However, despite fears that Boomers will trigger a collapse of Social Security, experts say the system can and will survive for decades and generations to come.

Congress made significant fixes to Social Security during the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, and there appears to be a slowly gathering political will to make it solvent for the next 75 years.

A giant meteorite that broke in two as it crashed off Australia, could have been responsible for a mini-ice age that engulfed Britain in 535AD.

The claim was made by marine geophysicist Dallas Abbott at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last month.

She found evidence of two substantial impact craters in the Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern Australian coast.

In the mid-sixth century, Europe and Asia experienced the most severe and protracted episode of cooling of the last 2,000 years.

Sources from the time refer to widespread crop failures and famines as the unseasonal weather took hold. The Gaelic Irish Annals recorded 'a failure of bread' from 536 to 539AD.

Tree ring analysis by Mike Baillie from Queen's University in Belfast also suggested a cool period. He found the Irish oak showed abnormally little growth in 536 and 542. This phenomenon was noted in trees in Sweden and Finland as well.

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The results of the weekend storm that buried many Eastern U.S. locations in 2 feet or more of snow stands out starkly in a new satellite image.

The image from space reveals how the storm swept through Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia but largely spared New York City. The landscape is largely snow-free just north of Manhattan.

Nicknamed "snowpocalypse" and "snowmageddon," the blizzard dumped a record-breaking 32 inches at Dulles International Airport in the nation's capital, according to news reports.

With all the talk of the current Yellowstone earthquake swarm, I thought it would worth it to write a post on the the structure and caldera - and why we get earthquake swarms that are structurally rather than magmatically-related.

First off, lets think about why calderas formed. This is relatively simple - at least superficially. The land (or volcano) above a magmatic system is partially supported by that magma, especially because magma is hot and buoyant. The isostatic support by the magma holds up the land surface or volcanic edifice, so when an eruption expels a large volume of magma, this support is removed. This collapse forms the caldera - the negative topographic expression of the eruption. The collapse of the land surface plays a dual role - not is it a result of the eruption, but also helps the eruption along, like a piston pushing of hot gas out of a cylinder. After the eruption, the collapsed caldera continues to subside as the isostatic equilibrium is reached. After the caldera-forming eruption {caution, large PDF}, the system may have eruptions that produce resurgent domes in the middle of the caldera as the last dregs of the caldera-forming magmatic system leak out. This is referred to as the "caldera cycle", originally defined by Howell Williams for the collapse of Mt. Mazama ~7,700 years b.p. (see below). (SOURCE : SCENCEBLOGS.COM )

A record 2 1/2 feet or more was predicted for Washington, where snow was falling heavily by evening, with big amounts expected elsewhere throughout the Mid-Atlantic. Authorities already were blaming the storm for hundreds of accidents and the deaths of father-son Samaritans in Virginia.

The region's second snowstorm in less than two months could be "extremely dangerous," the National Weather Service said. Heavy, wet snow and strong winds threatened to knock out power, clog roads and paralyze the region's transportation and retail.

Sightings of a fireball blazing across the sky were reported across Ireland last night.

People from across the country witnessed the spectacle, which happened at around 6pm.

It is thought the fireball was a space rock travelling at a 100,000 miles per hour, or the equivalent of a small atomic bomb blast in the skies.

The quake hit at 12:20 p.m. and was centered 28 miles offshore and 7 miles deep, northwest of the small town of Petrolia in Humboldt County, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Residents said they could feel the shaker, but it was nowhere near as disconcerting as the magnitude 6.5 quake that struck the region Jan. 9.

That quake was centered 18 miles offshore and wreaked more than $40 million in damage to roads, buildings and power systems in Eureka, Arcata, Ferndale and other North Coast towns.

A comet-like object has been created by the collision of two asteroids related to the one blamed for killing the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

The object, known as P/2010 A2, was circling 90 million miles from Earth in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter when it was spotted last week by the Hubble Space Telescope.

'The truth is we're still struggling to understand what this means,' lead scientist David Jewitt with the University of California at Los Angeles. 'It's most likely the result of a recent collision between two asteroids.

TVs around the world could go on the blink during the 2012 London Olympics, solar physicists warned today.

They were speaking ahead of the launch of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which will blast off on February 9.

Nasa's latest space mission will deliver high resolution images of the Sun ten times better than the average High-Definition television.

A picture using extreme ultra-violet light will be snapped every 0.75seconds. In a day the satellite will transmit the equivalent amount of data as 500,000 song downloads. It will produce more science data than any mission in Nasa history.

British scientists involved in the project said the observatory could help them predict solar storms that could disrupt communications on Earth.

This could prove crucial as solar activity is due to hit a peak in its eleven-year cycle during the Olympics in 2012.

In a one-story brick building built on bedrock, John E. Ebel monitors the size and heft of small earthquakes that rattle parts of New England every year.

For three decades, the Boston College professor and seismologist has recorded quakes around the region, sticking red pins into a large map that displays tremor clusters from Maine to Rhode Island. He distributes the information to a network of seismologists worldwide and worries, always, about what could happen if a damaging earthquake strikes New England.

Yellowstone National Park is shaking again, but jitters seem few so far. Over eight days, more than 1,270 mostly tiny earthquakes have struck between Old Faithful and West Yellowstone. The strongest dozen or so have ranged between magnitudes 3.0 and 3.8.

That's strong enough to feel - barely. The vast majority have been too weak to be felt even nearby.

Likewise, online chatter about an imminent volcanic eruption in Yellowstone hasn't really picked up compared with the attention that a similar quake swarm drew just over a year ago.

"Perhaps we have done a better job in the past year or so helping the public understand that earthquake swarms are not unusual in Yellowstone," park spokesman Al Nash said Monday. The largest quakes in the current swarm have included two of magnitude 3.1 and one of magnitude 3.0 late Sunday and early Monday, according to the University of Utah, which helps monitor seismic activity in Yellowstone.

Those who've felt some of the recent quakes include Tim Townsend, a law enforcement ranger at Old Faithful. Most haven't been alarming, he said, although one last week "had me running to cover, for sure."

One of the world's largest volcanoes slumbers at the core of Yellowstone. The volcano last had a caldera -forming eruption 640,000 years ago and last spewed lava 70,000 years ago. Geologists say Yellowstone could erupt again , although the probability of an eruption within anyone's lifetime is extremely low.