossed. Under the great extinction theory, the iridium showered down in debris after the asteroid struck. Not all scientists accept the doomsday scenario, but many say it does seem to explain why the dinosaurs died off. A similar event - although without those dramatic global effects - looks to have taken place in Ohio. The crater touches portions of Adams, Pike and Highland counties, about 200 miles southwest of Cleveland in the state's rolling Appalachian countryside. The mound, built about 1,000 years ago, straddles land near the crater's southwest edge and may have had a religious function, although nobody knows for sure what philosophy and beliefs shaped its origin.

 

Of course, that hasn't stopped people from speculating about Serpent Mound's builders and what they were up to. Some say they were mystics and priests. Others say magicians and soothsayers. Still others see them as prophets. There are those who claim that the builders were shamans who practiced human sacrifice, while some believe that they were ancient astronomers who were the intellectual caste of woodland America. Fact is, nobody can say. The mound builders left no written records. Erosion and Ice Age glaciers have erased most of the crater from the surface. 

 

But underground it's a far different story, and the boreholes exposed the geologic record. Fine grains of sand taken from 1,439 feet down appear deformed when viewed under a microscope. There even seem to be particles of soot left from scorched limestone, although researchers say additional work is needed before the strange black material is positively identified. Still, everything seems to point to a cosmic jolt. While some aren't convinced, they agree the evidence is piling up. Mike Hansen, a retired state geologist who runs an earthquake warning system and teaches at Ohio State University, said there is no doubt that the Serpent Mound area was disturbed by some unknown force. But Hansen thinks the stresses were triggered by natural shifts in the Earth's crust. Around the time the rocks were deformed, Hansen said, Africa was pushing into North America and the Appalachian Mountains range was thrusting up higher than today's Himalayas. He said a major tectonic event like that could have created the underground chaos at Serpent Mound. Still, Hansen concedes that the meteorite hypothesis is gaining adherents among geologists.

 

The object, if it did strike Ohio, would have been gigantic. Maybe up to three times larger than Cleveland Browns Stadium. Traveling up to 45,000 mph, it would have been moving much faster than a speeding bullet. The searing heat, blast and shockwaves from such a crash would have instantly carved a 1,000-foot-deep hole and crushed rocks miles below the five-mile-across crater. That is exactly what samples from the two boreholes show.

 

Researchers have spotted microscopic cracks in quartz crystals far beneath the surface and horsetail-shaped fractures called "shatter cones" in geological formations from the ground on down. The cracked crystals have patterns resembling those appearing after U.S. nuclear weapons tests in Nevada. Other than iridium, there is no trace of an asteroid or comet. It would probably have vaporized when it hit 256 million years ago. "I don't think we'll ever find it," Baranoski said. "It would have gone up in smoke. If anything was left near the surface, it would have been eroded away." Doyle Watts, a geophysicist at Dayton's Wright State University who worked on the international team that studied the core samples, said the impact theory explains why so much of the terrain around Serpent Mound appears jumbled. Some rock formations rise 1,000 feet above the ground. Others look like they have slid straight down. Those oddities were first noticed not long after Europeans settled Ohio. John Locke, a geologist who explored the area in the 1830s, thought he had found a "sunken mountain" and reported that "a region of no small extent had sunk down several hundred feet, producing faults, dislocations and upturnings of the layers of the rocks." 

 

Even more weird was the 1,348-foot-long Serpent Mound, which looked like an undulating snake atop a plateau overlooking Brush Creek. Watts said he believes that the Indians saw the strange features in the land and were moved to build the mound, perhaps as a sacred monument. He said the Indians were deeply attuned to the natural world. "It just begs the questions: Why would Native Americans lug tons of soil and shape it into a slithering serpent? Why would they choose to do so on the scar of an ancient impact when they had all of Ohio and the Midwest?" Watts said. "My guess is that they could have noticed something strange about the rocks. It has to be more than coincidence." 

 

The symbol of the Serpent/Dragon is also Biblically used to describe the fallen angels of Satan, who as a result of a war in heaven between the Angels, were cast out into the Earth - Revelation 12: 7-9. These would be the same extraterrestrial beings also described in Genesis 6: 2, as the sons of God, who took the daughters of men as wives, and further described as the 'Watchers' in the Book of Enoch, with even greater detail. Is this evidence of a cosmic blast beneath the Serpent Mound in Ohio as described in the article above, actually the result of weapons used in the great war of heaven between the Angels? If so, then the Native Americans were correct when they chose the symbol of the Serpent to mark this site where the Angels of Satan were forced down into the Earth. 

