Learn From the BP Disaster. Then Drill Again.

Nansen Saleri, president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston, was formerly head of reservoir management for Saudi Aramco. He seems to think, no, he does think, and contend, that after learning our lesson, we should drill again. The Palin crowd might well agree, and surely will, but that hardly constitutes responsibility, wisdom, and prudence.

But Hardship Endures in Alaskan Zone Hit by Valdez Spill.Not as easy as wishing something were true.

Se parte glaciar

Item found on El Universal website: NASA reports that an iceberg the size of Luxembourg (how many people have any idea what size that is? I don't. I'll look around for a measurement: the CIA World Factbook puts it at 2, 586 square kilometers, slightly smaller than Rhode Island) crashed with the glacier Mertz in the east of Antarctica, loosening another iceberg of near-equal size.

 La NASA publicó imágenes del choque de un iceberg, del tamaño de Luxemburgo, con el borde del glaciar Mertz en el este de la Antártida y desprendió otro iceberg de tamaño casi igual | Ver nota

Foto: Tomada de la NASA 04 de marzo de 2010

Chile temblor tilts Earth

Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images - Firefighters searched for victims in the debris of a house in Curanipe.

AMERICAS NEWS - MARCH 3, 2010

Temblor Tilts Earth by Inches

By GAUTAM NAIK

The earthquake that struck Chile was so powerful it shifted the planet's axis enough to make it spin slightly faster, meaning our days will be shorter by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to preliminary calculations by scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"This is an esoteric effect that physics says has to happen," notes David Kerridge, the British Geological Survey's head of natural hazards, who studies earthquakes. "It's interesting, but it has no particular consequence on anything."

View Slideshow


See details on the deadliest and strongest earthquakes world-wide.

Scientists have long noted that just about any event that shifts a large amount of mass from one part of the planet to another will have a tiny—and sometimes measurable—effect on the Earth's rotation. Such events include changes to ocean currents, big shifts in the atmosphere, earthquakes, and possibly even the creation of more and more reservoirs from the damming of rivers.

The 8.8-magnitude temblor that struck Chile on Saturday is one of the largest quakes in a century. It was the result of an ocean tectonic plate—a shard of the earth's crust—sliding under the South American plate; over time, the two became locked together. When the pent-up energy overcame the forces of friction and the South American plate sprang upward, it unleashed a huge amount of energy in the form of the quake.

The planet was jolted to its roots. A chunk of the Earth's mass was redistributed vertically, which caused the planet's figure axis—on which the Earth's mass is balanced—to move by about three inches, according to calculations by NASA scientist Richard Gross. The net effect of that mass redistribution made the earth spin slightly faster, just as a figure skater speeds up when she pulls in her arms.

"It's important for us to know how the earth's rotation changes," said Dr. Gross, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It helps us figure out where a spacecraft is and to navigate it for a precise pinpoint landing" on Mars, the moon or another planet. Dr. Gross and his colleagues had conducted a similar analysis following the even bigger 9.1-magnitude quake in Indonesia. They found that the 2004 temblor decreased the length of a day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the North Pole by a few centimeters.

For a long time, earthquakes have been gradually changing the shape of the earth as well. Calculations suggested that the earth's oblateness—the way it is flat on top and bulges at the equator—had decreased by a tiny amount following the Indonesian earthquake. In other words, the world is getting slightly rounder.

Dr. Gross said that though the Chilean quake was less powerful than the 2004 Indonesia temblor, it likely changed the position of the figure axis a bit more. (The planet's figure axis is separate from the north-south axis; they are about 33 feet apart.)

The vertical redistribution of mass caused by the Chilean quake had a slightly greater impact in shifting the figure axis because the quake happened near the mid-latitudes, NASA concludes. Plus, the fault in Chile dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle, which again has a greater effect on shifting the figure axis.

The Haiti quake, by contrast, didn't make the Earth wobble in quite the same way, according to Dr. Kerridge. The Haiti quake was caused by one tectonic plate sliding past another, not above or under it. "There was almost no vertical movement there when the quake happened, so you wouldn't expect the same effect," says Dr. Kerridge.

Terremoto

Earthquake in Chile. Found this graphic on the website if London's Daily Telegraph.

Big, Bad Machine

Channing Johnson for The Wall Street Journal - This piece of Vammas snow removal equipment can plow, brush and blow snow off runways, eliminating the need for multiple pieces of equipment. Crews began coordinating early for a snow storm at Logan International Airport on Wednesday in Boston, Mass.

