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Grizzly cubs from deadly mauling were malnourished

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© AP Photo/Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks DepartmentThis image provided by the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department on Friday July 30, 2010, shows a captured grizzly sow believed to be responsible for the mauling death of one camper and injuring two others near Yellowstone National Park in Montana. The fate of the bear will be determined after DNA tests confirm whether it was responsible for the attacks.
Three grizzly bear cubs whose mother killed one person and mauled two others in a late-night attack at a Montana campground were malnourished and still in their winter coats.

The cubs have arrived at their new home at ZooMontana in Billings. Zoo executive director Jackie Worstell said Sunday the two female cubs and one male cub were underweight, possibly explaining their mother's unusually aggressive behavior.

"It may be an indication of what happened," Worstell said. "There's obvious signs of stress and malnourishment. Maybe (the sow) was desperate."

The year-old cubs each weighed only between 60 and 70 pounds, versus a normal range of 80 to 130 pounds. Wildlife officials are investigating what caused the cubs to be malnourished. Grizzlies are omnivores and eat everything from berries and ants to fish and elk.

Kevin Kammer, 48, of Grand Rapids, Mich., was killed and two people were seriously injured when the adult bear ripped into several tents Wednesday at the Soda Creek Campground near Cooke City, an old mining town just outside Yellowstone National Park.

Ambulance

Pakistan floods death toll rises to 1,100

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© KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex FeaturesThe death toll from the Pakistan floods is set to rise even further.
Access blocked to areas in Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa as authorities try to rescue 27,000 people trapped after heavy rains

The death toll from floods in north-west Pakistan has risen to 1,100 people, an official said today.

Adnan Khan, a disaster management official, said the toll could rise further, as there were areas in Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa province that rescue workers had not been able to access.

Authorities are struggling to save more than 27,000 people still trapped by flooding after heavy monsoon rains. Khan said more than 20,000 people had been rescued so far.

Efforts have been aided by an easing of the rains, but as flood waters recede authorities are seeing the full scale of the disaster.

"Aerial monitoring is being conducted, and it has shown that whole villages have washed away, animals have drowned and grain storages have washed away," said Latifur Rehman, a spokesman for the Provincial Disaster Management Authority. "The destruction is massive and devastating."

Phoenix

Record Heat Wave Fans Deadly Fires in Russia

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© Alex Aminev, Reuters
A security guard walks near grass, which was lit on fire by severe heat, at Khodynskoe pole aviation museum in Moscow July 29.
A record-breaking heat wave continued to send forest fires sweeping across parts of Russia today, destroying villages and leaving thousands homeless and up to 23 people dead, officials said.

More than 200,000 acres have been engulfed in the past few days, fueled by strong winds and a severe drought. Moscow's temperature hit 100 degrees on Thursday, the highest since measurements began 130 years ago. The city today faces severe thunderstorms.

In reaction to the anger expressed by villagers around the city of Nizhny Novgorod, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin canceled meetings in the capital and visited Verkhnava Vereva, some 300 miles east of Moscow.

Sun

71 Drown in Moscow During Record Heat Wave

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© Andrey Smirnov, AFP/Getty ImagesMoscow's record was broken several days after this report was made. Temperatures across Russia are now the warmest since records began 130 years ago.
The heat wave, which led to a record 71 drowning deaths Monday, will last another 10 days, the country's chief forecaster said.

Daily highs in European Russia will subside to between 30 and 33 degrees Celsius over the next two days before rebounding to 36 C or more by the end of weekend, Alexander Frolov, head of the Federal Meteorological Service, said Tuesday.

Temperatures have broken July records in dozens of cities in western Russia, including Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara, while Moscow may this weekend break the all-time record of 36.8 C set in August 1920.

Almost 300 people drowned in Russia last week as they sought to cool off in rivers, lakes and seas, with Monday's toll reaching a daily record of 71, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

Binoculars

Undersea River Discovered Flowing on Sea Bed

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© University of LeedsA 3-D radar image, using false colour, of the undersea river channel where it enters the Black Sea from the Bosphorus Strait.
Massive underwater rivers that flow along the bottom of the oceans have been discovered by scientists.

Researchers working in the Black Sea have found currents of water 350 times greater than the River Thames flowing along the sea bed, carving out channels much like a river on the land.

The undersea river, which is up to 115ft deep in places, even has rapids and waterfalls much like its terrestrial equivalents.

If found on land, scientists estimate it would be the world's sixth largest river in terms of the amount of water flowing through it.

The discovery could help explain how life manages to survive in the deep ocean far out to sea away from the nutrient rich waters that are found close to land, as the rivers carry sediment and nutrients with them.

Arrow Down

India: 23 Pilgrims Killed as Truck Falls into Gorge, Lashed by Torrential Rains, in Uttarakhand

Twenty-three pilgrims from Haryana were today killed when a truck in which they were travelling fell into a gorge in Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand, which has been lashed by torrential rains during the last two days.

The incident took place at Dabrani on Rishikesh-Gangotri national highway about 70 kms from here when the truck, which was on its on way to Gangotri, fell into the 150 meter-deep gorge killing 23 'Kanwarias'( shiv devotees), Uttarkashi District Magistrate Saurabh Jain told PTI.

