Flood waters entered over 100 villages in Bihar in the past 24 hours, forcing people to abandon their homes, as many rivers in the state rose and posed a threat to other villages too, officials said Thursday. All the inundated villages are in the flood-prone districts of Purnea, Araria, Kishanganj, Muzaffarpur and Katihar. "Flood waters entered more than 100 villages of Amaur block in Purnea, Forbesganj and Sikti in Araria and Kochadham in Kishanganj. In Muzaffarpur, dozens of villages were inundated in Aurai and Katra blocks," an official of the state disaster management department said.

The department officials told IANS that fear of floods is gripping villages again in Bihar, with water levels rising in several rivers following heavy rain in the state and in the catchment areas in neighbouring Nepal. "Water levels in the Mahananda, Bagmati, Kamla Balan, Gandak, Bodhi Gandak and Kosi rivers are showing rising trend over the past two days, threatening hundreds of villages in over half a dozen districts," the official said. An unconfirmed report said that at least eight people, including three schoolgirls, have drowned in the flood water.

Once a lush and healthy estuary, the Indian River Lagoon is now an enigmatic death trap. Running along 40 percent of Florida's Atlantic coast, the lagoon's brackish waters harbor a mysterious killer that has claimed the lives of hundreds of manatees, pelicans, and dolphins.

Nobody knows why.


In April, NOAA declared the spate of manatee deaths an Unusual Mortality Event, a designation granted when marine mammal deaths or strandings are significantly higher than normal, demand immediate attention, and are the result of a common but unknown cause. Soon, the bottlenose dolphin die-off may be given the same designation.

"We have to hope we can find the answer, because until we do, we don't know how we can help prevent it in the future," said Jan Landsberg, a research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Since last July, 51 dolphins, 111 manatees, and as many as 300 pelicans have perished in the lagoon. The deaths don't follow an obvious pattern: Manatees are dying so quickly that some still have food in their mouths, while the dolphins and pelicans appear to be starving to death.

Shane Dunstan shot video of an apparent tornado in the Mansfield/Storrs area on Wednesday afternoon.

The National Weather Service determined that an EF-1 tornado came through Andover and Coventry and into Mansfield, last night, but the storm that came through Tolland was a microburst.

This was the fourth tornado to hit Connecticut since last Monday.

The storm touched down in the area of East Street in Andover around 5:19 p.m., and caused damage for 11.2 miles, before diminishing around 5:51 p.m.

Winds of 90 miles per hour traveled north and east, into Coventry and the tornado ended near Clover Hill Road in Mansfield, according to the National Weather Service.

A mudslide in Colorado sweeps away a car on Wednesday after heavy rainfall caused flooding. The car is believed to have been empty at the time. The flooding shut down four miles of a motorway for nearly three hours. More than 100 people were evacuated from the area but there have been no reports of injuries

Source: ITN

Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano is keeping up its recent activity, emitting 39 exhalations of "low to moderate magnitude" over the last 24 hours, according to El Universal. Ash, gases and steam expelled out of the volcano's crater this morning reached well over a mile in the air, said Mexico's National Disaster Prevention Center (Cenapred) in a statement. The lava dome on "El Popo" - the mound of viscous magma which, being extruded from the crater's vent, dries and piles up not far from it - continued to swell. Overnight, glowing fragments expelled from the inside of the volcano could be seen on its slopes. El Universal wrote that one of the most significant emission of ash, steam and gas occurred today at 7:00 this morning. The volcano also registered tremors of "high and low frequency" as well as medium-sized micro-tremors occurring as a result of the movement of magma over the course of several hours.

"El Popo," one of several nicknames by which the Popocatépetl volcano is known by nearby residents, is located in Puebla state, about 43 miles southeast of Mexico City. With roughly 25 million people living in the region around the volcano, the Mexican Government is keeping an eye on this one. Ash from recent fits of activity in the past few weeks have reached as far as Milpa Alta, one of the southernmost boroughs of the capital. - Latin Times

The holy grail of energy storage may lie in chemical bonds, but a process for making this happen remains unknown. All of the Nobel Laureates who weighed in Wednesday on a chemical energy conversion panel agreed on this much.

"Replacement of liquid fossil fuels is still in far reach," said moderator Wolfgang Lubitz, director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy and Conversion. From there, the men focused on the major questions relating to solar power, endothermic reactions, rare metals, the ever-controversial nuclear energy and another ice age.

Solar energy

Gerhard Ertl (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2007) told the audience that nuclear fusion stood as the en vogue future energy source when he was studying in graduate school. "We are still waiting for solutions," he said. In a similar way, solar energy holds great promise, but the storage problem remains unsolved. Hartmut Michel (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1988), the photosynthesis expert of the group, reminded that even nature struggled to get the most out of photosynthesis. "In photosynthesis, only 40 percent of the sunlight -- energy-wise -- is absorbed by the plants," he said. Therefore, the chemists onstage at the 63rd Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting exhorted young researchers to search for a brand-new catalytic conversion process that could solve the sunshine enigma.

