In fact, variations in the Sun have been blamed for everything from freakish weather to Atlantic salmon catches and fluctuations in the stock market. Distilling the fact from the fiction is now a focus for scientists. "We have to learn to live with the Sun because it is changing all the time and those changes affect us," says Paal Brekke, Deputy SOHO Project Scientist. [...]

"This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," said Richard Willson, a researcher affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University's Earth Institute, New York. He is the lead author of the study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.

"Historical records of solar activity indicate that solar radiation has been increasing since the late 19th century. If a trend, comparable to the one found in this study, persisted throughout the 20th century, it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years," he said.

NASA's Earth Science Enterprise funded this research as part of its mission to understand and protect our home planet by studying the primary causes of climate variability, including trends in solar radiation that may be a factor in global climate change. [...]

Before dawn on Thursday, a tornado ripped through two counties in southwest Georgia, killing six people and injuring 200. The twister carved a quarter-mile swath of destruction near Camilla, a city of 5,700 residents 55 miles north of Tallahassee, and reportedly destroyed more than 50 homes.

On Valentine's Day 2000, the same Georgia community was struck by a deadly twister that killed 11 people and inflicted more than $12 million in damages across several counties. [...]

Floods are traditionally thought of as the most devastating of natural disasters, and this has led to policies of total flood prevention being attempted.

But this can be highly costly, and could get ever more so with the more frequent and widespread flooding that might occur as a result of global warming.

China spent more on flood defences between 1999 and 2003 than it had in 30 years previously.

But now they have changed their view, stating earlier this year that "total flood control is not possible".

And Vietnam's Rural and Agriculture Ministry has gone a step further - the country's official policy is now one of "living with floods".

SOHO staff say it is one of the most spectacular images the observatory has so far captured.

The prominences occur because of temperature differences in the Sun's surface layers. While the surface of the Sun is a relatively cool 5,800 degrees Kelvin, the corona is about two million K, temperatures closer to that of the core of the Sun. The corona gets even hotter in a flare. Astronomers are still trying to find out why the Sun's atmosphere gets so hot.

In recent years, the field has been behaving in ways not previously seen in the admittedly short time it has been monitored. Some researchers think it may presage a geomagnetic reversal when the north and south magnetic poles flip.

Such speculation takes place as the science-fiction movie The Core goes on release. In the film, the Earth's core stops rotating and our planet's magnetic sheath collapses. A manned mission is despatched to the centre of the Earth to "jumpstart" the planet.

Scientists admit there are things going on way beneath our feet that they do not understand, and which could have profound consequences for life on the surface.

Southeastern Florida was the latest region affected when four tornadoes were triggered by a line of severe thunderstorms moving across the state on Thursday (March 27). The hardest-hit area was Miami-Dade County, where a strong twister touched down in the Liberty City neighborhood, killing one resident and injuring at least nine others.

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This was the brightest burst yet detected by HETE and is in the top one percent of all bursts in terms of intrinsic brightness. Within seconds, HETE nailed down a location and subsequently relayed the coordinates to the astronomy community, allowing hundreds of scientists and amateur astronomers to join the observation, from Australia to Finland and across the ocean to America.

Observations continue to pour in as scientists attempt to unravel what caused the burst. The region is still too bright to determine which galaxy this burst came from. "This was our biggest one ever, and it didn't get away," said Dr. George Ricker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Mass., and principal investigator for the HETE mission.

With scores of observations now completed and more on the way, we should get a rather clear picture of what triggered this burst." Gamma ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe; likely caused by the death of a massive star, in which the core implodes to form a black hole. Bursts appear to occur randomly, and few last more than a minute, making them hard to study. more...

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"Our observation of GRB 020813 supports two of the most important features of the popular supra-nova model for gamma-ray bursts," said Butler. "An extremely massive star likely exploded less than two months prior to the gamma-ray burst, and the radiation from the gamma-ray burst was beamed into a narrow cone.