 

Chase is on for comet spacecraft  - May 5, 2005

See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download
 the highest resolution version available.BBC News - The American Deep Impact spacecraft has caught first sight of its quarry. The probe has returned an image of Comet Tempel 1, taken from a distance of 64 million km (40 million miles). The observation will help Deep Impact's navigators, engineers and scientists as they tweak its flight path for a close rendezvous on 4 July. The probe will eject a 372kg impactor into the path of the comet to blast a deep hole in it - to learn more about how these objects are put together. Comets are the "undercooked leftovers" that remained when a sprawling cloud of dust and gas condensed to form the Sun and planets 4.6 billion years ago. 

 

Deep Impact Spacecraft Hurtles Toward Comet Drawing Credit: Pat Rawlings, U. Md., JPL, NASA

 

Scientists hope the mission will answer basic questions about how the Solar System came to be, by offering a better look at the nature and composition of these frozen balls of ice, dust and rock. "It is great to get a first glimpse [of] the comet from our spacecraft," said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr Michael A'Hearn, of the University of Maryland, US. "With daily observations beginning in May, Tempel 1 will become noticeably more impressive as we continue to close the gap between spacecraft and comet. "What is now little more than a few pixels across will evolve by 4 July into the best, most detailed images of a comet ever taken."

 

Scientists Scan Data From Saturn's Moon – January 27, 2005

Titan's Complex SurfaceFRANKFURT, Germany (Newsday) -- Saturn's largest moon contains all the ingredients for life, but senior scientists studying data from a European probe ruled out the possibility Titan's abundant methane stems from living organisms. More than a week after the Huygens probe plunged through Titan's atmosphere, researchers continue to pore over data collected for clues to how the only celestial body known to have a significant atmosphere other than Earth came to be and whether it can provide clues to how life arose here. Initial findings have revealed an abundance of methane on the surface of Titan -- the first moon other than Earth's to be explored -- which is crucial to supporting its thick atmosphere. 

 

Saturn’s Largest Moon - Titan

 

But scientists are still puzzling over the origin of the methane. "This methane cannot be coming from living organisms," Jean-Pierre Lebreton, mission manager for the Huygens probe that landed on the surface of Titan Jan. 14, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Images snapped by the 340-kilogram (750-pound) probe as it parachuted through Titan's atmosphere from the Cassini orbiter show the moon's surface was cut by a weather system leaving deep river beds and large reservoirs, implying activity by liquid methane. But unlike water in the Earth's atmosphere that continually renews itself, methane is destroyed by ultraviolet light, so Titan must have a source deep inside, scientists said. Based on data collected by Huygens' instruments, Sushil Atreya, a professor of planetary science at the University of Michigan in the United States, believes a hydro-geological process between water and rocks deep inside the moon could be producing the methane. "I think the process is quite likely in the interior of Titan," Atreya said in a telephone interview. The process is called serpentinisation and is basically the reaction between water and rocks at 100 to 400 degrees Celsius (212 to 752 degrees Fahrenheit), he said. While these discoveries are breaking new ground -- scientists have been surprised by the amount of data they were able to collect from Titan's surface during the mission -- researchers are far from helping to explain how life may have formed during Earth's earliest years.

 

Titan has the ingredients for living organisms, including nitrogen, methane and water, but not in the right combinations. Far more information is needed to glean any insights into activity on young Earth, Atreya said. "Just looking at the data we have now, I think it's a long shot," Atreya said. Huygens was spun off from the Cassini mother ship on Dec. 24. The euro2.4 billion (US$3.3 billion) Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its moons was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral, Florida -- a joint effort between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian space agency. The probe was named after Titan's discoverer, the 17th-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens.

 

Twelve new moons for Saturn  - May 5, 2005

BBC News - Astronomers have discovered 12 new moons orbiting Saturn, bringing its number of natural satellites to 46. The moons are small, irregular bodies - probably only about 3-7km in size - that are far from Saturn and take about two years to complete one orbit. All but one circles Saturn in the opposite direction to its larger moons - a characteristic of captured bodies. Jupiter is the planet with the most moons, 63 at the last count. Saturn now has 46. Uranus has 27 and Neptune 13. The latest ones were found last year using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. Confirmation observations were made last month using the Gemini North telescope also situated in Hawaii. 

 

The disk of Saturn casts a shadow across its rings away from the sun. The satellites Mimas, Enceladus, and Tethys, seen as dots, all orbit Saturn in the plane defined by its rings and equator.

