Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster on a scale comparable with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The official death count after Cyclone Nargis stood at just under half that by 1300 GMT today, at around 22,500 people dead plus a further 41,000 missing.

But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken delta of the Irrawaddy river, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be double that.

"We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless," Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children, told The Times.

 Source : Times Online UK

More than 10,000 people were killed in a devastating cyclone that hit western Burma on Saturday, Foreign Minister Nyan Win has said on state TV.

He said his government was ready to accept international assistance. Aid shipments are now being prepared. Thousands of survivors of Cyclone Nargis are lacking shelter, drinking water, power and communications. The United States offered to increase aid offered if Burma agreed to allow a US team access to assess the situation.

First Lady Laura Bush, who takes a special interest in Burma, urged Burma to accept $250,000 (£126,000) already allocated for emergency aid, and said more would be available if the team was allowed into the country. She also accused the Burmese authorities of failing to give a "timely warning" about the approaching storm, after which five regions - home to 24 million people - have been declared disaster zones.

 Source : BBC UK

Oil futures blasted to a new record over $122 a barrel Tuesday, gaining momentum as investors bought on a forecast of much higher prices and on any news hinting at supply shortages. Retail gas prices edged lower, but appear poised to rise to new records of their own in coming weeks.

Oil prices have nearly doubled from about $62 a barrel a year ago, which Goldman sees as a sign that the world is in the midst of a "super spike" in oil prices. Analyst Arjun Murti said in a research note released Monday that prices would ultimately force demand to fall sharply.

 Source : Yahoo Biz

"The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10,000 with 3,000 missing," a Yangon-based diplomat told Reuters in Bangkok, summarizing a briefing from Foreign Minister Nyan Win. "It's a very serious toll."

The scale of the disaster from Saturday's devastating cyclone drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

 Source : Yahoo News

To misquote the opening credits of Star Wars, these spectacular images show interstellar car-crashes happening a long time ago, in a place that's far, far away. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, they capture various points in the collision process between two galaxies, which can take hundreds of millions of years to go from start to finish.

Galaxy mergers were more common in the early universe than they are now, and are thought to have been one of the principal driving forces for cosmic evolution, from the frenetic births of stars to their explosive deaths. Indeed, our own Milky Way galaxy is currently absorbing the smaller Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy, and will in turn be merged with our bigger neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy.

The interaction of two galaxies is driven by the tidal pull of gravity, which draws the massive objects together (though actual collisions between stars are rare, as most of a galaxy is empty space). The billions of stars in each galaxy move individually, so that the interweaving tidal forces produce intricate and varied effects as the galaxies gradually coalesce.

 Source : Independent UK

A face recognition system will scan faces and match them to biometric chips on passports. Photograph: Image Source/Getty

Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.

Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.

But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

 Source : Guardian UK

Scientists say they know far too little about Midwestern seismic zones like the one that rumbled to life under southern Illinois Friday morning, but some of what they do know is unnerving.

The fault zones beneath the Mississippi River Valley have produced some of the largest modern U.S. quakes east of the Rockies, a region covered with old buildings not built to withstand seismic activity.

And, when quakes happen, they're felt far and wide, their vibrations propagated over hundreds of miles of bedrock.

Friday's quake shook things up from Nebraska to Atlanta, rattling nerves but doing little damage and seriously hurting no one. It was a magnitude 5.2 temblor centered just outside West Salem in southeastern Illinois, a largely rural region of small towns that sit over the Wabash fault zone. The area has produced moderately strong quakes as recently as 2002.

But it hasn't been studied to nearly the degree of quake-prone areas west of the Rockies, particularly along the heavily scrutinized Pacific coast.

 Source : AP / Myway News

The magnitude 5.2 earthquake that rocked the Midwest on Friday was felt from Kansas to Georgia, and aftershocks could continue for months at this strange seismic zone at the nation's center and even trigger another big quake, a geophysicist said.

The quake occurred on a northern extension of the New Madrid fault, about 6 miles north of Mt. Carmel, Ill. The New Madrid fault was responsible for devastating quakes in the Mississippi Valley in 1811 and 1812. So the Friday quake and its aftershocks likely are raising the blood pressure of some residents and scientists. For decades, scientists have debated whether and when the underlying fault could generate another temblor of similar and deadly strength.

"I think we saw a window to this possibility today in the Wabash Valley," said geophysicist Allessandro Forte of the Université du Québec à Montréal, who has studied the region's seismicity. "It's to the north of the New Madrid seismic zone, but given the strength of crust, the stress can be distributed great distances. It's not clear if we could see something in the next few years or even next few months, I would say." The last earthquake in the region to approach the severity of Friday's temblor was a 5.0 magnitude quake that shook a nearby area in 2002, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

 Source: Live Science

Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology tracked changes in the average position and strength of jet streams using records compiled by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the National Centers for Environmental Protection, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The data included outputs from weather prediction models, conventional observations from weather balloons and surface instruments, and remote observations from satellites.

 Source : Science Daily

The blast from the 10-kiloton bomb — similar to the bomb dropped over Hiroshima during World War II — would kill up to one in 10 tourists visiting the Washington Monument and send shards of glass flying the length of the National Mall, in a scenario that has become increasingly likely to occur in a major U.S. city in recent years, panel members told a Senate committee yesterday.

"It's inevitable," said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, who has charted the potential explosion's effect in the District and testified before a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "I think it's wistful to think that it won't happen by 20 years."

The Senate committee has convened a series of hearings to examine the threat and effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on a U.S. city , as well as the needed response.

 Source : Washington Times

Their work shows that the size of the meteorite that likely plummeted to Earth at the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary 65 million years ago was four to six kilometers in diameter. The meteorite was the trigger, scientists believe, for the mass extinction of dinosaurs and other life forms.