"An analysis of the data showed that the ions were moving away from the site of the gamma-ray burst at a tenth the speed of light, probably as part of a shell of matter ejected in the supernova explosion. The line features were observed to be sharply peaked, indicating that they were coming from a narrow region of the expanding shell. This implies that only a small fraction of the shell was illuminated by the gamma-ray burst, as would be expected if the burst was beamed into a narrow cone. The observed duration of the afterglow suggests a delay of about 60 days between the supernova and the gamma ray burst. more..

The hailstorm hit on Saturday afternoon in Zhejiang province and lasted for 10 minutes, said an official with the surname of Chen from the rescue section of the bureau of civil affairs in Wenling city. "Forty-two villages from two townships were stricken," he said. "The hailstones were the size of eggs, some up to 45mm big. "Our estimates are that 60 000 villagers were affected, of whom 30 000 were seriously affected."

Chen said 10 people were seriously hurt in the storm and "numerous people were slightly hurt". The China Daily put the injury toll at 105. Rescue workers were sent to the area with emergency rescue materials, including temporary shelters, said Chen. He added the damage bill was likely to reach 80 million yuan (about R75m).

Eleven of the deaths occurred overnight in and around Jackson, Tenn. As homeless families combed through rubble and sought shelter, officials warned of the possibility of more severe weather in the region.

THE DEATH TOLL had been 19 until Monday morning, when the Jackson-Madison County General Hospital in Tennessee confirmed 11 fatalities from a tornado that hit shortly before midnight.

Sixty-six people were treated for injuries and the hospital was expecting more victims from and around the city of 85,000. Much of Jackson had no power Monday and the hospital was operating off a generator.

"It's like downtown Baghdad", resident Joe Byrd said of the damage. With winds of at least 100 mph, the tornado tore a 65-mile path across west Tennessee.

The series of tornadoes that began midday Sunday knocked hundreds of homes off their foundations, uprooted trees, downed power lines and forced travelers at Kansas City's main airport to huddle in underground tunnels.

Mobil officials said that the donation offered "the last best hope" of saving the Attwater's prairie chicken, a speckled grouse whose high-stepping mating dance attracts avid bird watchers to the Texas plains each spring. Then an unusual role reversal took place.

The Conservancy, whose core mission is preserving land to protect species such as the prairie chicken, started acting like an oil company. The Conservancy sank a well under the bird's nesting ground. Drilling in sensitive areas is opposed as destructive by most environmentalists. But the Conservancy subscribes to an aggressive form of "compatible development," a pragmatic approach that seeks to accommodate the needs of business as well as environmentalism.

The Conservancy wanted the Texas City Prairie Preserve to be a national model to show that drilling can be accomplished without harming the environment. It would use the drilling profits to buy more habitat for the birds. That's not the way things worked out.

Five injuries were reported - one person was critical - after Friday night's twister tore up a southwest-to-northeast swath. It did not appear injuries would climb above a dozen, "which is unbelievable when you look at the pictures and that it went right across the metro," said Paul O'Leary, a spokesman for the Emergency Medical Services Authority.

There appears to be no end in sight for the series of storms that have battered the Midwest and South and killed 44 people. "We just don't have a down day; that's what's been very unusual," Rich Thompson, lead forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center of the National Weather Service, told The Associated Press. "It just doesn't stop." [...]

Nearly 300 tornadoes have occurred during the past week in the United States, according to the National Weather Service. States from Kansas to Georgia have suffered storm damage, injuries and deaths.

Fisheries biologists Ransom Myers and Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax analyzed nearly 50 years of data on predatory fish catches worldwide.

Their findings debunk the notion that oceans are picture perfect blue frontiers teaming with life. "What we've done is sliced the head off of the world's marine ecosystem and we don't know the consequences," said Myers.