 

 

Planetary puzzles  - Dave Jewitt of the University of Hawaii, co-discoverer of the objects, told the BBC News website that they were found as part of a detailed survey of the outer planets in order to better understand their origin. The newly-found satellites were probably formed in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and scattered out of it by the tug of Jupiter's gravity. "The key question is how they became captured by Saturn. The current models devised to explain how such bodies are captured are unable to explain why they reach the orbits they do," said Dr Jewitt. "The new discoveries should improve our knowledge of satellite systems in general and should, eventually, lead to an understanding of how such small, irregular bodies are captured by the gravity of giant planets". "Having more satellites to study will give us more data to plug into our computer simulations that may tell us what happened", he added. Astronomers have found that all four giant planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - possess about the same number of small irregular satellites irrespective of the mass of the planet, the orbit of the satellites, or if they were captured or formed in orbit. This observation remains unexplained.

 

Blue Skies on SaturnFebruary 17, 2005
Saturn's moon Mimas against SaturnScience.NASA - Fast forward 100 years: You're an astronaut piloting an airplane in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. The gas giant has no solid surface to walk on and no seas to put a boat in. Exploring Saturn means flying, dipping in and out of strangely-colored clouds, racing through ring shadows. It's a totally alien world. It's so alien that you start to feel homesick. So you do what they taught you in astronaut training. Take a deep breath, look up at the sunny blue sky and pretend to be back on Earth. Works every time!

 

Above: The blue skies of Saturn, photographed by Cassini in January 2005. In the foreground is Saturn's moon Mimas. The long, dark lines on the atmosphere are sun-shadows cast by the planet's rings. [More]

 

Sunny blue skies ... on Saturn? It's true. NASA's Cassini spacecraft discovered them in 2005."We were surprised," recalls JPL's Bob West, a member of the Cassini imaging team. "Saturn is supposed to be yellow." If you've ever looked at Saturn through a backyard telescope, you know it's true: Yellow is the dominant color of Saturn's thick clouds. "Sunlight reflected from those clouds is what gives Saturn its golden hue," explains West. But Cassini saw something different. Close to Saturn, the spacecraft was able to photograph the clear air above the planet's clouds. ("Air" on Saturn is mostly hydrogen.) The color there is blue."Saturn's skies are blue, we think, for the same reason Earth's skies are blue," says West. Molecules in the atmosphere scatter sunlight. On Earth the molecules are oxygen (O2) and nitrogen (N2). On Saturn the molecules are hydrogen (H2). Different planets, different molecules, but the effect is the same: blue light gets scattered around the sky. Other colors are scattered, too, but not as much as blue. Physicists call this "Rayleigh scattering."

 

End of story? Not quite.

"There are some things we don't understand," says West. For example, while Saturn's northern hemisphere has blue skies, Saturn's southern hemisphere does not. The south looks yellow. It could be that southern skies on Saturn are simply cloudier, yellow clouds making yellow skies.

 

see captionRight: Saturn, photographed by Geoff Chester of Alexandria, VA, on Jan. 29, 2005, using an 8-inch telescope. Saturn's blue north is hidden behind the planet's rings.

 

The mystery, says West, isn't why the south is cloudy--that's normal. It's why the north is clear. "For some [unknown] reason, Saturn's northern clouds have sunk deeper into the planet, leaving clear blue air behind." Saturn's north is so blue that West believes amateur astronomers could see the hue from Earth. Unfortunately, the north of Saturn is hidden at the moment behind Saturn's rings, a situation that will persist for another year or so. For now, Cassini is in the best position to investigate. Will Saturn's blue skies fade? Or grow to envelop the whole planet? No one knows. It is an alien world, after all.

 

Water Spread Across Much of Ancient Mars – February 17, 2005

Yahoo - Water was common across a vast region of ancient Mars, creating habitable conditions for long stretches of time billions of years ago, scientists said Thursday. New data reveal water in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars extended across hundreds of thousands of square miles, at least as groundwater and possibly as shallow lakes or seas. The work significantly expands the amount of surface area on Mars known to have once been water-laden, and it extends the period of time that the water was present.

 

Space observations suggest frozen sea under Mars' surface - February 21, 2005

PARIS (Mars Daily) - A frozen sea surviving as blocks of pack ice may lie just beneath the surface of Mars, the New Scientist magazine said, citing observations from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft. Images from the high resolution stereo camera on Mars Express showed of structures called plates that look similar to ice formations near Earth's poles. These plates could indicate the first discovery of a large body of water beyond Mars' polar ice caps, the review said. The team of researchers, led by John Murray of Britain's Open University, estimated the possible submerged ice sea at about 800 by 900 kilometres (500 by 560 miles) in size and 45 metres (150 feet) deep on average. 