20 bodies have been fished out by the police and ITBP personnel, he said, adding efforts are on to extricate three more bodies from the accident site.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Ramesh Pokhariyal Nishank has also ordered a magisterial probe into the incident.

Bizarro Earth

More than 800 dead in Pakistani floods

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© AP Photo/Mohammad SajjadA woman sits outside her house flooded by heavy monsoon rains in Peshawar, Pakistan on Friday, July 30, 2010. Boats and helicopters struggled to reach hundreds of thousands of villagers cut off by floods in northwest Pakistan on Friday as the government said it was the deadliest such disaster to hit the region since 1929.
Flooding in Pakistan has killed more than 800 people in a week, a government official said Saturday as rescuers struggled to reach marooned victims and some evacuees showed signs of fever, diarrhea and other waterborne diseases.

The flooding caused by record-breaking rainfalls caused massive destruction in the past week, especially in the northwest province, where officials said it was the worst deluge since 1929. The U.N. estimated Saturday that some 1 million people nationwide were affected by the disaster, though it didn't specify exactly what that meant.

The information minister for the northwest province, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said reports coming in from various districts across the northwest showed that more than 800 people had died due to the flooding. Many people remain missing.

Floodwaters were receding in the northwest, officials said, but fresh rains were expected to lash other parts of the country in the coming days.

Bizarro Earth

Study changes picture of U.S. quake hazards

The New Madrid Fault
© USGSNew Madrid's Violent Past
In the central and eastern U.S., earthquakes are felt over a broader area than comparable-size quakes in the western United States because of differences in geology. Although only of magnitude 6, the earthquake that occurred near Saint Louis in 1895 affected a larger area than the 1994 magnitude 6.7 Northridge, California, quake, which caused $40 billion in damage and economic losses and killed 67 people. A repeat of the 1895 earthquake could prove disastrous for the Midwest, where structures are not as earthquake resistant as those in California.
The risk of earthquakes in the U.S. Midwest may be more widespread than geologists have believed, but a "big one" may be less likely at Missouri's New Madrid fault, researchers said on Wednesday.

They found that rivers that swept away sediments at the end of the last ice age could have triggered a series of large earthquakes that began in 1811 in the New Madrid seismic zone.

This suggests that these fault segments are unlikely to fail again soon, but the same process could trigger earthquakes on nearby fault segments, they reported in the journal Nature.

When glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age between 16,000 and 10,000 years ago, monstrous rivers formed and washed away 40 feet of sediment.

Eric Calais of Purdue University in Indiana and colleagues developed a computer model that shows this could have caused the crust underneath to slowly lift and cause the magnitude 7 and greater quakes that shook the Missouri-Arkansas border region in 1811 and 1812, causing the Mississippi River to run backwards and ringing church bells as far away as Boston.

"Models indicate that fault segments that have already ruptured are unlikely to fail again soon, but stress changes from sediment unloading and previous earthquakes may eventually be sufficient to bring to failure other nearby segments that have not yet ruptured," Calais and colleagues wrote.

Areas such as Charleston, South Carolina, hit by a highly damaging quake in 1886, may be susceptible to more activity cased by the processes described by Calais, geophysicist Mark Zoback of Stanford University in California wrote in a commentary.

Scientists have a good understanding of earthquakes at major faults where one of the Earth's tectonic plates touches another one -- such as in California, Indonesia and Haiti.

Less well understood are intraplate faults -- faults in the middle of a plate -- like the New Madrid fault.

Igloo

Giant South Dakota hailstone breaks US records

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© AP Photo/National Weather ServiceThis photo taken July 24, 2010 provided by the NOAA National Weather Service shows a hailstone that was found by a ranch hand in Vivian, S.D., on June 23, 2010. The hailstone has set U.S records. It measured 8 inches in diameter and weighed 1 pound, 15 ounces. The previous record for diameter was 7 inches for a hailstone found in Aurora, Neb., in 2003. The previous record for weight was 1.67 pounds for a stone in Coffeyville, Kan., in 1970.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says a giant hailstone that fell in central South Dakota has broken U.S. records, even though the man who found it says it melted somewhat while waiting to be evaluated.

The NOAA's National Climate Extremes Committee says the hailstone found in the town of Vivian on July 23 measures 8 inches in diameter and weighs 1 pound, 15 ounces. The committee says the South Dakota ice chunk breaks records set by hailstones discovered in Nebraska and Kansas.

Ranch hand Leslie Scott says the hailstone was about 3 inches larger when he found it. Scott says he put it in the freezer but that he couldn't prevent some melting because of an hours-long power outage that followed the storm.

Camera

Northern lights and noctilucent clouds over Alberta, Canada

A high speed solar wind stream is buffeting Earth's magnetic field, and this is causing geomagnetic activity around the poles. Zoltan Kenwell of Edmonton, Alberta, witnessed this display on July 27th:

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© Zoltan Kenwell/InFocus Imagery Inc.
"It was a beautiful night on the Alberta prairies," says Kenwell. "Aurora activity was subtle, but definitely present. The full Thunder Moon was lighting up the canola fields and the arrival of a few noctilucent clouds just put the icing on the cake!"

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© Zoltan Kenwell/InFocus Imagery