Vammas Snow Removal

* THE MIDDLE SEAT
* FEBRUARY 11, 2010

Big, Bad Machine in Boston Keeps Runways Clear at Logan

If you want to keep an airport open through a massive snow storm, you better get a mighty big shovel. And that's what Boston's Logan Airport has.

Logan, which was spared heavy snow Wednesday, hasn't officially closed the airport since the Blizzard of '78, thanks in part to a massive snow mover called Vammas.

Manufactured in Finland and used by only a couple of airports in North America, the 68-foot-long machine has a huge blade on the front for plowing, a giant sweeper brush in its midsection and a blower in its tail that spits out air at 451 miles per hour. A staggered line of 10 Vammas machines can clean a runway down to bare pavement in about 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how heavy the snow is.

"It's a pretty unique piece of equipment," said Gary Tobin, director of facilities for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates Logan.

A double whammy of two major snow storms in one week buried much of the East Coast, closing airports, forcing cancellation of thousands of flights and disrupting the plans of hundreds of thousands of travelers. At many airports, the snow overwhelmed efforts to keep runways safe and open, and impassable roads meant neither workers nor travelers could get there. Like schools, airports simply closed down for entire days.

Most airports aren't equipped to handle several feet of snow at once. But Boston, which typically gets about four feet of snow each year, attacks the white stuff with a vengeance. "Snow removal is an art," said Thomas Kinton, chief executive of Massport. "No one airport is the same in fighting Mother Nature in the winter."

In recent years, airports have become better equipped at battling blizzards because of a de-icing chemical called potassium acetate (airports can't use salt because it's corrosive to airplanes) and because of improved plowing technology like the Vammas.

The Vammas rolls when runways get one-quarter inch of slush, one-half inch of wet snow or one inch of dry snow. Runways are closed when they have more than half an inch of slush or wet snow, two inches of dry snow or any report from a pilot describing braking action as "poor" or "nil." The Vammas machines clear it, and flights resume.

Each Vammas gets a nickname painted on the side, usually reflecting its assigned driver. Kevin Finn, the lead driver of the Vammas conga line, has named his the "Flying Finn." The Vammas, which Logan started putting in operation in 1998, operate by computer and a joy stick, and the long machine pivots so it can turn in tight radius, much like a hook-and-ladder fire truck.

"What the plow misses the broom gets. What the broom misses the blower gets," Mr. Finn said.

Logan has a special vehicle to measure the friction on the surface of a runway—key for planes to be able to brake without skidding. Airport managers patrol the field during storms and monitor pilot reports of braking trouble. Electricians follow plows and fix any runway lights that get broken.

Sometimes, officials take airline pilots out to runways in cars to let them stand on the surface and see whether it is slippery. Portable snow melters are positioned over storm drains and snow is dumped into giant vats to be melted so it doesn't stack up in terminal areas and block gates.The airport tries to keep two runways and associated taxiways open during storms, but when snow is coming down hard, crews focus on keeping one runway open.

"Snow is within our control since we've had the Vammas," said Ed Freni, Massport's aviation director. "Even with what Washington had to deal with, we're equipped for one-runway operation."

Airports actually compete every year for a snow-removal award sponsored by an airport trade association. Airlines and air-traffic controllers vote, and Logan has won the award two of the past four years.

Though safety is airlines' first concern, passenger bookings play a role in deciding whether to cancel flights. This past week was lightly booked, making it easier to cancel flights and reaccommodate customers. But passenger loads will be heavy in Boston beginning Thursday because of a school-vacation period. To compensate for cancellations Wednesday, several airlines planned to fly extra trips into and out of Boston on Thursday. after thinning out schedules Wednesday

At a planning meeting with airline-station managers Wednesday morning, Mr. Freni had airport officials run through plans for the day, then polled airlines on how many flights they planned to cancel, how many planes would be on the ground overnight and other contingencies. They reviewed plans for helping airlines get people off planes that sit for long periods.

The forecast for the airport was for heavy, wet snow—the most difficult to move. That, coupled with high winds, had officials concerned. But because of Logan's snow prowess, most airlines planned to operate at least two flights an hour into the afternoon at the forecasted peak of the storm, and bring in enough planes late in the day to have a full flight schedule Thursday morning. "Keep communicating with us," Mr. Freni said at the end of the meeting, "and good luck."