 

Did a series of volcanic eruptions cover an ancient sea on Mars, that to this day lies dormant as a frozen ocean?

 

The researchers said the evidence suggested that the plates, estimated to be about 5 million years old, were not just imprints left by ice that has now completely vanished. While the site of the plates near Mars' equator means that sunlight should have melted any ice there, the team suggested that a layer of volcanic ash, perhaps a few centimetres thick, may protect the structures. "I think it's fairly plausible," said Michael Carr, an expert on Martian water at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, who was not part of the team. "Maybe the ice is still there in the ground, protected by a volcanic cover as they suggest," Carr said. There is abundant evidence for the past presence of water on Mars but today the planet appears relatively dry, with ice confined to the planet's polar caps. The discovery was to be presented Friday at the first Mars Express science conference in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. 

 

In their paper the researchers traced a possible history for Mars' underground ice, saying it began with huge masses of ice floating in water that were later covered with volcanic ash, leaving the pack ice plates behind. "If the reported hypothesis is true, then this would be a prime candidate landing site to search for possible extant life on Mars," said Brian Hynek, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States.

 

Scientists Battle 'Dark Energy' Theory of Universe  - March 25, 2005

ROME (News Yahoo) - A small group of physicists are battling what they see as the cosmological equivalent to the bogeyman: an enormous dark force, that nobody has ever seen, driving galaxies apart. Conventional wisdom holds that the mysterious force, called "dark energy," may make up 70 percent of the universe, and could be the determining factor in whether it is eventually destroyed billions of years from now. But Italian and American cosmologists are offering a controversial alternative to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. They say it's not dark energy, but an overlooked after-effect of the "Big Bang" -- which cosmologists believe gave birth to the universe. "No mysterious dark energy is required," said Antonio Riotto at Italy's National Nuclear Physics Institute in Padova. "If dark energy were the size that theories predict ... it would have prevented the existence of everything we know in our cosmos," he told Reuters. Since the late 1990s, scientists have used dark energy to explain an apparent anti-gravity force pushing galaxies away from each other at an accelerating rate, and using a variety of theories -- like new dimensions -- to justify its existence. Albert Einstein once proposed a similar "cosmological constant," entering an anti-gravity factor into his general theory of relativity to offset gravity and create a balanced, static universe. 

 

Dark Energy – Distant Supernova – Hubble Deep Field

 

WAS EINSTEIN RIGHT OR WRONG? When he later discovered that the universe was expanding, he called the cosmological constant his "greatest blunder," but dark energy revived the idea of an anti-gravity force. However, according to the new study, no anti-gravity factor like dark energy or cosmological constant is needed to explain the forces of the universe. "We think Einstein was right when he said he was wrong," said Edward W. Kolb of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Kolb and the Italians say the universe's accelerating expansion is the result of long ripples in the fabric of space-time created by the big bang, during an "inflation" phase of rapid expansion of the universe, which have not been properly accounted for since they stretch beyond the observable universe. "These long wavelength swells grow with time and give an extra expansion to the universe," Kolb said. Not all cosmologists are buying into the theory, which will be poured-over following its submission this month to the journal Physical Review Letters. 

 

"Their paper is going to get enormous scrutiny, and my own guess is that in the end, they'll be wrong," said cosmologist Michael Turner at the University of Chicago, who coined the term "dark energy," and published a paper with Kolb in 1990. "But they may get the last laugh. And the interesting thing is, if they get the last laugh, I doubt that this is the only effect of these long ripples. We may have to make some other changes," he told Reuters. That could include changes to theories about the ultimate fate of the universe, particularly whether it will collapse in a "big crunch," be completely blown apart in a "big rip" or just drift steadily until galaxies are so far away from each other they cannot be seen -- in effect taking stars from the sky. The ramifications of the "long ripples" proposal would be infinite drift and "cosmic darkness," Riotto said. "The next generations of experiments that are done should be able to distinguish or tell us which if any of the ideas are correct. Whether it's dark energy or our proposal," said Kolb. 

 

Water & Ice: Space is a fabric with the fluid characteristics of water, and similar to water will take the shape of any container in which it resides, and including any electromagnetic field that molds it, or any planet or star that displaces it. Matter is an electromagnetic ripple or wave in the fabric of space, and can be likened to ripples and waves on the surface of the sea, which have no real existence apart from the water on which they ride. Similarly, matter has no real existence apart from the space in which it resides. Like water and ice, the fabric of space is the material from which matter is formed. When space is disturbed via electromagnetic waves, matter comes into existence as a ripple affect, and when the disturbance ceases, so too does matter, as it returns to the stillness of empty space. All is but a vibration in the fabric of space itself, and this is known as the Word of God. Time is the duration of resonance.