These lonely sites feature ankle- high and meter-wide donuts of gravel; mazes, stripes, and polygonal networks of pebbles, sand, or ice; and sometimes ice crevasses in perfect geometric patterns. The enigmatic configurations, seemingly created without human influence, call to mind the mysterious phenomenon of crop circles, except that the puzzling structures are made of rocks or ice instead of trampled corn or wheat.

Scientists studying so-called patterned grounds have developed geological models for how some of these varied landforms have arisen from the influence of only soil, water, and sunlight. Although such simulations do a good job of reproducing Earth's variety of patterned ground, one of them may also go much farther: It could explain the hundreds of patterned regions that spacecraft have spied on the surface of Mars.

Flooding began to ebb late Thursday. It began Wednesday afternoon, when an earthen dike disintegrated about 30 miles upstream; two dams on the Dead River system failed, but two key dams held, saving the community from massive flooding, authorities said.

"This is the worst in anybody's memory that I've talked to," Fire Chief Tom Belt said Thursday afternoon as he peered over the ruins of a two-lane bridge.

"Miraculously, no one was hurt," he said.

Roots had no idea who the truck - which landed on his property amid a tornado outbreak - belonged to.

"Well, it was sitting out here for the past couple of days," Roots said Friday morning as he looked beyond the rubble that once was his house. "I guess someone came by and took it away."

The mysterious whereabouts of the pickup were also unknown Friday to other neighbors who were preoccupied with hauling and burning storm debris, including about four workers at the nearby Simpson's tree lot where nearly 500 planted Christmas trees were destroyed by the tornadoes.

While some individual property owners in South Pekin and Morton reported looting in the days following the storm, Tazewell County Chief Sheriff's Deputy Tom Siron said there have not been any official reports of stolen property.

"We haven't heard a thing," Siron said. "We've had one or two incidence(s) of people taking old broken two-by-fours, but that's been about it."

The sheriff's department continues to assist South Pekin police patrolling the areas hit hardest by the storm.

Siron said only two vehicles have been towed since the storm hit one week ago today, and that was done because the vehicles were blocking truck traffic on the town's east side. Siron was unaware of the abandoned green pickup truck along Route 29.

"We're running the path of the storm three to four times a day," Siron said.

In addition, some residents of South Pekin cannot find their cats. There are also reports of a horse that was found dead in a field northwest of South Pekin and a missing pet boa constrictor lingering somewhere in town.

The owner of the pet snake was unknown Friday. "A lot of things you hear are just rumors," Siron added.

About 150,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, said a relief official in the capital, Colombo. They are being housed in temples, schools and public buildings.

"The worst has happened, an entire village has been wiped out rising our death toll to more than 80," said chief administrator Malini Premaratne in Ratnapura district, 60 miles southeast of the capital, Colombo.

[...] Floods of this magnitude are rare in Sri Lanka, a small tropical island country off India's southern coast.

Last week, a cyclone hit Sri Lanka, blowing roofs off houses, uprooting trees and leaving some streets in the capital under three feet of water. Since then it has been raining heavily in central and southern parts of the country, caused by a depression in the Bay of Bengal...

About 150,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, said a relief official in the capital, Colombo. They are being housed in temples, schools and public buildings.

"The worst has happened, an entire village has been wiped out rising our death toll to more than 80," said chief administrator Malini Premaratne in Ratnapura district, 60 miles southeast of the capital, Colombo.

[...] Floods of this magnitude are rare in Sri Lanka, a small tropical island country off India's southern coast.

Last week, a cyclone hit Sri Lanka, blowing roofs off houses, uprooting trees and leaving some streets in the capital under three feet of water. Since then it has been raining heavily in central and southern parts of the country, caused by a depression in the Bay of Bengal...

The flood damage was severe in five districts in the south of the island, but homes had been submerged in western province too, a statement said Tuesday.

"The Ministry of Social Services has announced that over 177,000 families have been displaced and 237 persons were killed due to floods and landslides in a number of districts in the country," the government statement said.

