If you cruise the Web you can find long-lost friends, high school sweethearts and ... far-traveling humpback whales.

With the help of Flickr, a photo-sharing site, Peter Stevick, a biologist at the College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor, Me., and colleagues have identified a whale that made an unprecedented journey, an epic 6,000 miles from Brazil to Madagascar, about 10 years ago. The whale's adventure is described in Biology Letters.

Carole Carlson, an author of the paper and a researcher at the College of the Atlantic, often checks Flickr for whale photos because humpbacks can be identified by their tails, which are as individual as fingerprints. An amateur photographer had taken a photo on a film camera in 2001 and only recently posted it. That photo matched one taken by researchers of a whale off the coast of Brazil in 1999.

An aerial photo taken months before a gigantic reservoir unleashed torrents of toxic sludge shows a faint red trail trickling through the container wall - part of a growing body of evidence that inspectors who gave the pit a clean bill of health may have missed warning signs.

Police were examining the photo Tuesday as part of an investigation into how part of the wall containing the 10 million cubic metres of caustic slurry could have given way without structural weaknesses being detected by a team of inspectors from the government environmental agency who inspected the container pond less then two weeks before the spill. The flood of red sludge killed eight people.

Hurricane Paula is gaining strength as it is heading towards Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

The hurricane intensified to a category-two storm with winds of up to 160km/h (100 mph), forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center said.

It has brought strong winds and heavy rain to north-east Honduras and damaged homes in Honduras, officials said.

The centre of the hurricane was expected to hit the Mexican coast early on Wednesday.

Hailstorm in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn New York.

Date-Time:
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 14:06:29 UTC

Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 09:06:29 AM at epicenter

Location:
35.206°N, 97.307°W

Depth:
5 km (3.1 miles) set by location program

Region:
OKLAHOMA

Distances:
10 km (10 miles) E of Norman, Oklahoma

35 km (20 miles) SSE of OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma

35 km (25 miles) WSW of Shawnee, Oklahoma

60 km (35 miles) ENE of Chickasha, Oklahoma

That shaking and loud noise experienced recently in Menominee County of Upper Michigan was indeed an earthquake, albeit a small one, according to a Michigan Tech researcher.

"The large crack and ridge were created most probably by a magnitude 1 or 2 earthquake," said Wayne Pennington, chair of geological and mining engineering and sciences, of the events that took place Monday, October 4.

The ridge and crack are 361 feet long, and the ridge is 4 to 5 feet high and 20 to 30 feet wide at its largest point, Pennington said after visiting the site. The crack is 2 feet wide and 4 to 5 feet deep at its largest point. Trees are tipped away from the crack at about 14 degrees on either side, showing that the surface is now tipping, having formed the ridge.

At least 10 people have been killed and another three were feared dead after they were buried in a landslide on Indonesia's Sulawesi island, police said Wednesday.

A steep part of a hill in the Morowali district of Central Sulawesi province collapsed on Tuesday and engulfed dozens of people working for a local palm oil company, local police chief Suhirman told AFP.

"The workers were taking a lunch break on the hill's slope when the incident happened," he said.

Heavy rains as well as excavation work to build an access road for the plantation company may have been partly to blame for the landslide, he said, adding that 18 people were also injured, most suffering broken bones.

Search and rescue teams were trying to locate the three missing people using heavy machinery but hopes were slim of finding them alive as they were buried in about five metres of earth, Suhirman said.

Pesticides produced by genetically modified (GM) corn have been found dissolved in streams in Indiana, raising new questions about whether GM foods could have impacts beyond immediate food safety, a new study reports.

Jennifer Tank of Indiana's University of Notre Dame and colleagues sampled 217 streams in a 400-square-mile (1,053-square-kilometer) area in northwestern Indiana, six months after the corn harvest. Of those streams, 28 had corn "detritus" (that would be husks, cobs, leaves, and so on for those playing along at home) containing the Cry1Ab protein, which is produced by so-called GM "Bt corn" to ward off the European corn borer, an invasive pest.

The researchers, whose work was published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found Cry1Ab protein in the water of another 50 of the 217 test stream sites, even though there were no corn husks in the water. However, all 50 of those streams were located within 1,640 feet (500 meters)--or roughly five football fields--from a cornfield.

You probably don't think about the nutrients in whale poop very often, but biologists from the University of Vermont and Harvard University actually made a huge contribution to many scientists and fisherman, sharing what they learned studying whale poop and which way it floats.

Did you know that increasing the population of whales and whale poop is essential to sea life, and that increasing their numbers will help commercial fisheries catch more fish, not less. How about knowing that whale waste can help temper the damage that humans have done to the environment as a whole?

While much is known about the eco-systems created by microbes, plankton, and fish, not much was known about the contributions of whales and other marine mammals. The whale biologists, Joe Roman and James McCarthy, studied areas of the North Atlantic where whales are more prevalent.

It was the buzz heard round the world. On Thursday, the front-page New York Times article titled, "Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery" was supposed to close the book on a four-year long case involving the unexplained death of millions of honey bees nationwide. Instead, it has only brought more confusion, unanswered questions, and anger in the science and beekeeping communities.

In 2006, once thriving bee colonies across America suddenly vanished, leaving behind empty beehives. The bodies of the bees were never found. Scientists soon gave a name to the mysterious phenomenon: colony collapse disorder (CCD)

From 2006 to 2009, over one-third of beekeepers reported colonies collapsing accompanied by a "lack of dead bees," according to a survey conducted by the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA).

In March 2007, James Doan, formerly the largest commercial beekeeper in New York, delivered an emotional testimony to the House Committee on Agriculture concerning the large-scale and mysterious loss of honey bee colonies, which he attributed to CCD.

"The economic impact on my operation is that it will cost me $200,000 to replace the honey bees that I have currently lost," Doan wrote in a letter. "If we cannot survive as a beekeeping industry here in this country, there will not be an agriculture community here in the U.S., period."

See, it's not just the beekeeping business that has something to worry about - the loss of honey bees affects all people. That is because honey bees pollinate food crops of all kinds.

They provide more than $15 billion in value to about 130 crops, including berries, nuts, fruits, and vegetables, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). And without honeybees to pollinate crops, our food supply is in danger.