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Message in a Bottle: From Florida to Ireland on the Gulf Stream

Laura Leigh Davidson
Scholastic.com
Mon, 11 Oct 2010 02:00 UTC
From Florida to Ireland_2
© Jim McMahon
The bottle traveled northeast along the Gulf Stream from Florida to Ireland.
Last week, 17-year-old Adam Flannery was walking along a pebble beach on Ireland's west coast when he saw a rubber-corked bottle with a note inside.

The message explained that the bottle was part of an experiment. It contained directions for anyone who found the bottle to contact Ethan Hall at Melbourne High School in Melbourne, Florida.

Adam and his father did as the message in the bottle asked and contacted Hall, a marine-science teacher.

Hall told Florida Today that he used to joke with students that their bottle might find them an Irish pen pal if they were lucky. But none of his students' bottles had ever traveled to another country in all the years he had been using the experiment.
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Sun

Animals Said to Have Spiritual Experiences

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:00 UTC
dog
© iStockPhoto
Spiritual experiences originate within primitive parts of the human brain, structures shared by animals, like dogs.
Ever have an out-of-body experience? Your dog may have too.

The Gist
  • A neurologist and other scientists argue animals are capable of having spiritual experiences.
  • The researchers hold that spiritual experiences originate within primitive parts of the human brain, structures shared by animals.
  • The challenge lies in proving what animals experience.
Animals (not just people) likely have spiritual experiences, according to a prominent neurologist who has analyzed the processes of spiritual sensation for over three decades.

Research suggests that spiritual experiences originate deep within primitive areas of the human brain -- areas shared by other animals with brain structures like our own.

The trick, of course, lies in proving animals' experiences.

"Since only humans are capable of language that can communicate the richness of spiritual experience, it is unlikely we will ever know with certainty what an animal subjectively experiences," Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky, told Discovery News.
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Bizarro Earth

US: 2 Injuries Reported After 2 Quakes Hit Arkansas


Associated Press
Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:12 UTC
Image
© USGS
The U.S. Geological Survey says two small earthquakes have struck two areas in Arkansas more than 150 miles apart. Local officials say no injuries or damages have been reported from either quake.

An estimated 3.8-magnitude quake shook the small town of Guy in Faulkner County at about 8:30 a.m. Monday. The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake happened 15 miles north-northeast of Conway and 40 miles north of Little Rock.

Another quake hit at almost the exact same time about 150 miles away in northeast Arkansas. The U.S. Geological Survey says the 3.9-magnitude earthquake was centered about 15 miles southeast of Paragould.
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Sherlock

New meat-eater emerges in Madagascar

Cian O'Luanaigh
New Scientist
Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:13 UTC
Image
© Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
This feisty cat-sized creature from Madagascar is the first new species of carnivorous mammal to be discovered in 24 years.

Durrell's vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) was found in the threatened Lac Alaotra wetlands in central eastern Madagascar in 2004. Zoologists took photos of it at the time, and have now confirmed it is a new species after comparing it to specimens of the closely related brown-tailed vontsira (Salanoia concolor).

Named in honour of the late conservationist Gerald Durrell, the new vontsira weighs just over half a kilogram and belongs to a family of carnivores - Eupleridae - only known in Madagascar. It is likely to be one of the most threatened carnivores as their Lac Alaotra wetland habitat becomes threatened by agricultural expansion, burning and invasive plants and fish.
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Bizarro Earth

One dead, thousands affected in Philippine floods


Terra Daily / Agence France-Presse
Sat, 09 Oct 2010 19:17 UTC
Image
© Unknown
One person has drowned and thousands of people have been affected by floods that have swamped a rain-soaked island in the central Philippines, police said Saturday.

Floodwaters rose south of Naujan lake on Mindoro island after heavy rain began falling in the area before dawn Friday, national police spokesman Senior Superintendent Agrimero Cruz told reporters.

In addition to the drowned person, an undetermined number of farm animals was also lost in floodwaters that reached an average of three feet (0.91 metres), he added.