Chatter of Monkeys

January 12, 2010
Deciphering the Chatter of Monkeys
By NICHOLAS WADE

Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him.

That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild.

The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T.

But with a few exceptions, teaching animals human language has proved to be a dead end. They should speak, perhaps, but they do not. They can communicate very expressively — think how definitely dogs can make their desires known — but they do not link symbolic sounds together in sentences or have anything close to language.

Better insights have come from listening to the sounds made by animals in the wild. Vervet monkeys were found in 1980 to have specific alarm calls for their most serious predators. If the calls were recorded and played back to them, the monkeys would respond appropriately. They jumped into bushes on hearing the leopard call, scanned the ground at the snake call, and looked up when played the eagle call.

It is tempting to think of the vervet calls as words for “leopard,” “snake” or “eagle,” but that is not really so. The vervets do not combine the calls with other sounds to make new meanings. They do not modulate them, so far as is known, to convey that a leopard is 10, or 100, feet away. Their alarm calls seem less like words and more like a person saying “Ouch!” — a vocal representation of an inner mental state rather than an attempt to convey exact information.

But the calls do have specific meaning, which is a start. And the biologists who analyzed the vervet calls, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania, detected another significant element in primates’ communication when they moved on to study baboons. Baboons are very sensitive to who stands where in their society’s hierarchy. If played a recording of a superior baboon threatening an inferior, and the latter screaming in terror, baboons will pay no attention — this is business as usual in baboon affairs. But when researchers concoct a recording in which an inferior’s threat grunt precedes a superior’s scream, baboons will look in amazement toward the loudspeaker broadcasting this apparent revolution in their social order.

Baboons evidently recognize the order in which two sounds are heard, and attach different meanings to each sequence. They and other species thus seem much closer to people in their understanding of sound sequences than in their production of them. “The ability to think in sentences does not lead them to speak in sentences,” Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney wrote in their book “Baboon Metaphysics.”

Some species may be able to produce sounds in ways that are a step or two closer to human language. Dr. Zuberbühler reported last month that Campbell’s monkeys, which live in the forests of the Ivory Coast, can vary individual calls by adding suffixes, just as a speaker of English changes a verb’s present tense to past by adding an “-ed.”

The Campbell’s monkeys give a “krak” alarm call when they see a leopard. But adding an “-oo” changes it to a generic warning of predators. One context for the krak-oo sound is when they hear the leopard alarm calls of another species, the Diana monkey. The Campbell’s monkeys would evidently make good reporters since they distinguish between leopards they have observed directly (krak) and those they have heard others observe (krak-oo).

Even more remarkably, the Campbell’s monkeys can combine two calls to generate a third with a different meaning. The males have a “Boom boom” call, which means “I’m here, come to me.” When booms are followed by a series of krak-oos, the meaning is quite different, Dr. Zuberbühler says. The sequence means “Timber! Falling tree!”

Dr. Zuberbühler has observed a similar achievement among putty-nosed monkeys that combine their “pyow” call (warning of a leopard) with their “hack” call (warning of a crowned eagle) into a sequence that means “Let’s get out of here in a real hurry.”

Apes have larger brains than monkeys and might be expected to produce more calls. But if there is an elaborate code of chimpanzee communication, their human cousins have not yet cracked it. Chimps make a food call that seems to have a lot of variation, perhaps depending on the perceived quality of the food. How many different meanings can the call assume? “You would need the animals themselves to decide how many meaningful calls they can discriminate,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. Such a project, he estimates, could take a lifetime of research.

Monkeys and apes possess many of the faculties that underlie language. They hear and interpret sequences of sounds much like people do. They have good control over their vocal tract and could produce much the same range of sounds as humans. But they cannot bring it all together.

This is particularly surprising because language is so useful to a social species. Once the infrastructure of language is in place, as is almost the case with monkeys and apes, the faculty might be expected to develop very quickly by evolutionary standards. Yet monkeys have been around for 30 million years without saying a single sentence. Chimps, too, have nothing resembling language, though they shared a common ancestor with humans just five million years ago. What is it that has kept all other primates locked in the prison of their own thoughts?