The typhoon, packing gusts of up to 227 kilometers (140 miles) per hour, was 960 kilometers east of the island's southernmost tip as of 0300 GMT, Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau said. Soulik is moving west-northwest towards Taiwan at about 22 kilometers per hour and could narrowly skip or make landfall in the north of the island sometime between late Friday and Saturday morning, the bureau said. "The public must heighten their vigilance as the typhoon will certainly bring strong winds and heavy rains," a weather forecaster told AFP. Authorities on Thursday evacuated 2,300 tourists from Green Island, off the southeastern city of Taitung, and issued a warning to ships sailing north and east off Taiwan to take special precaution. The Hong Kong Observatory has classified Soulik as a "super typhoon" on its website, while Taiwan's weather bureau listed it as a "strong typhoon."


On the Chinese mainland, meteorological authorities maintained an orange alert - the second-highest level - for Soulik on Thursday, Beijing's official Xinhua news agency reported. After hitting or passing Taiwan on Saturday Soulik is expected to head towards the coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Fujian, bringing "extremely strong" winds, it cited the National Meteorological Center as saying. In August 2009 Typhoon Morakot killed about 600 people in Taiwan, most of them buried in huge landslides in the south, in one of the worst natural disasters to lash the island in recent years. -Physics

Flooding in western China, the worst in 50 years for some areas, triggered a landslide Wednesday that buried about 30 people, trapped hundreds in a highway tunnel and destroyed a high-profile memorial to a devastating 2008 earthquake. Meanwhile, to the northeast, at least 12 workers were killed when a violent rainstorm caused the collapse of an unfinished coal mine workshop they were building, said a statement from the city government of Jinzhong, where the accident occurred. The accident Tuesday night came amid heavy rain and high winds across a swath of northern China, including the capital, Beijing. There was no immediate word on the chances of survival for the 30 or so people buried in the landslide in the city of Dujiangyan in Sichuan province, but rescue workers with search dogs rushed to the area, the official Xinhua News Agency said. State-run China Central Television said hundreds of people were trapped in a highway tunnel between Dujiangyan and Wenchuan - the epicenter of the earthquake five years ago that left 90,000 people dead or missing.

In last few years, Himachal Pradesh (HP) is witnessing increased frequency of earthquakes up to 5 magnitude on the Richter scale, which has led to the fear of bigger quakes hitting the state in future. While experts are claiming low intensity quakes release seismic energy to avoid bigger earthquakes, unplanned constructions, even on steep hills, has led to fear of widespread destruction if a high magnitude earthquake hits the state. In the past 90 years, 250 quakes of magnitude 4 and more than 60 with a reading of 5 on the Richter scale have rocked HP and adjoining states of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and Uttarakhand. On Tuesday, a low intensity earthquake of magnitude 5 had hit Kullu, Chamba and Lahaul-Spiti districts and its epicenter was between J&K and HP.

Last month, between June 4 and 6, four low intensity earthquakes had hit the state and epicenter of all the quakes was between Chamba and Lahaul-Spiti. The areas falling in districts Chamba, Kangra, Mandi, Kullu, Hamirpur and Bilaspur are very sensitive as they fall in the very high damage risk seismic zone (Zone V), whereas the rest of the areas falls in high damage risk zone (Zone IV). According to D D Sharma of Himachal Pradesh University, frequent occurrences of low intensity earthquakes are good because they help in releasing the seismic energy and does not allow accumulation of energy, which later results in earthquakes of bigger magnitude and intensity. "It is said that a big earthquake revisits after a gap of 50 years and in Kangra district for last 110 years no major earthquake has occurred.

Floods that caused billions of dollars in losses were the world's most expensive natural disasters so far this year, with central Europe being hit hardest, re-insurers Munich Re said on Tuesday. Altogether, natural catastrophes - also including earthquakes, tornadoes and heat waves - caused $45 billion in losses in the first half of 2013, well below the 10-year average of $85 billion. Insured losses worldwide totaled about $13 billion, said Munich Re. Inland flooding that affected parts of Europe, Asia, Canada and Australia caused about 47 percent of overall global losses and 45 percent of insured losses, said the leading reinsurance company based in Munich, Germany. The deadliest disaster out of 460 recorded "natural hazard events" worldwide was a series of flash floods in northern India and Nepal that killed more than 1,000 people in June after early and exceptionally heavy monsoon rains.
By far the most expensive natural disaster was the river flooding that hit southern and eastern Germany and neighboring countries in May and June, causing more than $16 billion in damage, most of it in Germany. "The frequency of flood events in Germany and central Europe has increased by a factor of two since 1980," said Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek. In some places, 400 liters of rain per square meter fell within a few days. With the ground already saturated from the rainiest spring in half a century, this led to rapid swelling of the Danube and Elbe river systems. Peter Hoeppe, head of Munich Re's Geo Risks Research unit, said in a statement that "it is evident that days with weather conditions that lead to such flooding are becoming more frequent."