Seattle, Washington - A vicious storm struck the Pacific Northwest and other western states at the start of the holiday travel season, dumping heavy snow on roads, knocking out power to tens of thousands of people and causing a cargo plane to overshoot its runway in Seattle.

At least three deaths in Washington state have been blamed on the storm, including a man struck and killed outside his car Monday night on snowy Interstate 5 in Tacoma. Washington State Patrol Trooper Brandy Kessler said it wasn't clear whether the man was chaining up his car or pushing it when he was hit.

A man's body was found along the Willamette River waterfront in Portland, Ore., on Tuesday. Police were trying to determine whether the death was weather related.

Blowing snow, slick roads and temperatures in the mid-20s turned the Monday evening commute in the Puget Sound region into an hours-long crawl - for those who made it home. Some commuters gave up after being stuck for five hours or more and returned to their offices, or just left their cars at the side of the road.

Looking down on the world - and especially those tail-wagging dimwits known as dogs - may seem like the natural order of things for cats.

No longer. For scientists yesterday claimed pet dogs are smarter than their feline counterparts.

The reason, they claim, is that dogs evolved bigger brains because friendly, social mammals need more grey matter than solitary, aloof ones.

The findings, which are bound to divide pet owners around the world, come from a study into the brain size of more than 500 species of living and fossilised mammals.

The researchers at Oxford University charted the evolution of mammal brains over the last 60million years - from a few million years after the dinosaurs became extinct to the modern day.

They discovered that there is a strong link between the size of a brain relative to an animal's body and how sociable that creature is.

Sociable mammals such as whales, dogs, dolphins and humans tend to have much larger brains compared to their bodies. Solitary species - such as tigers, domestic cats and rhinos - have less grey matter, the scientists found.

Date-Time
Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 09:01:06 UTC

Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 07:01:06 PM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location
6.021°S, 148.957°E

Depth
66.2 km (41.1 miles) set by location program

Region
NEW BRITAIN REGION, PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Distances
70 km (40 miles) WNW of Kandrian, New Britain, PNG

140 km (85 miles) WSW of Kimbe, New Britain, PNG

430 km (265 miles) NNE of PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea

2415 km (1500 miles) N of BRISBANE, Queensland, Australia

DOD tries to uncover secret of flying snakes

An unusual breed of Asian snakes can glide long distances in the air, and the Department of Defense is funding research at Virginia Tech to find out why.

Most animals that glide do so with fixed wings or a wing-like part. But not the "flying snakes" of Southeast Asia, India and southern China - at least five members of the genus Chrysopelea.

As video of the reptiles show, they undulate from side to side, in almost an air-slithering, to create an aerodynamic system. It allows them to travel from the top of the biggest trees in the region (almost 200 feet high) to a spot about 780 feet away from the tree's trunk.

Strong Earthquake Hits Near Eastern Taiwan Coast; No Damage Reported

Officials say a strong earthquake has struck near the eastern coast of Taiwan. No casualties or damage have been reported.

Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau says the earthquake hit Sunday evening and was centered 13 miles (22 kilometers) from Hualien county, and about 85 miles (135 kilometers) southeast of Taipei. It says the quake registered magnitude 6.1, while the U.S. Geological Survey measured it at 5.6.

Earthquakes frequently hit Taiwan but most are minor and cause little or no damage.

Britain is set to shiver in temperatures as low as minus ten this week with 'significant' snow falls hitting the country, the Met Office warn.

The last time the mercury plummeted this low was in March - at the summit of a Scottish mountain.

The north and the east of the country are in line for heavy snow, although forecasters say this could spread across Britain as we head to the weekend.

For the start of the week temperatures will be average, with daytime highs of seven or eight Celsius.

But as December nears this will fall, with a north easterly wind battering the coast and bringing showers with it.

Rural parts of the country could see overnight temperatures as low a -10C, said Met Office forecast Alex Fox.

He said: 'The last time temperatures reached that low was on the night of the 9th and 10th of March this year at the top of Braemar, a mountain in Scotland that's 1,000ft above sea level.

That gives us an idea of how cold things are going to get.

A moderate 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra today, the US Geological Survey(USGS) said, but there were no immediate reports of damage.

The quake hit at 4.55 am (7.55am AEDT today) 95 kilometres east-southeast of the city of Padangsidempuan in North Sumatra at a relatively deep 213km, USGS said.

Date-Time:
Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 19:06:35 UTC

Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 01:06:35 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
35.319°N, 92.303°W

Depth:
4.5 km (2.8 miles)

Region:
ARKANSAS

Distances:
3 km (2 miles) ESE (102°) from Guy, AR

10 km (6 miles) SW (228°) from Quitman, AR

11 km (7 miles) E (89°) from Twin Groves, AR

29 km (18 miles) NNE (28°) from Conway, AR

65 km (40 miles) N (2°) from Little Rock, AR

411 km (255 miles) SSW (207°) from St. Louis, MO

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has declared a state of emergency in 28 of the nation's 32 departments because of heavy rains and flooding that have affected some 1.2 million people.

He called on the international community to help and said the capacity of the Colombian government is overwhelmed.

Flooding and mudslides have killed at least 136 people, injured 205 and left 20 missing, the nation's Interior and Justice Ministry reported.

Emergency officials say the heavy rain has led to problems in 561 municipalities in the South American nation.

"Many have lost everything they had and the capacity of the government [to help them] has been overwhelmed. We're trying to find ways to get more resources and that's why we're calling on the business sector, the public in general, and the international community to help us because, unfortunately, the situation is getting worse," said Santos.

He declared the state of emergency after meeting Thursday with ministry officials. Santos made the announcement on national television, saying the declaration would help get aid to those who need it.

Last week, on the morning of Nov. 11, a tremor shook the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour. It was a minor geological event, but given the still fresh and haunting memories of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hammered Haiti on Jan. 12 and killed some 230,000 people - many of them in Carrefour - even that mild shudder caused public panic. The only reported injuries, in fact, were due to people scrambling to take cover.

To geologists, it's good to see Haitians on such heightened alert. Most scientists believe the western hemisphere's poorest country is hardly out of the seismic woods - and after studying the Haiti quake data for the past 10 months, they're more convinced than ever that Haitians can expect another major quake sooner rather than later. That's largely because they've found, according to a new study by 10 prominent geologists, that the lion's share of the January temblor occurred not along the fault line they originally suspected, known as the Enriquillo - Plantain Garden fault zone, but on a previously unknown fault. (Faults separate plates in the earth's crust, which cause quakes when stress makes them collide.) As a result, says Falk Amelung, a University of Miami geologist and one of the report's authors, "the prospects of another serious event may be rather worse than we first thought."

When Amelung and other geologists started poring over information from the earthquake's satellite-radar images last January, they were flummoxed by a variety of features. One was the vertical motion the quake exhibited - unusual because the Enriquillo, which runs across Haiti's southern peninsula just below Port-au-Prince, is a strike-slip fault, the kind that almost exclusively displays horizontal motion when it ruptures. At the same time, the quake's horizontal movement was partly north-south, another anomaly for a strike-slip fault. "Those were the two important smoking guns" that made scientists question their early assumptions about the quake, says Eric Calais, a Purdue University geologist who is in Haiti as a science adviser to the U.N. Development Program and is a lead author of the study, which was published last month in Nature Geoscience.(See more about the January earthquake that devastated Haiti.)