 

That being the condition as presented, this mysterious dark energy that everyone is looking for must be space itself, and just as when water poured into a large container will expand to fill the entire container, and the space between objects floating within will expand as they drift further and further apart, so too does space itself expand as matter dissolves back into it's original state, and returns to the formlessness from which it came. This then brings up a question. Where in this vast universe do we find large quantities of matter being destroyed and reduced to primordial form? In black holes of course.

 

Galaxies are enormous vortexes formed in the fabric of space itself, hence the reason for the spiral shape of most galaxies, as all matter caught within the curvature of space follows the lines of force swirling around and towards center. In the center of every galaxy resides a black hole or eye of the vortex. Recent astronomical observations have determined that there are black holes at the center of nearly every galaxy, and because there are an infinite number of galaxies contained within the universe, there are likewise and infinite number of black holes sucking all matter into oblivion.  

 

Matter in the form of gas and dust drifting throughout the void of space is captured by these galactic swirls, where it condenses to form stars and planets within the outer and central regions of the galaxies, and when matter finally reaches the center of a galaxy, it enters the eye of the vortex, or black hole, and ceases to exist. It returns to it's original form and pours back into the void of empty space, and it is this conversion of matter back into empty space that is recorded and observed as the expansion of the universe, and just as water poured into a boundless container will continue to expand, so too does space expand and spread the galaxies further and further apart. 

 

NASA Tracks Three Space Bursts, Says Stellar Explosions Imminent – January 26, 2005

Space.com - Three powerful bursts of energy from different regions of space could presage spectacular explosions of huge stars, astronomers just announced. The eruptions are likely imminent. Scientists around the world are scrambling to track the blasts, NASA officials said last night. There is no danger to Earth from the expected stellar explosions, called supernovas. Yet never before have astronomers had such advance warning of the faraway explosions. In fact, they don't even know if their forecasts are right. What is clear is that as the flashes develop into explosions -- or not -- knowledge of how stars die is likely to grow.

'Beautiful' bursts - A blast of X-rays was spotted Sept. 12, and another on Sept. 16. Each came from a different location in the sky and from galaxies far beyond our own. A more powerful eruption was detected Sept. 24 from yet another spot in the sky. This third flash, importantly, was on the verge between an X-ray eruption and a more energetic gamma-ray burst, which involves a more powerful form of radiation. X-rays and gamma rays are types of light, just like less powerful visible light and lowly radio waves. All are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The three high-energy flashes were each discovered by NASA's orbiting High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE- 2) observatory. There is no reason to suspect there's any connection between the three blasts. "We think it's just a strange coincidence," George Ricker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a telephone interview today. Telescopes around the world have since raced to track each event.

"Each burst has been beautiful," Ricker said. "Depending on how these evolve, they could support important theories about supernova[s] and gamma-ray bursts." Ricker told SPACE.com the stars will likely go supernova 10 to 20 days after the initial bursts that were spotted. The initial events have faded beyond the visibility of small professional telescopes and are now being monitored by some of the world's largest ground-based observatories. Backyard astronomers likely could not find the bursts, Ricker said.

 

Head-scratchers - Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic events in the universe other than the Big Bang. They briefly outshine entire galaxies. Astronomers think each burst is related to the explosion of a very massive star that has used up its main fuel. Much material is blasted into space, and some falls back rapidly and collapses into a tiny sphere more dense than most folks can imagine, resulting in the formation of a black hole. In some cases, however, the energy might be unleashed when two black holes collide. But experts are not sure why some supernovas are accompanied by gamma-ray bursts and others seem to shoot out only X-rays (the latter assumption has not even been convincingly determined). 

The leading theory is that when a star collapses after exploding, it sends out two incredibly swift jets of material, one along each of its poles. If a jet is pointed toward Earth, the thinking goes, we see a gamma-ray burst. Otherwise we note only the X rays. Other theorists argue that gamma-ray bursts and X-ray flashes are different animals altogether. All this could become much clearer in coming days as the three new eruptions are monitored by a global telescope network designed to detect each of the different wavelengths of energy involved.

 

Nature on a rampage - The eruptions are all probably a billion or so light-year away, Ricker said. That's relatively close in comparison to most gamma-ray bursts, which may explain why the X-ray flashes have been seen at all. "These past two weeks have been like 'cock, fire, reload,'" Ricker said. "Nature keeps on delivering." Artist's impression of a supernova, with the exploded star seen as a point of light in the center. Credit: NASA Until recently, the events leading up to gamma-ray bursts and black hole formation had not been seen. The bursts are known to come routinely from every direction in the sky. 

