A potentially deadly strain of fungus is spreading among animals and people in the northwestern United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia, researchers reported on Thursday. The airborne fungus, called Cryptococcus gattii, usually only infects transplant and AIDS patients and people with otherwise compromised immune systems, but the new strain is genetically different, the researchers said.
"This novel fungus is worrisome because it appears to be a threat to otherwise healthy people," said Edmond Byrnes of Duke University in North Carolina, who led the study. "The findings presented here document that the outbreak of C. gattii in Western North America is continuing to expand throughout this temperate region," the researchers said in their report, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens found here.
Our findings suggest further expansion into neighboring regions is likely to occur and aim to increase disease awareness in the region." The new strain appears to be unusually deadly, with a mortality rate of about 25 percent among the 21 U.S. cases analyzed, they said.
Soaring tens of thousands of miles away from the Sun's surface, a solar flare explodes with the energy of 100 megaton hydrogen bombs. The fiery plasma, heated to tens of millions of degrees celsius, throws out particles into space at near the speed of light.
It is just one of the spectacular images from a new satellite which it says could give fresh insight into how the Sun works.
The pictures were taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the Sun.
If Iran decides to go for nuclear weapons, the US may not be able to permanently stop this from happening unless it is willing to occupy the country.
This is the candid conclusion of one army general testifying in front of the Senate but one that seems to have gone mostly unnoticed amid a flurry of statements on Iran over the past few days in Washington.
Gen James Cartwright, one of America's top uniformed officers, slowly edged towards that conclusion during a Senate testimony last week, underscoring the difficult choices facing the Obama administration as it weighs what do about Iran. [ BBC NEWS ]
In the last 20 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized the way humanity views the universe. In many ways, it may have been the most influential telescope since Galileo peered at the night sky with one four centuries ago.
The greatest insights often make the world seem like a larger place than it was before. In Hubble's case, the most important and perhaps most confounding discovery it helped find accomplished just that, by revealing the universe was expanding faster than anyone had known.
NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope, a joint effort by NASA and the European Space Agency, on April 24, 1990 aboard the space shuttle Discovery to much fanfare that soon fell flat. A flaw in the telescope's optics gave it blurry vision and turned the iconic space telescope into a potential boondoggle in orbit.
The volcanic ash cloud from Eyjafjallajokull has caused travel chaos and misery. But we were lucky. An eruption in the future could wipe out the human race .
Great volcanoes have a habit of prompting profound changes to the world - very much greater in extent than the most savage of earthquakes and tsunamis , even though the immediate lethality of the latter is invariably much more cruel. Though ground-shaking events are generally fairly local in extent, their potential for killing can be terrific: 250,000 died after the Tangshan earthquake in China in 1975; and a similar number died in the Indian ocean tsunami of 2004. Volcanoes seem by contrast relatively benign: the accumulated total number of deaths in all of the great volcanoes of the last 300 years has probably not exceeded a quarter of a million: the total number of casualties from a hundred of the biggest recent eruptions has been no more than those from a single giant earthquake.
But there is a signal difference. Earthquakes and their aftershocks, once done, are done. Volcanoes, however, often trigger long-term and long-distance ill-effects, which history indicates generally far outweigh their immediate rain of death and destruction. Emanations of particles from the tiniest pinprick in the earth's crust, once lifted high into the skies by an explosive eruption, can wind themselves sinuously and menacingly around the entire planet, and leave all kinds of devastation in their train. They can disrupt and pollute and poison; they can darken skies and cause devastating changes in the weather; they can and do bring about the abrupt end to the existence of entire populations of animals and people.
Earthquakes and tsunamis have never been known to cause extinctions ; but volcanoes and asteroid collisions have done so repeatedly – and since the earth is today still peppered with scores of thousands of volcanoes ever yearning to erupt, they and the dramatic long-term effects of their eruptions are in fact far more frequent, far more decisive, and far greater than those that are triggered by any other natural phenomenon on the planet. [ GUARDIAN UK ]
Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory has provided an astonishing new vista on our turbulent star.
The first public release of images from the satellite record huge explosions and great looping prominences of gas. The observatory's super-fine resolution is expected to help scientists get a better understanding of what drives solar activity.
Launched in February on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, SDO is expected to operate for at least five years. Researchers hope in this time to go a long way towards their eventual goal of being able to forecast the effects of the Sun's behaviour on Earth.
Solar activity has a profound influence on our planet. Huge eruptions of charged particles and the emission of intense radiation can disrupt satellite, communication and power systems, and pose a serious health risk to astronauts. [ BBC NEWS ]
For all the worldwide chaos that Iceland's volcano has already created, it may just be the opening act.
Scientists fear tremors at the Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FYAH-lah-yer-kuhl) volcano could trigger an even more dangerous eruption at the nearby Katla volcano - creating a worst-case scenario for the airline industry and travelers around the globe.
How big would a Katla eruption be?
A Katla eruption would be 10 times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbor, which has already brought European air travel to a standstill for five days and promises severe travel delays for days more.