Drs. Seyfarth and Cheney believe that one reason may be that they lack a “theory of mind”; the recognition that others have thoughts. Since a baboon does not know or worry about what another baboon knows, it has no urge to share its knowledge. Dr. Zuberbühler stresses an intention to communicate as the missing factor. Children from the youngest ages have a great desire to share information with others, even though they gain no immediate benefit in doing so. Not so with other primates.

“In principle, a chimp could produce all the sounds a human produces, but they don’t do so because there has been no evolutionary pressure in this direction,” Dr. Zuberbühler said. “There is nothing to talk about for a chimp because he has no interest in talking about it.” At some point in human evolution, on the other hand, people developed the desire to share thoughts, Dr. Zuberbühler notes. Luckily for them, all the underlying systems of perceiving and producing sounds were already in place as part of the primate heritage, and natural selection had only to find a way of connecting these systems with thought.

Yet it is this step that seems the most mysterious of all. Marc D. Hauser, an expert on animal communication at Harvard, sees the uninhibited interaction between different neural systems as critical to the development of language. “For whatever reason, maybe accident, our brains are promiscuous in a way that animal brains are not, and once this emerges it’s explosive,” he said.

In animal brains, by contrast, each neural system seems to be locked in place and cannot interact freely with others. “Chimps have tons to say but can’t say it,” Dr. Hauser said. Chimpanzees can read each other’s goals and intentions, and do lots of political strategizing, for which language would be very useful. But the neural systems that compute these complex social interactions have not been married to language.

Dr. Hauser is trying to find out whether animals can appreciate some of the critical aspects of language, even if they cannot produce it. He and Ansgar Endress reported last year that cotton-top tamarins can distinguish a word added in front of another word from the same word added at the end. This may seem like the syntactical ability to recognize a suffix or prefix, but Dr. Hauser thinks it is just the ability to recognize when one thing comes before another and has little to do with real syntax.

“I’m becoming pessimistic,” he said of the efforts to explore whether animals have a form of language. “I conclude that the methods we have are just impoverished and won’t get us to where we want to be as far as demonstrating anything like semantics or syntax.”

Yet, as is evident from Dr. Zuberbühler’s research, there are many seemingly meaningless sounds in the forest that convey information in ways perhaps akin to language.

volcán Tungurahua

El volcán Tungurahua, uno de los más activos de Ecuador, emanó en las últimas horas material incandescente durante su reactivación tras seis meses de calma | Ver nota

Mexico's worst drought in years

DRY STATE A farmer rode past a carcass in Tabasco State, which has lost about 7,000 animals.








The rainy season typically begins here in June. Rain falls almost daily in most of the country, irrigating the spring planting and filling reservoirs before the dry months. But this year, the first three months of the rainy season were dry. Officials warned that the reservoirs were falling to dangerously low levels.

The [Mexico] city government heavily subsidizes the cost of water, and Ramón Aguirre, the official in charge of the water supply, said last month that he would lobby the city assembly to drop the subsidy for large consumers. Households pay only 15 percent of what it costs to supply their water.

On the wealthy west side of Mexico City, green lawns and shiny cars are evidence of how much water households use. A study by the National Polytechnic Institute estimated that the city’s wealthy households consumed four to fives times as much water as poor households on the city’s east side. In many poor neighborhoods, the water supply has been cut off frequently, and many people start lining up at 4 a.m. to ask for water trucks to fill tanks in their houses.

The Cutzamala reservoir system was depleted this spring.

NYC braces for risk of higher seas

Sea level may rise faster near New York than at most other densely populated ports due to local effects of gravity, water density and ocean currents, according to four new forecasts of melting ice sheets. The forecasts are the work of international research teams that included the University of Toronto, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., Florida State University and the University of Bristol in the U.K., among others.

Slideshow

prompted by a possibility of floods from higher seas, some university-based marine researchers and civil engineers are debating whether New York ought to protect its low-lying financial district, port, power grid and subways with storm surge barriers like the mobile bulwarks that safeguard London, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and St. Petersburg, Russia.

While most of New York is above sea level, its subways, telecommunications cables, fiber-optics networks, plumbing and power mains aren't. "There is so much underground," says urban water management consultant Piet Dircke at Arcadis, one of four engineering firms that recently developed concepts for a storm surge barrier here. "The economic impact of flooding could be huge."

Indeed, some civil engineers argue the city already risks catastrophic storm flooding. "A storm surge is not really a global warming issue" for New York, says senior engineer Dennis Padron at Halcrow Inc., which helped design a 15-mile-long storm barrier in St. Petersburg. "It could happen tomorrow."

