An amazing display from the Perseid meteor shower is expected in the coming days offering one of the best opportunities in years to see the night sky lit up with fragments of Comet Swift-Tuttle. A lack of moonlight this year will allow stargazers to easily view the annual event with the naked eye.
Every 133 years Comet Swift-Tuttle makes a pass through the inner solar system spewing dust and gravel behind it. According to NASA, the debris zone is so wide that the Earth spends weeks inside of it.
The fragments from the comet slam into our atmosphere at an astounding 144,000 miles per hour and light up the night sky as they burn up. Most of these meteoroids are the size of grains of sand but some can be as large as marbles. Called Perseids because they seem to fly out of the constellation Perseus in the northeast August sky, the end result is a bevy of shooting stars across the night sky. .
For the 2010 show, the moon will not be up during the pre-dawn hours allowing a very dark sky to show off the meteors as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. At its peak, observers this year may see as many as 100 Perseids per hour. [ EXAMINER ]
A new superbug could spread around the world after reaching Britain from India - in part because of medical tourism - and scientists say there are almost no drugs to treat it.
Researchers said on Wednesday they had found a new gene called New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, in patients in South Asia and in Britain. NDM-1 makes bacteria highly resistant to almost all antibiotics, including the most powerful class called carbapenems, and experts say there are no new drugs on the horizon to tackle it.
With international travel in search of cheaper healthcare increasing, particularly for procedures such as cosmetic surgery, Timothy Walsh, who led the study, said he feared the new superbug could soon spread across the globe. "At a global level, this is a real concern," Walsh, from Britain's Cardiff University, said in telephone interview. [ REUTERS ]
More than 700 people are now known to have died in a massive landslide in north-west China - making it one of the deadliest incidents so far in the country's worst flooding in a decade.
A frantic search is continuing for the more than 1,000 people still missing.
Buildings were hit by a wall of mud so mighty that buildings seven storeys high crumpled like paper, says the BBC's Chris Hogg, in Gansu province.
He says rescuers are searching by hand in the remote, mountainous region.
Asteroid 1999 RQ36, which has a one-in-1,000 chance of hitting the Earth before the year 2200, would cause an explosion equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs detonating at once.
An analysis of its orbit has predicted that it is most likely to hit us on September 24, 2182 but scientists want to collect a sample of the rock to help forecast its trajectory more accurately.
f Nasa gives the plan the green light, the spacecraft would blast off in 2106 to map out and collect rock samples from the asteroid, which is 1,800 feet-wide.
Rescuers lifted muddy bodies into trucks, and aid convoys choked the road into the remote Chinese town where hundreds died and more than 1,100 were missing Monday from landslides caused by heavy rain that has flooded swaths of Asia and spread misery to millions.
In Pakistan, the United Nations said the government's estimate of 13.8 million people affected by the country's worst-ever floods exceeded the combined total of three recent megadisasters — the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Rescuers in mountainous Indian-controlled Kashmir raced to rescue dozens of stranded foreign trekkers and find 500 people still missing in flash floods that have killed 140. [ YAHOO NEWS ]
The United Nations said Monday that massive floods in Pakistan had affected 13.8 million people and eclipsed the scale of the devastating 2004 tsunami , as anger mounted among survivors.
The Pakistani government and UN officials have appealed for more urgent relief efforts to cope with the worst floods in more than 80 years, with President Asif Ali Zardari due to return home after a heavily criticised European tour.
The entire northwestern Swat valley, where Pakistan fought a major campaign to flush out Taliban insurgents last year, was cut off at the weekend as were parts of the country's breadbasket in Punjab and Sindh.
"This disaster is worse than the tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake and the Haiti earthquake ," Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told AFP. He said the 13.8 million affected outstripped the more than three million hit by the 2005 earthquake, five million in the tsunami and the three million affected by the Haiti earthquake. The United Nations estimates 1,600 people have died in Pakistan's floods. About 220,000 were killed by the December 26, 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia.
Stephen Hawking has warned that unless the human race colonizes space within the next two centuries it will disappear forever.
The famous astrophysicist says that our only chance for long-term survival is to move away from Earth and begin to inhabit new planets.
In an interview with website Big Think, Hawking said he was an ‘optimist’ but the next few hundred years had to be negotiated carefully if the human race is to survive.
He said: 'I see great danger for the human race. There have been a number of times in the past when survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 is one of these. ‘The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully.’
Muscovites fled the Russian capital in record numbers as extreme heat combined with thick, acrid smoke from wildfires to double the death rate.
More than 104,400 people flew out of Moscow yesterday, topping the previous 2010 record of 101,000, according to the Federal Air Transportation Agency. On Aug. 7, 95,000 left the city by plane, 20 percent more than the year-earlier date, agency spokesman Sergei Izvolsky said by telephone today.
The heat wave that has plagued central Russia since June is the worst in the country’s history, said Alexander Frolov, head of Rosgidromet, the federal weather service. “In 1,000 years, neither we nor our ancestors have observed or recorded anything like this sort of heat,” he said in televised comments. [ BLOOMBERG ]
Floods caused by torrential rain left 14 people dead and several others missing in Central Europe over the weekend, with residents rescued from rising waters in boats, buses and helicopters.
While rivers burst their banks and dykes were breached in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, in western Europe about 500 firefighters tackled wildfires in Portugal.