François Paquay, a geologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), used variations (isotopes) of the rare element osmium in sediments at the ocean bottom to estimate the size of these meteorites. The results are published in this week's issue of the journal Science. When meteorites collide with Earth, they carry a different osmium isotope ratio than the levels normally seen throughout the oceans.

"The vaporization of meteorites carries a pulse of this rare element into the area where they landed," says Rodey Batiza of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research along with NSF's Division of Earth Sciences. "The osmium mixes throughout the ocean quickly. Records of these impact-induced changes in ocean chemistry are then preserved in deep-sea sediments."

 Source : Science Daily

A dramatic rise in the worldwide cost of food is provoking riots throughout the Third World where millions more of the world's most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages grow and cereal prices soar. It threatens to become the biggest crisis of the 21st century.

This week crowds of hungry demonstrators in Haiti stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Port-au-Prince, in protests over food prices. And a crisis gripped the Philippines as massive queues formed to buy rice from government stocks.

There have been riots in Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso and protests in Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt and Morocco. Mexico has had "tortilla riots" and, in Yemen, children have marched to draw attention to their hunger.

 Source : Independent UK

Analysis of chemical remains of the asteroid that can still be found in sediments under the sea shows the rock was about 2.5 miles wide, according to Francois Paquay, a geology graduate student at the University of Hawaii.

That is significantly less than the up-to-12-mile-wide space boulder that past researchers have suggested was the dinosaur-killer, according to research published Friday in the journal Science.

 Source : SFGate.com

"Current oceanic and atmospheric trends indicate that we will likely have an active Atlantic basin hurricane season," said William Gray, who is beginning his 25th year forecasting hurricanes at Colorado State University.

The team's forecast now anticipates 15 named storms forming in the Atlantic basin between June 1 and Nov. 30. Eight of the storms are predicted to become hurricanes, and of those eight, four are expected to develop into intense or major hurricanes (Saffir/Simpson category 3-4-5) with sustained winds of 111 mph or greater.  Long-term averages are 9.6 named storms, 5.9 hurricanes and 2.3 intense hurricanes per year.

 Source : Science Daily

It looks like an image from a Star Wars film – the destruction of the Death Star , perhaps. But in fact this is real. Published yesterday by the European Space Agency, it shows a vast quasar destroying a galaxy far, far away. It's certainly among the most powerful quasars ever discovered, and if, as thought, it proves to be the mightiest of all, then this image will represent the most awesome force ever witnessed in the universe.

Of all the strange objects in the heavens, quasars are among the most fascinating. Thought to number about 100,000 in total, they are among the most mysterious, distant and significant objects in the universe. First discovered in the 1950s, they are scenes of cataclysmic violence . They are also the most distant objects we have ever seen. When the universe was young, quasars were common, but due to the extraordinary distances involved, and the time their light takes to reach us, we can still see them, burning bright. Thankfully, quasars do not occur today. If they did, we wouldn't be here.

A quasar consists of a black hole surrounded by super-heated gas that gives off prodigious amounts of radiation. Just to hint at the scales involved, the black hole at the centre of the quasar pictured here is a billion times the mass of our own Sun. Quasars begin life as distant galaxies, and eventually they collapse, and the galaxy and gas is swallowed by the black hole .

 Source : Independent UK

The head of the World Meteorological Organisation said La Nina - the weather phenomenon which is cooling the Pacific - is likely to trigger a small drop in average global temperatures compared with last year. 

The prediction - which follows a bitterly cold winter in China and the Arctic - is prompting some sceptics to question the theory of climate change.

(The news that the earth appears to be cooling would seem to contradict most experts who say that global warming is melting ice at the Poles)

 Source : DailyMail UK

Gas prices rose further into record territory Monday, pulled higher by resurgent oil futures and a growing belief that gasoline supplies are falling as the summer driving season approaches.

Oil futures, meanwhile, jumped by more than $2 a barrel as traders bet the Federal Reserve will continue cutting interest rates. Comments from OPEC suggesting the cartel plans no production increases also boosted oil prices.

At the pump, the national average price of a gallon of gas jumped 3.6 cents over the weekend to a record $3.339, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. That's 58 cents higher than a year ago. In New York Mercantile Exchange trading, May gasoline futures rose 2.68 cents to settle at $2.7835 a gallon.

 See Also : Iran to OPEC: Stop Oil Sales in Dollars
 Source : Yahoo Business 

In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone.

It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.

Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect.

 Source : NY Times

Now a tornado has hit the capital city and Arkansans have to be wondering what's next. Since the night of Arkansas' Super Tuesday primary in early February, the sky just hasn't stop hurling rain, wind and disaster across the Southern state. "We've been assaulted by Mother Nature over the last few months," Gov. Mike Beebe said.

Across the state, nights are filled with red and blue emergency lights flashing across wet streets strewn with pine needles and limbs thrown by tornadoes . Days remain soaked by muddy floodwaters that lap across front doors and seep into molding furniture. Thirteen people died after two tornadoes screamed through the state Feb. 5. One snaked over cross-country Interstate 40 on its 123-mile path.

In the time since, more than a foot of snow fell at points in Arkansas' Ozark Mountains. Swollen rivers spilled into farm pastures and bayous across Arkansas' eastern Delta region in March, killing two. Another man remains missing. South of the capital city in Benton, Thursday's storm destroyed a dozen homes at the Hurricane Creek Mobile Home Park. Emergency workers had trouble responding because downed power lines and trees blocked the main entry road. A gas leak caused by a felled tree ignited a fire that destroyed one of the trailers.

 Source : Yahoo News