But they last just seconds, sometimes less than a second, so in most cases only the aftermath is witnessed. Astronomers hope this time they've seen the prelude and can witness the entire process. Observations of other events in recent years linked gamma-ray bursts to supernovas. Now, follow-up observations of the Sept. 24 blast, named GRB040924, suggests X-rays and gamma rays do indeed emanate from the same event. The recent bursts "may be the first time we see an X-ray flash lead to a supernova," said theorist Stanford Wooslsley of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

 

Telescopes see 'distant planet'  - April 7, 2005

GQ Lup, European Southern ObservatoryBBC News - A European team claims to have obtained the first direct image of a planet beyond our own Solar System. The "extrasolar planet" is said to orbit a star called GQ Lup - thought to be like a young version of our Sun. Similar claims have been made in the past, but sceptical scientists believe the pictures merely show objects that share the same view in the sky. The GQ Lup object is far more certain claims Ralph Neuhaeuser's team in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. GQ Lup and its companion are located in a star-forming region about 400 light-years away. The "planet" has been observed by the team since 1999. 

 

The new "planet" (right) is seen close to a relatively young star

 

The astronomers have used image data from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Because it is in a young system, the planet is said to be relatively hot. This helped the team detect the planet in the glare from its host star, the group says. The planet is also quite far from GQ Lup - about 100 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth, which assisted the team in separating the light from the two objects.

 

The team models the mass of the companion to be 1-2 times that of our own Jupiter. Astronomers have found about 130 exoplanets over the past decade, but most of these have been detected via the gravitational "wobbles" they induce in their parent stars. The limitations of current technology make it very difficult to see a planet directly. It is expected that such images will not become routinely available until new space-borne planet-hunting telescopes are launched in the next decade. Some scientists have already questioned whether the GQ Lup companion is an exoplanet. They have concerns over the size of the object, which by the team's own admission could be as high as 42 Jupiter masses. If confirmed at the top end of this scale, it would make the object a brown dwarf (a failed star), not a planet.

 

Surprises in History and Science

 

Lake disappears, baffling villagers – May 23, 2005

MOSCOW (News Yahoo) - A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight. NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately. "It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground," said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel. Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations. "I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us," said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house.

Large lake completely disappears in Russian village overnight  - May 20, 2005

Pravda - The landscape on the forest edge near the village looks like the water has gone under the ground from an unplugged gigantic bathtub

A large lake disappeared in Russia's Nizhni Novgorod region overnight. Residents of the village of Bolotnikovo discovered a huge trench instead of a million cubic meters of water on Thursday morning. No other lake appeared in the area. There are only 300 meters between the lake and the village, Russian NTV channel reports. The landscape on the forest edge near the village looks like the water has gone under the ground from an unplugged gigantic bathtub. Village residents asked Russia's emergency services for help.

 

Specialists arrived at the site of the incident and examined the bottom of the lake seeking possible victims. Luckily, there were no people near the lake when it was virtually emptied. Dmitry Zaitsev, the chief of the local firefighting brigade, said that a large number of trees had been sucked under the ground. "If a human being finds himself in the middle of such a disaster, there will be no chances for a person to survive," Zaitsev said.

 

Local residents were shocked to find out that their lake had literally vanished from the area. Village fishermen came to the lake early in the morning. "I was amazed to see that there was no water there. All I could think of was - oh, my God," a local resident said. One of the men assumed that the USA had been involved in such an amazing natural phenomenon: "I think that America got us here," a man said.

An official from a neighboring village, Alexander Kluyev, believes that the lake has flown into an underground river. "I think that the vault of a large underground cave came down and connected with a river there. We believe that there is a certain underground river flowing here in the area, and the water of the lake has gone under the ground," said he.

Officials from the regional administration said that several houses went under the ground in the village of Bolotnikovo 70 years ago

 

For Dead Sea, a slow death  - May 23, 2005

Israel: The Dead Sea, Ein Gedi, and MasadaMSNBC - Sea's water level dropping as Jordan River goes dry. EIN GEDI, Israel - When the Ein Gedi Spa opened in 1986 to pamper visitors with massages, mud wraps and therapeutic swims, customers walked just a few steps from the main building to take their salty dip in the Dead Sea. Nineteen years later, the water level has dropped so drastically that the shoreline is three-quarters of a mile away. A red tractor hauls customers to the spa's beach and back in covered wagons.  "The sea is just running out, and we keep running after it," said Boaz Ron, 44, manager of the resort. "In another 50 years, it could run out another kilometer," or more than half a mile. It may sound redundant, but the Dead Sea, one of the world's cultural and ecological treasures, is dying. In the last 50 years, the water level has dropped more than 80 feet and the sea has shrunk by more than a third, largely because the Jordan River has gone dry. In the next two decades, the sea is expected to fall at least 60 more feet, and experts say nothing will stop it.

