"Harriet has been a huge chunk of the Irwin family's life," Irwin said Saturday. "She is possibly one of the oldest living creatures on the planet and her passing today is not only a great loss for the world but a very sad day for my family. She was a grand old lady."

Senior veterinarian Jon Hanger told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday that Harriet died of heart failure.

Harriet was long reputed to have been one of three tortoises taken from the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin on his historic 1835 voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.

However, historical records, while suggestive, don't prove the claim. And some scientists have cast doubt on the story, with DNA tests confirming Harriet's age but showing she came from an island that Darwin never visited.

According to local legend, Harriet was just five years old and probably no bigger than a dinner plate when she was taken from the Galapagos to Britain.

The tortoise spent a few years in Britain before being moved to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens in Australia's tropical Queensland state in the mid-1800s. There she was mistaken for a male and nicknamed Harry, according to Australia Zoo, which later bought the 330-pound tortoise in 1987.

Harriet was believed to be the world's oldest living tortoise, and one of its oldest living creatures. Despite her longevity, however, Harriet is not the world's oldest known tortoise.

That title was awarded by the Guinness Book of World Records to Tui Malila, a Madagascar radiated tortoise that was presented to the royal family of Tonga by British explorer Captain James Cook in the 1770s. It died in 1965 at the ripe age of 188.

"There is a paucity of information about the prevalence of heartburn in other geographical regions, but symptoms of GERD are uncommon in non-Western populations," note Dr. Nicholas J. Talley from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and Dr. Paul Moayyedi from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario note in the report.

The exact cause of heartburn remains unknown but genetic factors are thought to be involved. Obesity and lifestyle factors, such as eating certain foods, drinking alcohol and smoking also appear to increase the risk that a person will develop GERD.

Some studies have shown that losing weight and elevating the head of the bed at night may relieve heartburn caused by GERD, although it's less clear whether avoiding spicy foods, carbonated beverages, coffee or that late night meal, which are often recommended, will relieve GERD-associated heartburn.

"Unfortunately, most patients do not respond to lifestyle advice and require further therapy," Talley and Moayyedi note. Their options, at the moment, include, medications that suppress acid, such as proton pump inhibitors, endoscopic therapy, and anti-reflux surgery.

Drug therapy looks to be "better than placebo," Talley and Moayyedi report, although "most patients need long-term treatment because the disease usually relapses."

Endoscopic therapy to treat GERD may entail the use of suturing devices, the application of radiofrequency energy to the lower esophagus, or the injection of bulking agents. The authors say these approaches are of "great interest," but so far their value is uncertain.

Surgery seems to work as well as proton pump inhibitor therapy "although there is a low operative mortality and morbidity," the authors note.

GERD is also a costly problem for Western societies. In the United States, the annual direct cost for managing the disease is estimated to be more than $9 billion dollars.

Engineers are hopeful the problem can be fixed, said Ed Campion, a NASA spokesman at Goddard Space Flight Center outside Baltimore, which is responsible for managing the Hubble.

A bad transistor could be causing the trouble, Campion said. If so, a backup could be used. Another suspicion is that some of the camera's memory was disturbed by a cosmic event. That could be fixed by reloading the memory.

"Both possibilities are things that can be resolved here on the ground," Campion said.

The loss of the camera has not shut down the telescope entirely, he said.

"The Advanced Camera for Surveys is regarded as sort of the workhorse for the telescope, but there are other instruments that are still working," Campion said.

The camera sent messages Monday indicating power supply voltages were above their upper limits and causing it to stop working.

"At this point, the ACS is in a safe configuration, and further analysis is ongoing," according to a statement by the Space Telescope Science Institute.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys consists of three electronic cameras and a complement of filters and dispersers that detect light from the ultraviolet to the near infrared.

It was installed on the Hubble during a servicing mission by the crew of the space shuttle Columbia. Development of the ACS was a joint operation among Johns Hopkins University, Goddard Space Flight Center, Ball Aerospace and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Hubble, launched in April 1990, needs new batteries and gyroscopes if it is to keep working beyond next year.

Her dog, a 6-month-old chow named Bear, was in the backyard of her home on Leaf Street in Brandywine Crossing in Manchester Township. Beyond the fence is a grassy hill, home to a bunch of groundhogs. She has no neighbors to the back of her house.

It was about 10 when she heard Bear yelping and barking and generally carrying on like a bird large enough to carry her away had landed just on the other side of the fence.

Grether went outside to see what the problem was. It sounded like something had frightened Bear, she said, something big, scary and weird.

Pat saw it as soon as she walked out the door. At first, she thought it was one of those big kites kids sometimes fly in the field. But it wasn't.

It was a bird.

A huge bird.

"It looked like a Cadillac," she said.

If that's so, it was the avian equivalent of an Escalade.

Huge doesn't do it justice.

It was black, except for white feathers on the tips of its wings and what appeared to be a white ring around its neck. It didn't look like any bird she knew. She knows what eagles look like, and it wasn't an eagle. She knows what vultures look like, and it wasn't that either. "Vultures have that turkey face," she said. "It didn't have a turkey face."

Most striking was the bird's size.

By her estimation, the bird had a wingspan of 18 to 20 feet.

Considering that California condors - the largest bird in North America, which, of course, is not native to this region - has a wingspan that approaches 10 feet, that's a lot of bird.

The huge bird perched in the field, just beyond her fence.

"I was shaking," Grether said. "I was scared to move. It takes a lot to scare me. Nothing scares me. But this did."

Bear, brave creature that he is, crouched behind her. "Bear was scared to death," she said. "And chows aren't scared of anything. They hunt lions."

Had it been a lion behind her house, she would have been all set and would have been able to sic Bear on it, or at least she wouldn't have been as upset as she was by the sight of a bird of prehistoric proportions. (It didn't appear prehistoric, Grether said.)

"If it had been a lion, I would have said, a lion, OK," she said. "But this ..."

She froze, and after what seemed like a long time, the bird took to wing and flew off toward the south, toward York.

Then, she went inside and called her husband, Glenn, to tell him that she wasn't crazy, but she had just seen a huge bird behind their house. Her husband didn't think she was crazy. If she said she saw it, she saw it. She and her husband later checked the Internet and couldn't find any birds that resembled the one she says she saw. She has her video camera charged and ready to go in her kitchen in case it comes back.

"I know it sounds crazy," she said. "But I'm not crazy. I know what I saw."

And it was huge bird, bigger than any bird native to these parts.

Francis Velazquez, a naturalist at York County's Nixon Park, said he'd never heard of a bird that big. He said it could have been an immature eagle or a vulture, but neither of them have wingspans of 18 to 20 feet. A full-grown eagle, he said, may reach 9 feet, but that's about as big as it gets. He said sometimes, particularly with people not familiar with birds, it's difficult to judge a bird's size and wingspan.

But 18 to 20 feet? "I don't know of anything that big," he said. "That's monster-sized."

It wasn't a monster, Grether said. It was a bird.

And she hopes someone else saw it.

"It's impossible for a bird that size to be around and nobody else see it," she said. "I just want to know if anybody else saw it."

She hopes it won't become the York County version of the Loch Ness Monster.

Which she doesn't believe in anyway.