To be sure, the city that never sleeps is rarely dry even now. Every day, transit crews pump 14 million gallons of water from city subways. Authorities recently installed $400 million of more powerful pumps. Last year, they started installing higher sidewalk grates -- disguised as street art, bike racks and benches -- to help keep storm water away from subway rails.

I saw one of those grates, two, actually, on the south side of Hillside Avenue, between 183rd and 184th Streets; I went to a Guyanan-West Indian-Chinese restaurant for dinner (got curry chicken, which was superb, and roti, which was hot and great for mopping up the curry gravy). The food cost $8.05, and was superb, and quite a bargain for a filling meal.

In their efforts, Mr. Aggarwala and his colleagues have been guided by a panel of city-appointed climate experts from NASA and Columbia University, whose report predicts that by 2080 New York will have the climate Raleigh, N.C., has today. By their estimate, it will be about seven degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea level may be two feet higher, unless polar ice sheets do melt.

Balmy, and mild winter; too bad I won't be around to enjoy that.

But such forecasts can be overtaken by new data. "You have to continually update plans as the models get better and the knowledge gets better and the unknowns become known," Mr. Aggarwala says.

Generally, sea level today varies from place to place. The North Atlantic normally is two feet lower than the northern Pacific, because Atlantic sea water is colder, denser and saltier. This summer, weakened currents and persistent winds, for instance, caused sea level along the U.S. eastern seaboard to be two feet higher than normal, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week.

By taking such factors into account, researchers earlier this year calculated that melting Greenland glaciers could shift ocean currents enough to make sea level along New York's 570 miles of shoreline an additional 20 inches higher than seas elsewhere. "It will cause the sea level along the coastal region of the Northeast U.S. to rise faster," says climate modeler Aixue Hu at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Recommended Reading

At Florida State University, climate forecasters reported variations in rising seas in USA Model projections of rapid sea-level rise on the northeast coast of the United States in Nature Geoscience.

In Geophysical Research Letters, climate researchers estimated the impact of melting Greenland glaciers in Transient response of the MOC and climate to potential melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the 21st century.

At the University of Toronto, researchers estimated higher sea levels along the U.S. coast from Antarctica's melting ice sheets in The Sea-Level Fingerprint of West Antarctic Collapse, published in Science.

Researchers at the University of Bristol reported on especially high seas along the U.S. Pacific and Atlantic seaboards in Reassessment of the Potential Sea-Level Rise from a Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in Science.

At Columbia University, the Center for Climate Systems Research monitors hurricanes, sea level rise, and New York City.

The Urban Ocean Observatory at the Center for Maritime Systems at the Stevens Institute of Technology tracks ocean, weather, environmental, and vessel traffic conditions throughout the New York Harbor and New Jersey Coast regions.

The Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets shows rising seas world-wide under different climate change scenarios.

At Geology.com, maps show areas of New York and New Jersey that would be flooded at various stages of sea level rise.

African gems

Bridges Family - Campbell Bridges, pictured in 2006, lived in a tree house near his mine to avoid the local wildlife, from scorpions to lions


It all began, Campbell Bridges liked to say, the day a charging cape buffalo forced him to flee into a ravine. That was where he discovered a cache of small green garnets that turned out to be the making of his career.

Mr. Bridges went on to become the leading miner of tsavorite, the gemstone he first sighted in 1961 in Zimbabwe. A geologist and an African adventurer known for living in a tree house and setting a cobra to scare off intruders at his mine, Mr. Bridges was a legendary figure in the world of gemology.

Tsavorite is named for the Tsavo national parks.

To avoid the scorpions, army ants and other hazardous fauna including lions, Mr. Bridges took to living in tree houses, 25 feet off the ground. "They are safe and cool," he told a jewelry trade magazine in 2007. "And the views are spectacular."











blue-purple tanzanite.

Rescued

Jason Oglesbee strains to reach the drowning woman (Pic:AP)


















The woman battles to stay alive in the swirling river (Pic: AP)















Hero construction worker Jason grasps the woman's arm (Pic: AP)
















Construction crew saves woman from Des Moines River
Wednesday, July 1, 2009, 11:39 AM
By Matt Kelley

Members of a construction crew are being credited with saving a life Tuesday afternoon in downtown Des Moines. A small boat capsized on the Des Moines River, dumping a man and woman into the water.

