Gusts up to 80 mph as well as storm surge will test towns
A rapidly intensifying storm was approaching the west coast of Alaska on Tuesday and could become "one of the worst on record" for the region, the National Weather Service said in an alert.

The alert, issued by the NWS in Fairbanks, said the "extremely dangerous" storm would lash coastal areas from Tuesday night into Wednesday. It was expected to be just west of the Bering Strait by Tuesday night and then move into the southern Chukchi Sea on Wednesday.

The storm will likely be "life-threatening ... one of the worst on record," the service said.

"Essentially the entire west coast of Alaska is going to see blizzard and winter conditions: heavy snow, poor visibility, high winds," Bob Fischer, lead NWS forecaster in Alaska, told alaskadispatch.com.

Some areas of Oklahoma experienced hail and even tornadoes Monday as severe weather blanketed the region. A number of storm chasers were out capturing video of the tornadoes as they touched down and a number of videos have already been posted of the twisters.

The submarine volcanic eruption that began in mid-October in the Canary Islands continued in early November 2011. The volcanic island of El Hierro sits on a tectonic hot spot in the Atlantic Ocean off of North Africa and Spain.

The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite acquired this natural-color image of El Hierro and a plume of volcanic material in the surrounding waters on November 2, 2011. The waters south of the island have been bubbling and fizzing with heat, sediment, bits of volcanic rock, and minerals for weeks, with the plume stretching tens of kilometers.

The eruption is believed to be venting about 50 to 100 meters below the water surface, and it is warming the waters by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, according to geologist and blogger Erik Klimetti. The temperature of erupting basalt can be as hot as 1100 to 1200 degrees C, he notes.

Vietnamese officials say some of the country's worst flooding in a decade has killed 88 people and left four others missing in the central and southern regions.

Central Quang Nam province disaster official Nguyen Minh Tuan says recent floods have killed eight people there, leaving another missing as large swaths of land remain submerged.

The government says two other people have drowned in central Vietnam and three more are missing.

Tuan said Tuesday that large parts of Hoi An ancient town, a UNESCO heritage site popular with tourists, were inundated, but that no landmarks were under threat of damage.

The death toll from Thailand's worst floods in half a century climbed above 500, as advancing pools of polluted black water threatened Bangkok's subway system Monday and new evacuations were ordered in the sprawling capital.

The latest district added to the government's evacuation list late Sunday was Chatuchak, home to a large public park and an outdoor shopping zone that is a major tourist attraction. The Chatuchak Weekend Market was open but missing many vendors and customers Sunday as floodwaters poured past the market's eastern edge.

So far, Bangkok Gov. Sukhumbhand Paribatra has ordered evacuations in 11 of Bangkok's 50 districts, and partial evacuations apply in seven more.

The evacuations are not mandatory, and most people are staying to protect homes and businesses. But the orders illustrate how far flooding has progressed into the city and how powerless the government has been to stop it.

Chatuchak, just a few miles (kilometers) north of Bangkok's still-unaffected central business zone, is home to the government's national emergency flood relief headquarters. It is housed in the Energy Ministry - a building now surrounded by water.

Alaska is facing a life threatening winter storm with near hurricane force winds, more than a foot of snow and severe coastal flooding, the National Weather Service says.

"This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening storm which will be one of the worst on record over the Bering Sea and the west coast," NWS forecasters said in a bulletin Monday afternoon.

The storm was about 600 miles southwest of Shemya in the far western Aleutian Islands on Monday afternoon and was expected to move over the Bering Sea toward Alaska's west coast on Tuesday.

A 6.9 magnitude earthquake rattled the sea-floor just northeast of Taiwan. The earthquake was deep- 209.5 km or erupted 130.2 miles below the surface. The epicenter of the earthquake was 497 km (309 miles) ENE from T'ai-Pei, Taiwan and 1140 km (708 miles) S (186°) from Seoul, South Korea. A low tsunami alert was issued but is not expected to be a threat to the mainland.

A 4.7 magnitude earthquake struck 9 km (5 miles) from Prague, 10 km from Sparks and about 71 km (44 miles) from Oklahoma City. It is the strongest tremor to strike the state since the 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck over the weekend. Geologists still have no explanation for why such intense earthquakes are rattling the state.

The death toll from Thailand's worst floods in decades jumped above 500 on Sunday as the seemingly unstoppable waters crept deeper into Bangkok, swamping main roads and threatening the city centre.

The government said the disaster has now killed 506 people nationwide -- an increase of 60 from the figure reported a day earlier. So far no deaths in Bangkok have been reported in the official toll.

At least 20 percent of the capital is already submerged in floodwater contaminated by rubbish, dead animals and industrial waste, raising fears about outbreaks of disease in the densely populated metropolis of 12 million people.

The slow-moving water is now just a few kilometres (miles) away from business and tourist districts, and authorities are desperately seeking to push the floods through waterways in the east and west of the city and out to sea.

Amid mounting concern over the advancing waters, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Saturday said Bangkok's economic and political heartland risked only "minor and brief" flooding at most.

We started this series with a pretty 'out-there' topic: prophecy. But the Cassiopaean Experiment, while pretty 'out-there' to begin with (at least from the mainstream perspective), also deals with more 'down-to-earth' subject matter. Issues relating to more conventionally understood and practiced science (albeit with often unconventional interpretations) make up a large portion of the received data.

It's been my experience that people tend to forget that scientists are 'human' too, or more precisely, scientists can be just as willfully blind, self-serving, conformist, fearful and mendacious as anyone else. Some of them are even unabashed con men who falsify their data, or intellectual prostitutes who will produce the results they are paid to, whether they believe them or not. Just because it's been peer-reviewed, or written by a person with a string of letters after their name, doesn't mean it's true, or even remotely so. And if history tells us anything, it's that the history of science is a long history of wrong or incomplete ideas. So it's best to be skeptical whenever scientists speak in terms of absolutes with certainty, whenever they put the lid on testing alternate hypotheses. Chances are, they're simply deceiving themselves, and you.

Science is a work in progress. The theories that are taken for granted as being true may very well turn out to be completely bogus following the intervention of new discoveries and innovations. Sadly, space and weather science are two areas where innovation not only rarely occurs, it is actively hindered by scientists and politicians with vested interests in keeping old, inadequate theories at the forefront of popular and academic belief systems. Like many of the examples that will follow in subsequent installments of this series, the ones below are just a sample of ideas that at first glance may look just plain wrong. But new discoveries have been proving many outdated preconceptions to be just that.