An earlier trip in March included visits to six or seven different places. The tests have revealed the presence of both infrasound -- sound that is so low in frequency it can't be heard by the human ear -- and audible noise, said Jim Cowan, a senior consultant for Acentech and project manager for the Kokomo study.

Further array testing, used to determine the direction a sound is coming from, suggests the hum could be coming from several potential locations, Cowan said, though he declined to give further details.

"At this point, I'd like to be as nonspecific as possible, because we still have data to go through," Cowan said.

"Christie Whitman played a moderating role at times, but the facts are clear: the Bush EPA has made our water more polluted, our air dirtier and our communities more at risk from toxic dumps," said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth. "As unsatisfactory as her leadership was, evidently it was still too pro-environment for the Bush administration."...

Environmental groups have subsequently criticized Whitman's agency for dismantling an array of longstanding environmental laws. During the past two years, EPA has signed off on a rule allowing polluters to dump industrial waste into waterways and proposed a Clean Air Act change that would allow the nation's dirtiest power plants to expand. The agency has also cut the number of toxic cleanups in half and dramatically reduced its enforcement of pollution control laws, and is currently considering a Clean Water Act change that would remove 60 percent of streams from protection under the law.

Friends of the Earth pointed to these regulatory changes as part of a larger pattern, where administration officials use administrative procedures and budget cuts to surreptitiously weaken laws that enjoy broad public support. The group predicted that Whitman's replacement would continue using these tactics to pursue more environmental rollbacks.

A lingering drought, upstream diversions for irrigation and municipal uses, and a reduced snow pack in the mountains of New Mexico and Colorado are blamed for the intermittent dry conditions, said David Elkowitz, a spokesman for the remote park in the southwest corner of Texas. "We're hopeful we will get a rainy season this year," he said...

"Although the river has been dwindling for years, this is an event of historical proportions," Park Suprintendent Frank J. Deckert said recently. "In places, the river bed is now a series of stagnant pools separated by reaches of bone-dry gravel beds."

The hot spell for more than a week has seen temperatures shoot up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in parts of the state.

Officials have issued pamphlets to educate people on precautions against heat exhaustion and sunstrokes, such as staying inside and drinking plenty of water, Rosaiah said.

Some of the worst affected northern coastal districts earned a brief respite Friday after light showers, the meteorological office said.

The government has announced a payment of 10,000 rupees (214 dollars) to the victims' families.

Large parts of northern India are in the grip of intense heat, with sections of Andhra Pradesh along with the western states of Rajasthan and Gujarat experiencing their second straight summer of drought.

Five injuries were reported - one person was critical - after Friday night's twister tore up a southwest-to-northeast swath. It did not appear injuries would climb above a dozen, "which is unbelievable when you look at the pictures and that it went right across the metro," said Paul O'Leary, a spokesman for the Emergency Medical Services Authority.

The 24-year-old was walking her dog through a park in the northern city of Hamburg when "the birds swooped down on her and tried to peck at her head and neck," police said in their report on the incident.

When the woman returned to the park with police, the flock of some 20 crows were perched on a tree.

But as she approached, they again swarmed around her, strangely leaving the police officers and dog alone.

A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.

The researchers based their simulation on a real asteroid known to be on course for a close encounter with Earth eight centuries from now. Steven Ward, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCSC, and Erik Asphaug, an associate professor of Earth sciences, report their findings in the June issue of the Geophysical Journal International.
March 16, 2880, is the day the asteroid known as 1950 DA, a huge rock two-thirds of a mile in diameter, is due to swing so close to Earth it could slam into the Atlantic Ocean at 38,000 miles per hour. The probability of a direct hit is pretty small, but over the long timescales of Earth's history, asteroids this size and larger have periodically hammered the planet, sometimes with calamitous effects. The so-called K/T impact, for example, ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. [...]