The Des Moines Fire Rescue team responded and found the man's body downstream, but the woman, who was wearing a life jacket, was still alive and trapped in the swirling water below the dam.

The rescue boat couldn't go in and the woman was too weak to grab a line -- so a nearby construction crew sprang into action. A workman was suspended from a crane and lowered down a long cable to the woman. He grabbed her and then the crane swung her into the rescue boat nearby. She's was last reported in stable condition.

The woman's husband was also in the boat and drowned before rescuers could get to him. The two have not been identified.
***************************************************************
Hero construction worker plucks woman from swirling river - dramatic pictures



This is the dramatic moment a hero construction worker rescued a drowning woman from a swirling river.

Jason Oglesbee dangles from a crane with his arm outstretched to reach the terrified woman who’s boat overturned near a dam on the Des Moines River in Iowa, America.

She was pulled to safety but her husband, who was with her when the boat overturned yesterday, tragically drowned.



“I saw the boat drift down, and he started it up and he hit the bridge base,' construction worker Joe Lowe told local media.

“Then he tried to wrap it up with an anchor or line and then I heard him holler at his wife, put your life jacket on. He didn't have one on.”

The lifejacket kept the woman afloat in the fierce river for more than an hour as Jason Oglesbee battled to reach her.



Des Moines police Sgt. Joe Gonzalez said the workers saw the woman floating in a boil and they tried to move a crane over to her.

Rare frog caught on film

Video of frog. BBC story.

A rare type of frog has been filmed for the first time by scientists.

The purple frog was only discovered in 2003 in the Western Ghats, in India.

The chubby amphibian spends most of its time buried underground, surfacing only to breed during the monsoon.

Video courtesy of S. D. Biju and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL)

Diamonds linked to quick cooling eons ago

Scientists found microscopic diamonds in the black layer of rock at Murray Springs in Arizona.

researchers are reporting that the abrupt cooling — which took place about 12,900 years ago, just as the planet was emerging from an ice age — may have been caused by one or more meteors that slammed into North America.

That could explain the extinction of mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and maybe even the first human inhabitants of the Americas, the scientists report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

The hypothesis has been regarded skeptically, but its advocates now report perhaps more convincing residue of impact: a thin layer of microscopic diamonds found in rocks across America and in Europe.

Among Dolphins, Tool-Using Handymen Are Women

A wonder. Dolphins using tools.
One of the few male spongers with a bright orange sponge.












Other forms of animal ingenuity have been observed in sea otters, who use rocks to open shells.









Chimpanzees use spears to hunt.

Angel Island scorched

The island is in SF Bay. Read about it in a column entitled Rushing to see the apocalypse in Market Watch website.

As I traveled home Monday evening before sunset, and witnessed the charred remains of more than half of Angel Island, I wondered how many years or decades it might take for the island to be what it once was. Yet the next day's paper quoted experts saying that the grass will begin growing with the rains this winter and that by the spring it should be largely back to normal. One guy said it will look like a golf course before the end of the year.

And just as growth will return to Angel Island much sooner than its smoldering ruins suggest today, our economy and way of life will rebound long before we can possibly imagine right now as we stand before the flames.

Hurricane Ike

Ike's moving deep into the Gulf, and Houston is under threat. Gov. Rick Perry today urged coastal residents in Hurricane Ike's path to evacuate immediately, describing it as a storm that could swamp houses in Galveston and other areas to at least their eaves. That's from a Houston Chronicle piece.

Its progress is something to behold.

Hannah leaving the Northeast, Ike approaching Cuba.

Ike over western Cuba










Ike past the Florida Keys









Ike inside the Gulf










Ike south of Mississippi












Ike south of Louisiana












Barreling toward the coast








Where will Ike hit?











Sept 12 11.45UTC

13 Sept 1.45 UTC (20.45 EDT)













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9-13 19.45 UTC (14.45 EDT)














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14 Sept 3.45 UTC (22.45 EDT)

Hurricane Ike now ...

as of 19.15 UTC (2.15pm EDT)

Hurricane Iks is now...

Approaching the US coast.

Hurricna Ike aims for Texas

Picture is as of 8.15am EDT.

Hurricane Ike rumbles on

Ike is in the Gulf of Mexico. This picture is as of 1.15 UTC (8.15pm EDT).