 

The Dead Sea

 

The decline has been particularly rapid since the 1970s, when the water began dropping three feet a year. That created a complex domino effect that is slowly destroying some of Israel's most cherished plant and wildlife reserves along the Dead Sea's shores, a key resting stop along the annual migration route for 500 million birds that fly between Europe and Africa. The receding waters have left huge mud flats with hundreds of sinkholes that threaten to collapse roads and buildings and have forced a development freeze on Israel's side of the sea, which lies on the border with Jordan. 

"I'm looking at the reality, and nothing will change in the next 20 to 40 years -- the sinkholes will continue opening even more, the infrastructure will be destroyed from stream erosion, the water level will drop and affect the ecosystem," said Galit Cohen, head of environmental policy at Israel's Environmental Ministry. "The forecast for the future is very bad." The main problem, experts agree, is that most of the water that once flowed into the sea -- the saltiest large body of water in the world and, at 1,371 feet below sea level, the lowest point on Earth -- is being diverted for drinking water and agriculture, so there is not enough to offset the high evaporation rate. 

 

In addition, Israeli and Jordanian industries on the south end of the sea are letting 180 million gallons of the mineral-rich water evaporate every day -- about 66 billion gallons a year -- to extract chemicals. "The situation of the Dead Sea is something that happened because there's a water shortage and it's needed for other uses," Cohen said. "You can say, 'Don't think of anything else. Let the Dead Sea have the water,' but no one will listen. They'll say, 'So we won't have water in Tel Aviv or the Negev or where? "The best hope for a solution, some believe, is to pump salt water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea via a proposed 120-mile Red-Dead Canal, a $5 billion project that the Jordanian government is pursuing with international donors. The World Bank will help fund a $20 million study of the idea. 

But Israeli experts say similar proposals -- including a Med-Dead canal to pump water from the Mediterranean -- have been around for more than 30 years and are unlikely to work. According to Amos Bein of the Geological Survey of Israel, chemical and biological reactions produced by mixing Dead Sea water with seawater could change the blue color of the Dead Sea to white or red or create deadly gases. In the end, he said, the sea will continue falling about three feet a year for the next 150 years or so, until the water becomes so supersaturated with salt that evaporation effectively stops. At that point, according to Bein, the surface of the Dead Sea will be one-third smaller and about 434 feet lower than today. "It's possible to see the half-full part of the glass," he said. "The Dead Sea will never dry up."...More

 

Exploding Toads Puzzle German Scientists – May 5, 2005

Berlin (News Yahoo) - More than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, and German scientists have no explanation for what's causing the combustion. Both the pond's water and body parts of the toads have been tested, but scientists have been unable to find a bacteria or virus that would cause the toads to swell up and pop, said Janne Kloepper, of the Hamburg-based Institute for Hygiene and the Environment. "It's absolutely strange," she said Wednesday. "We have a really unique story here in Hamburg. This phenomenon really doesn't seem to have appeared anywhere before." The toads at a pond in the upscale neighborhood of Altona have been blowing up since the beginning of the month, filling up like balloons until their stomachs suddenly burst.

"It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie," Werner Schmolnik, the head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily. "The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die." Biologists have come up with several theories, but Kloepper said that most have been ruled out. The pond's water quality is no better or worse than other bodies of water in Hamburg, and the toads did not appear to have a disease, she said. A laboratory in Berlin has ruled out the possibility that it is a fungus that made its way from South America, Kloepper said. She said that tests will continue. In the meantime, city residents have been warned to stay away from the pond.

Turin shroud 'older than thought'  - January 27, 2005

BBC News - Shroud of Turin, Nasa Tests in 1988 concluded the cloth was a medieval "hoax". The Shroud of Turin is much older than suggested by radiocarbon dating carried out in the 1980s, according to a new study in a peer-reviewed journal. A research paper published in Thermochimica Acta suggests the shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old. The author dismisses 1988 carbon dating tests which concluded that the linen sheet was a medieval fake. The shroud, which bears the faint image of a blood-covered man, is believed by some to be Christ's burial cloth. The radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic

 

Three dimensional cast of the Shroud of Turin

 

Raymond Rogers- Raymond Rogers says that his research and chemical tests show the sample used in the 1988 radiocarbon analysis was cut from a medieval patch woven into the shroud to repair fire damage. This was responsible for an erroneous date being assigned to the original shroud cloth. "The radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic," said Mr Rogers, who is a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, US.