Three people drowned in southwestern Poland, near the border with Germany and the Czech Republic, Polish Interior Minister Jerzy Miller told reporters on Sunday.[ THE PROVINCE ]
Russia's devastating summer heatwave has cost almost 5,000 lives, according to officials who conceded yesterday that the state was struggling to gain control over the worst wildfires in decades.
The ministry for emergencies issued an urgent call for volunteers to join fire brigades to bolster the fight against the peat and forest fires raging out of control around Moscow.
Temperatures in Russia have hit records for the time of year on at least six occasions in recent weeks. Forecasters said there would be no respite from temperatures above 97F (36C) for at least another week.
Death rates have escalated steadily since the heatwave began, according to statisticians. “We recorded 14,340 deaths in Moscow in July, that is 4,824 deaths more than in July, 2009,” said Yevgenia Smirnova, an official from the Moscow registry office. [ TELEGRAPH UK ]
By 2100 only 18% to 45% of the plants and animals making up ecosystems in global, humid tropical forests may remain as we know them today, according to a new study led by Greg Asner at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. The research combined new deforestation and selective logging data with climate-change projections. It is the first study to consider these combined effects for all humid tropical forest ecosystems and can help conservationists pinpoint where their efforts will be most effective. The study is published in the August 5, 2010, issue of Conservation Letters.
"This is the first global compilation of projected ecosystem impacts for humid tropical forests affected by these combined forces," remarked Asner. "For those areas of the globe projected to suffer most from climate change, land managers could focus their efforts on reducing the pressure from deforestation, thereby helping species adjust to climate change, or enhancing their ability to move in time to keep pace with it. On the flip side, regions of the world where deforestation is projected to have fewer effects from climate change could be targeted for restoration."
Tropical forests hold more then half of all the plants and animal species on Earth. But the combined effect of climate change, forest clear cutting, and logging may force them to adapt, move, or die. [ SCIENCE DAILY ]
An ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off from one of Greenland's two main glaciers, scientists said Friday, in the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.
The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 620 miles south of the North Pole between Greenland and Canada.
The ice island has an area of 100 square miles and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building, said Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware.
Muenchow said he had expected an ice chunk to break off from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest remaining ones in Greenland, because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years. But he did not expect it to be so large.[ MSNBC ]
Scientists using NASA's THEMIS mission have come across a new form of space weather. They have dubbed it a "spacequake"
A spacequake - a strong vibration in the planet's magnetic field - can affect auroras and generate "space twisters" powerful enough to bring down power lines.
In general, Earth's magnetic field lines can be thought of as rubber bands stretched taut by the solar wind, which is actually charged particles flowing in all directions from the sun, said study co-author Vassilis Angelopoulos, a space physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Earth's magnetic tail is the part of the field that's stretched out like a windsock by the sun's steady bombardment.
One of the fastest big solar eruptions in years has been observed streaking away from the sun at more than 2.2 million mph by two NASA spacecraft.
The flare occurred Aug. 1 and created a massive sun eruption called a coronal mass ejection that struck Earth's magnetic field Tuesday, creating dazzling aurora displays. NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft recorded the eruption and beamed images of the sun storm back to Earth. ( Photo of the sun eruption.)
The material ejected from the sun was seen speeding toward Earth at more than 1,000 kilometers per second, or just over 2.2 million mph. Another wave from the event was expected to hit Earth's magnetic field on Wednesday. NASA's two STEREO spacecraft, which monitor the sun's weather in 3-D, also recorded a video of the sun eruption.
Record high ocean temperatures and the development of a climate phenomenon known as La Nina will keep the Atlantic hurricane season on track to be the busiest since 2005, government forecasters said Thursday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration slightly lowered the outlook it released in May, but an above-normal season was still expected, said Gerry Bell, lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center in Washington.
The updated forecast calls for 14 to 20 named tropical storms, down from a range of 14 to 23. The hurricane season started June 1 and ends Nov. 30, but the peak period for hurricanes runs from August through October.
Eight to 12 storms could become hurricanes, and four to six of those hurricanes could become major storms, blowing winds of 111 mph or more, forecasters said.
"August heralds the start of the most active phase of the Atlantic hurricane season and with the meteorological factors in place, now is the time for everyone living in hurricane prone areas to be prepared," NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco said in a statement. Historically during active storm seasons, multiple hurricane strikes are much more likely for both the Gulf Coast and the East Coast in the U.S.
Astronomers have for the first time obtained a 3D view of the aftermath of a star exploding (which is known as a supernova).
The team used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to study the supernova 1987A, which lies 168,000 light-years away.
The results show the original blast was very powerful and concentrated in one particular direction.
Seen in 1987, it was the first supernova visible with the naked eye to have been observed for some 383 years.
The 3-D view shows the explosion was stronger and faster in some directions than others, leading to an irregular shape with some parts stretching further out into space.
With a civilian population haunted by the Blitz and the Second World War still in the balance, it was one development Winston Churchill could have done without – an incursion into British airspace by an arrow-shaped metallic object feared to contain an invasion force of little green men.
Such was the sensitivity of an alleged UFO sighting by an RAF bomber crew returning to England from a mission over Germany that Churchill ordered it to be covered up with the words: "This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church."
This at least was the allegation put to the Ministry of Defence by relatives of a senior British military aide who claimed to have witnessed the cigar-chomping Prime Minister discuss the incident with General Dwight Eisenhower as part of a meeting about a succession of "foo fighter" sightings by Allied air crews in the Second World War. [ INDEPENDENT UK ]