..."Until we detect all the big ones and can predict their orbits, we could be struck without warning," said Asphaug. "With the ongoing search campaigns, we'll probably be able to sound the 'all clear' by 2030 for 90 percent of the impacts that could trigger a global catastrophe."

Rogue comets visiting the inner solar system for the first time, however, may never be detected very long in advance. Smaller asteroids that can still cause major tsunami damage may also go undetected.

The most impressive aspect of the event will be an annular, or ring eclipse, so named because the Moos disk will be too small to completely cover the Sus disk. The result is a ring of fire surrounding the black circle of the Moon. It's like a dull penny sitting atop a shiny nickel.

Annular eclipses can occur because the Moon's orbit around Earth is not quite a circle. When the Moon is closer to Earth than average, a total solar eclipse can occur. When it is farther than average, an annular eclipse can result. The annular eclipse will be visible across a sparsely populated swath of Earth from Scotland to the Canadian Arctic.

Ten fishermen remain missing while at least seven people have been injured since the storm hit the main northern island of Luzon on Sunday, the National Disaster Coordinating Council reported.

At least 8,357 people were displaced in northern provinces and damage to crops and infrastructure was estimated at more than 60 million pesos (US$1.1 million).

Scores of people suffering from dehydration and sunstroke were being treated at hospitals across Andhra Pradesh state, said Mr D.C. Roshaiah, the chief relief official in the state.

The official number of people dying from extreme heat jumped from 494 on Wednesday as more districts sent updates on casualties, he said.

It was not immediately clear whether there were more deaths on Wednesday and Thursday. Weather officials have said the heat was subsiding in many parts of the state.

Only three of the 23 districts in the state have not been affected. [...]

In the 1970s, Wickramasinghe and the late astronomer Fred Hoyle proposed the theory that life was originally brought to the barren Earth by comets. The comets, they said, shed organic molecules and alien microbes as they passed by the Earth and some of those became established once they hit the ground. Last week, Wickramasinghe wrote in the Lancet that the Sars virus, still causing havoc in south east Asia, might have dropped to Earth in such a way.

Not likely, says William Grant at the University of Leicester who studies microbes in extreme environments. The very act of tolerating space would make alien microbes, should there be any nearby, hopeless human pathogens. Suppose a clump of alien microbes were hurtling through space on a comet. The bacteria would only survive if evolution resulted in their adapting to the intensely cold, radiation-rich vacuum of space. The process itself might take millions of years. If they did survive, they would be so well adapted to living in space, they could never thrive on Earth, let alone have the necessary molecular machinery to invade human cells and cause disease, says Grant.

On Earth, new human viruses tend first to linger in animals with at least similar physiology to humans. Then, as the virus evolves to dodge the animal's immune system, a chance mutation might just make it capable of jumping species into a human. That evolutionary process would not take place if the virus was flying through space on a lump of rock.

"In the case of Sars, the virus needs a specific protein to bind to human cells and enable it to enter them. It's extremely complicated. The idea that it could just have evolved without being in a very similar environment, an animal, is nonsense," says Ian Jones, a virologist at the University of Reading. "The evolutionary pressure would never be there for the protein to form."

Scientists have long known that complex molecules can form in space, and meteorites discovered on Earth have been found to contain amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. But these are a far cry from living organisms, says Jack Cohen, a biologist at the University of Warwick and part-time 'alien creature designer' for science fiction writers. "Some scientists think that if you can get complex molecules, some of them might be diseases. They don't understand how complicated something has to be before it can be an effective disease," he says.

Wickramasinghe says his critics reject his theory because they are convinced life originated on Earth. If life came from elsewhere, then organisms on different planets would evolve together, he says, making the chance of alien microbes able to infect humans more likely. "The only way it works is that evolution is not restricted to Earth, but happens on a huge cosmic scale. Life on Earth is connected with life everywhere in the universe," he says.