Some 8,148 families were affected in the towns of Socorro and Pinamalayan, and police are on standby to conduct rescues or evacuations where necessary.
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Bulb

US physics professor: 'Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life'

James Delingpole
UK Telegraph
Sat, 09 Oct 2010 08:34 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Newton: "Fie on you, Hansen, Mann, Jones et al! You are not worthy of the name scientists! May the pox consume your shrivelled peterkins!"
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
It's so utterly damning that I'm going to run it in full without further comment. (H/T GWPF, Richard Brearley).

Comment: The reader may be interested in this article: Bilderbergers Warming To A New Idea?

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Bizarro Earth

Wall of Hungary sludge lake will fall

Pablo Gorondi
Associated Press
Sun, 10 Oct 2010 10:24 UTC
Image
© AP Photos/MTI, Lajos Nagy
Hungarian soldiers wearing protective gear are washed by water jets in Devecser, 164 kms southwest of Budapest, Hungary, Saturday Oct. 9, 2010. Five days ago more than 750,000 cubic meters of toxic sludge spilled out of a nearby reservoir flooding seven villages.
The wall of a reservoir filled with caustic red sludge will inevitably collapse and unleash a new deluge of red sludge that could flow about a half-mile (1 kilometer) to the north, a Hungarian official said Sunday.

That would flood parts of the town already hit by the industrial waste on Monday but stop short of the next town to the north.

Environmental State Secretary Zoltan Illes said recently discovered cracks on the northern wall of the reservoir at the alumina plant have temporarily stopped widening because of favorable weather conditions but will continue to expand, especially at night.

Disaster agency spokesman Tibor Dobson said engineers didn't detect any new cracks overnight, and the older cracks were being repaired, but that it was too soon to consider lowering the current state of alert. Protective walls were being built around the reservoir's damaged area to hold back any further spills and a 2,000-foot (620-meter) long dam was under construction to save the areas of the town of Kolontar not directly hit by Monday's disaster.
      Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Earthquake Experts See the 'Big One' Getting Bigger

Rong-Gong Lin II
Los Angeles Times
Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:07 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The "Big One" that has been forecast for the San Andreas fault could end up being bigger than earthquake experts previously thought.

Recent research showing that a section of the fault is long overdue for a major earthquake has some scientists saying the southern portion of the fault is capable of a magnitude 8.1 earthquake that could run 340 miles from Monterey County to the Salton Sea.

That's significantly stronger and longer than the southern San Andreas' last major rupture, in 1857. Such a temblor would cause much more damage because with a larger stretch of the fault rupturing, a larger area would be exposed to the quake and the shaking would last longer.

Whether such a quake would happen in our lifetime had been a subject of hot debate among scientists. That's because until recently, experts believed that a part of the southern San Andreas that runs through the Carrizo Plain 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles would remain dormant for at least another century.
      Read More...
Better Earth

Tune in to the live whale song network

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist
Sat, 09 Oct 2010 17:52 UTC
Image
© Reinhard Dirscherl/Visuals Unlimited/Getty
Do you do requests?
Just 2 minutes ago, a sperm whale swam by about 4 kilometres south of Cassis on the French Mediterranean coast. From my desk in London, I heard its whistle. Thanks to a new website, so can you.

The LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment) site offers a live feed to 10 hydrophones sprinkled around European waters, and one in Canada. Several more are scheduled to come soon in Canada and in Asia.

The network's primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea noise so that researchers can study the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins.

It is the brainchild of Michel André, a bioacoustician at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He and his colleagues have spent the past 10 years placing hydrophones on the seabed, on existing research platforms that monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, for instance, or detect neutrino particles from space.
      Read More...
Stop

Warming to misanthropy

Anthony Cox and Joanne Nova
ABC.net.au
Thu, 07 Oct 2010 07:12 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Misanthropy: n. Hatred or mistrust of humankind.

Man-made global warming theory [AGW] says that climate change is caused by the CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels. As the human population increases the inexorable need for energy from fossil fuels increases and therefore the level of AGW increases.

AGW is similar to the theory of Thomas Malthus, the 18th century clergyman who thought that human population would outstrip natural resources and that natural calamity would be visited on humankind through disease, starvation and pestilence. Malthus's theory could never have understood what a person like Norman Borlaug achieved in applying agricultural technology to farming to greatly increase food production or how modern medical technology has saved billions of people.
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