 

Fire damage - The linen sheet was damaged in several fires since its existence was first recorded in France in 1357, including a church blaze in 1532. The shroud first surfaced in France in 1357. It was restored by nuns who patched the holes and stitched the shroud to a reinforcing material known as the Holland cloth. In his study, Mr Rogers analysed and compared the sample used in the 1988 tests with other samples from the famous cloth. Microchemical tests, which use tiny quantites of materials, demonstrated that the shroud must be older than previously thought. These tests revealed the presence of a chemical called vanillin in the radiocarbon sample and in the Holland cloth, but not the rest of the shroud. Vanillin is produced by the thermal decomposition of lignin, a chemical compound found in plant material such as flax. Levels of vanillin in material such as linen fall over time, so it provides one way to date the shroud.

 

'Older date' - "The fact that vanillin cannot be detected in the lignin on shroud fibres, Dead Sea scrolls linen and other very old linens indicates that the shroud is quite old," Mr Rogers writes. "A determination of the kinetics of vanillin loss suggests the shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old." In the 1988 study, scientists from three universities concluded that the cloth dated from some time between 1260 and 1390. This ruled it out as the possible burial cloth that wrapped the body of Christ. That led to the then Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero, admitting the garment was a hoax.

 

But since, several attempts have been made to challenge the authenticity of these tests. Researchers using high-resolution photography claimed they had found indications of an "invisible" reweave in the area used for testing. "The sample tested was dyed using technology that began to appear in Italy about the time the crusaders' last bastion fell to the Mameluke Turks in AD 1291," said Mr Rogers. "The radiocarbon sample cannot be older than about AD 1290, agreeing with the age determined in 1988. However, the shroud itself is actually much older."

 

Why we should all want a shoe like this 2,000-year-old one  - May 11, 2005

Icwales - A 2,000-YEAR-OLD leather shoe dug up in a quarry is better than some footwear being made today, a leading Welsh podiatrist claimed yesterday.

Andrew James, senior podiatrist with Cardiff-based Ace Foot in Motion which advises Wales's Elite Cymru athletes, says the ancient shoe appears to have been well constructed. The Iron Age relic, made of leather and complete with stitch and lace holes was found in a hollowed out tree at Whitehall Quarry, Somerset.

Archaeologists say the shoe, thought to be the oldest ever found in Britain, is the equivalent of a modern size 10.Mr James said yesterday, "Having looked at photographs of it I can see the shoe is clearly constructed of some kind of leather and has been hand stitched. It was clearly designed to be laced on to the foot which would give fairly good stability and control." I went into a sports store just a few days ago and I can honestly say I would have recommended hardly any of the shoes or trainers I found in there. "In many cases fashion has been put to the fore and stability and protection for the foot and ankle have come second.

 

Leather Shoe from Wales

 

The modern trend for air soles for instance in many cases means that the foot moves around on top of the air bubble beneath, not giving stability. While it is hard to tell exactly from a photo, the Iron Age shoe looks at least as if it would have given stability to the wearer."And the leather would have provided protection and the lacing work and stitching suggest it probably took some planning, time and effort to make ... it's probably better than some shoes that are being made today." Mr James however said he was amazed the shoe was a size 10. He said, "Probably because of modern nutrition, people's feet are getting bigger ... just this morning I was dealing with someone with size 15 feet. "Sizes of 11 or 12 are fairly average now and the female foot is getting bigger too. We deal with young female athletes with size 12 or 13 feet which would have been quite unusual at one time. "The average Celt tends to be relatively short and stocky so to find a 2,000-year-old shoe in a size 10 is something of a surprise ... maybe it belonged to a visitor to these shores. I would think that whoever was the owner of the shoe was particularly tall for those times."

 

The shoe has been sent for expert conservation work and it will be displayed at the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter. A team from Exeter Archaeology unearthed the shoe when excavating at Town Farm, Burlescombe. It was in a "bronze age industrial site" consisting of two mounds of burnt quarry stone dated to 1460-1290 BC with two timber-built wells nearby. One of the wells was constructed over a spring using a hollowed-out tree set into the ground. The shoe measures approximately 30cm. The animal from which the leather was derived has yet to be ascertained.

 

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml