But Dr Ayele, 37, and his colleagues wanted a scientific explanation. They knew the area was geologically unstable, but the number of earthquakes - 162 measuring more than four on the Richter scale in just two weeks - made them suspect that something extraordinary had happened deep underground.

They asked a team of British-based scientists with access to satellite technology for help. When the results came back it seemed as unlikely as birds flying out of the ground. Here in the Afar desert, one of the hottest and driest places on earth, the tribe had witnessed the birth of a new ocean. Images from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite showed that a huge rift, 37 miles long and up to eight metres (26ft) wide, had opened deep in the Earth's crust. The tear, the largest observed since the advent of satellite monitoring, was created by a violent lateral rush of molten rock, or magma, along the fault line separating the Nubian and Arabian tectonic plates.

Tim Wright, a geologist at the University of Leeds who interpreted the satellite results, was astonished by the images and what they pointed to.

"The process happening here is identical to that which created the Atlantic Ocean," said Dr Wright during a recent research expedition in Afar. "If this continues we believe parts of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti will sink low enough to allow water to flow in from the Red Sea."

The findings caused a stir in the scientific community. This year teams from the UK, France, Italy and the US mounted expeditions to Afar, a region described by the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger as a "veritable land of death".

From above you can see vast black tongues of lava lapping at the desert sands, and rust-coloured volcanos with their lids long blown off.

There are so many fissures and faults where the ground has opened and slipped that the Earth's skin looks like elephant hide.

The lunar geography reflects what lies beneath. Afar stands at the junction of three tectonic plates, which form the outer shell of the Earth and meet at unstable fault lines. The Nubian and Somali plates run along the Great Rift Valley, which spreads south from Afar. Branching out like a funnel to the north is the Arabian plate.

Tectonic plates across the globe are constantly shifting - though slowly, usually by a few centimetres a year - with the magma beneath the crust. The plates can collide, forcing the crust upwards and creating mountain ranges - as happened with the Himalayas. They can also slide past one another, as occurs along the San Andreas Fault, in California, a notorious earthquake zone.

The plates can also pull apart causing continents to break up and oceans to form. Early in this process, at the plate margins, the Earth's crust stretches and thins in the manner of toffee. Magma rises up, eventually cracking the crust and helping the plates drift apart. Between the fault lines the crust, now heavy with cooled magma, sinks to form a valley and then allows water from a nearby sea to rush in.

This is how the Atlantic was formed, separating Africa and Eurasia from the Americas. And this is what scientists believe is happening in Afar as the Arabian and Nubian plates pull apart. Parts of the region have already sunk to more than 100 metres below sea level, and only the highlands around the Danakil depression stop the Red Sea from rushing in.

Analysis of the new rift is providing an insight into the role of magma injection in cracking the Earth's crust and the pace at which continental break-up occurs. The last big "ocean spreading" occurred in Krafla, Iceland, in the mid 1970s, along the boundary of the North American and Eurasian plates that forms the Atlantic's mid-ocean ridge.

But it took nine years to achieve what has occurred in Afar in a few weeks.

"We are looking at a huge open-air laboratory here," said Gezahegn Yirgu, a geologist from Addis Ababa University, as he peered out of a military helicopter swooping low over the Afar region.

In recent months there has been more instability in Afar. After a series of earthquakes in June the rift widened by a further two metres. Hundreds of Afar nomads are still seeking refuge in a town 25 miles from the main fault zone, too afraid to go home. They may be wise; the scientists say there could be more violent earthquakes and eruptions.

The new sea is predicted to be formed within about a million years. The separation of the Nubian and Somali plates along the Great Rift Valley could take 10 times as long. But that will be even more dramatic - for then Africa will eventually lose its horn.

"Some people think that extreme natural phenomena happened only in historical times," said Cindy Ebinger, an American geologist leading the research in Afar. "But here we can see them happening right now."

The new strain, which virologists say may have become resistant to vaccines, was first isolated in Fujian province in March 2005, and has surfaced in several provinces in China since October 2005, and elsewhere in the South East Asian region, including Hong Kong, Laos Thailand and Malaysia.

"It is likely that this variant has already initiated a third wave of transmission throughout Southeast Asia and may spread further in Eurasia," according to three researchers who have published an article on the "Fujian-like virus" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific journal.

The researchers - University of Hong Kong virologists Guan Yi and Malik Peiris, and US-based Robert Webster - said that the controls now in place were probably "ineffective" in dealing with H5N1's evolutions. The scientists had collected bird faecal samples from poultry markets in six provinces from July 2005 to June 2006; about 1,300 of these samples tested positive for H5N1.

However, in other samples, collected from October 2005, they found that the Fujian strain had become predominant. A research team member said one reason for the predominance may be that it has remained immune to bird flu vaccines.

Because of this, babies who suffer from SIDS can suffocate on their own clothes or bedsheets, especially if they are sleeping on their tummies.

Scientists from the Boston Children's Hospital studied post-mortem samples from the brainstems of 31 infant victims of SIDS and compared them to 10 babies who had died of other causes.

TOO MANY RECEPTORS

The new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the cot-death babies examined had twice as many brain cells that manufacture serotonin compared to babies that died of other causes.

However, they had fewer receptors for the chemical.

Serotonin is a chemical that is best known for regulating mood but, in the brain stem, it is believed to help coordinate breathing, blood pressure and sensitivity to carbon dioxide by relaying messages from one brain cell to the next.

And it is this defect in the serotonin system that may explain why some babies die suddenly in their sleep.

Dr Hannah Kinney, one of the study's authors, explained that when babies sleep face down, or have their faces covered by bedding, they are thought to re-breathe carbon dioxide instead of fresh oxygen.

Nerve cells in the brain stem then react to the lack of oxygen and stimulates breathing and arousal centres in the brain to prevent suffocation.

'A normal baby will wake up, turn over, and start breathing faster when carbon dioxide levels rise,' Dr Kinney said.

But with a baby who suffers from SIDS, the defects in the serotonin system may impair the brain's ability to sense the build-up of carbon dioxide.

Hence, the baby is not roused from sleep and suffocates to death.

The study also showed that boys who died from cot death had significantly fewer serotonin receptors than girls, which would explain why male infants die from the condition twice as often as female infants.

The researchers added that the brain abnormalities likely develop during the early phases of foetal development.

SMOKING COULD BE CAUSE

Environmental factors such as smoking or alcohol use by the mother may negatively affect the development of the baby's brain stem.

However, they suspect that if the babies survive their first six months to a year after they are born, their brains should develop sufficiently to react normally to low oxygen levels.

Dr Kinney hopes that this discovery will help to reduce future incidences of SIDS.

'These findings provide evidence that sudden infant death syndrome is not a mystery but a disorder that we can investigate and some day may be able to identify and treat,' she said.

Abnormally warm weather, coupled with pollution and overfishing, have contributed to a rapid decline in large coral, Edmunds said during a talk at the University of the Virgin Islands.

Species such as the boulder star coral, which stretch several yards across, take hundreds of years to grow. Edmunds predicted the boulder star coral could be gone from much of the U.S. Virgin Islands in less than 50 years. In Jamaica, the species has almost been replaced by mustard hill coral, a smaller species unable to make large reefs, he said.

"The big guys are becoming rarer. The small guys are becoming more common," said Edmunds, who recently began projects near Tahiti and Taiwan, where he plans to compare Pacific data with that gathered in the U.S. Caribbean territory.

Mark Eakin, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch, said the coral study documents an even more widespread phenomenon.

"That's a general pattern we have seen in other places as well," Eakin said, referring to the Caribbean. "The remaining large coral, such as star coral, is dropping away" and the smaller coral is moving in.

A vital building block of marine life, coral grows and reproduce best at about 81.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the Caribbean, said Edmunds, who has studied Virgin Islands coral for two decades.

Edmunds said his research suggests coral in warmer water grows more slowly.

U.S. government scientists also warned for a second time this year on Tuesday that sea temperatures around Puerto Rico have exceeded healthy levels for coral, saying the fragile undersea life could become more susceptible to damage and disease during overheating.

Seas reached 85.3 degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures at which coral can be damaged if waters do not cool after a few weeks, Eakin said.

The U.S. atmospheric administration issued a similar warning in September, when seas reached 85.5 degrees Fahrenheit around the U.S. Virgin Islands and 85.1 degrees Fahrenheit in waters off Puerto Rico.

After hot summers, sea temperatures usually cool in late October, Eakin said in a telephone interview.

"We'd expect it to start cooling down soon," he said. "Hopefully we're right."

The government warning urges scuba-dive operators and underwater researchers in the U.S. Caribbean territories to look for coral damage and use caution around the fragile reefs, which are easily damaged by physical contact.

At the Coral Reef Task Force's biannual meeting in St. Thomas last week, top researchers backed an Australian study that said up to 60 percent of the worlds coral reefs could die by 2030.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered decreased activity in the frontal lobes, an area of the brain associated with being in control of one's self. This pioneering study, involving functional imaging of the brain while subjects were speaking in tongues, is in the November issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, the official publication of the International Society for Neuroimaging in Psychiatry.

Radiology investigators observed increased or decreased brain activity - by measuring regional cerebral blood flow with SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) imaging - while the subjects were speaking in tongues. They then compared the imaging to what happened to the brain while the subjects sang gospel music.

"We noticed a number of changes that occurred functionally in the brain," comments Principal Investigator Andrew Newberg, MD, Associate Professor of Radiology, Psychiatry, and Religious Studies, and Director for the Center for Spirituality and the Mind, at Penn. "Our finding of decreased activity in the frontal lobes during the practice of speaking in tongues is fascinating because these subjects truly believe that the spirit of God is moving through them and controlling them to speak. Our brain imaging research shows us that these subjects are not in control of the usual language centers during this activity, which is consistent with their description of a lack of intentional control while speaking in tongues."

Newberg went on to explain, "These findings could be interpreted as the subject's sense of self being taken over by something else. We, scientifically, assume it's being taken over by another part of the brain, but we couldn't see, in this imaging study, where this took place. We believe this is the first scientific imaging study evaluating changes in cerebral activity -- looking at what actually happens to the brain -- when someone is speaking in tongues. This study also showed a number of other changes in the brain, including those areas involved in emotions and establishing our sense of self."

Newberg concludes that the changes in the brain during speaking in tongues reflect a complex pattern of brain activity. Newberg suggests that since this is the first study to explore this, future studies will be needed to confirm these findings in an attempt to demystify this fascinating religious phenomenon.

This preliminary study, done only at Penn, examined five subjects in a laboratory setting. The study, set for publication in the November issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, can now be accessed on-line at http://www.sciencedirect.com. The article is titled, "The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow During Glossolalia: a Preliminary SPECT Study." Co-authors include: Nancy Wintering, Donna Morgan, and Mark Waldman.

PDF of the study and images available upon request.
Suggested caption: "From a new brain imaging study at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, SPECT scans were taken of subjects while worshiping versus speaking in tongues. The speaking in tongue images primarily show a decrease of brain activity in the frontal lobes, which is what normally makes us feel as if we're in control. There was also a decrease in activity in the left basal ganglia, which is involved with focusing attention and emotional responses. Finally, the thalamus activity increased during speaking in tongues which supports it is an active state of the brain."
Please courtesy images: "Courtesy: University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine."

Dr. Newberg is the director of the new Center for Spirituality and the Mind at PENN. To learn more, go on-line to: http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/radiology/CSM/index.html or email mindreligion@uphs.upenn.edu. Through the collaboration of distinguished scholars from the University of Pennsylvania, the interdisciplinary group works to promote future research and scholarly dialogue on the mind, religion and ethics.

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