The two volcanos are side by side in southern Iceland, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) apart and thought to be connected by a network of magma channels.
Katla, however, is buried under ice 550 yards (500 meters) thick - the massive Myrdalsjokull glacier, one of Iceland's largest. That means it has more than twice the amount of ice that the current eruption has burned through - threatening a new and possibly longer aviation standstill across Europe. Katla showed no signs of activity Tuesday, according to scientists who monitor it with seismic sensors, but they were still wary. [ BREITBART ]
The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland is having a major impact on travel and commerce in Europe and worldwide. However, as a volcanic event (in terms of scale), it barely is worth mentioning.
By the measure of the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) - a sort-of Richter scale for eruptions - the current outburst is probably a 2 or a 3, experts say. In other words, eruptions like Eyjafjallajökull happen virtually every year somewhere in the world. It's a regular occurance.
The biggest eruption of the past millennium , by contrast, was a 7. Given that each number on the scale represents an eruption 10 times more powerful than the previous, that means Eyjafjallajökull is 10,000 times less powerful than one in Indonesia's Sunda Islands in 1815. [ CSM ] [ Worst Disasters by death toll ]
Top 5 : Tambora , Krakatoa, Novarupta, Pinatubo and Santa Maria.
A 15-second-long piece of news broadcast on a local television channel has raised the uneasy question of whether the municipal government is anticipating some calamitous natural disasters in 2012.
A short news segment on Dragon TV disclosed that the construction of up to three underground emergency shelters will be completed by 2012. The segment touched the nerves of many people who, apparently, fear the premise of the Hollywood movie 2012 that the world will end by then.
"I was intrigued when I saw that broadcast," wrote yuxiqingchen, a netizen on Tianya.cn, a popular Chinese online forum. "Is there anything our government isn't telling us?" The post has been forwarded to many other major online forums, especially in the Shanghai region.
"The whole thing smells fishy. Why emphasize 2012? What will happen then?" one netizen asked. After the huge success of the film 2012, many people have indulged in the game of establishing a link between the recent earthquakes and doom prophesies. [ China Daily ]
The word on everyone’s lips right now is ‘volcano.’ The eruption of the long-dormant Eyjafjallajökull on March 21st has absolutely devastated travel across the UK and most of Europe. Most websites on the internet cannot cope with the amount of traffic from people trying to find ways home - the P&O Ferries website has actually crashed due to so many people trying to catch a boat. And phone systems are ringing off the hook.
But is this only the beginning to the main event?
Katla is another volcano in Iceland. Situated to the north of Vík í Mýrdal and partly covered by the Mýrdalsjökull glacier, Katla’s peak reaches 1,512 metres. Katla last had a major eruption in 1918 and the one word used to describe that has been ‘vicious.’ Since 1999, geologists have been uneasy around the Katla volcano as it showed signs of waking up and historically, every time the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupts, Katla soon follows. The past two days has seen an increase of 200% in Katla’s activity. This isn’t something to just worry the residents of Iceland, but of the whole world too. Smog, famine, floods and freezing were just some of the things the last Katla eruption caused. Let’s hope that travel disruption is the worst of it.
Despite what many tweets would have, Mt. Hekla has not started erupting.This has been confirmed by Grapevine representatives on location, and the whole of the Icelandic media.
We have no idea how this crazy rumour got started, but we imagine some genius spotted the RÚV webcam of Hekla (their "Hekla watch," which has been ongoing for years, as Hekla is overdue for an eruption), spotted a plume or two and did some pretty awful guesswork. [ SOURCE ]
The volcanic ash spewing from an Icelandic mountain that’s disrupting air travel across Europe may be hundreds of times less than what Mount Pinatubo disgorged in the Philippines in 1991 when it altered the world’s climate.
The impact of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano is likely to be “virtually non-existent” on the global climate because the eruption is too small and gases are not penetrating the upper atmosphere, Blair Trewin, a senior climatologist at Australia’s National Climate Centre in Melbourne, said in an interview.
“In its current form, we wouldn’t expect the eruption to have any significant global climate effects,” Trewin said today by telephone. “In terms of how much material was being put up into the atmosphere, Pinatubo was several hundred times larger than this has been so far.”[ Bloomberg News ]
Ash column above volcano now lower at a height of 4-5 km
Farmers, livestock moved indoors as ash falls
Icelandic airlines now running flights to Norway
Powerful tremors from an Icelandic volcano that has been a menace for travellers across Europe shook the countryside on Sunday as eruptions hurled a steady stream of ash into the sky.
Ash from the volcano drifted southeast towards the European continent, sparing the capital Reykjavik and other more populated centres but forcing farmers and their livestock indoors as a blanket of ash fell on the surrounding areas.
"We are all doing our utmost to make sure that the farming community in this area survives this disaster," Icelandic President Olafur Grimsson told Reuters Television. [ REUTERS ]
Vivos, a California-based company, said it is planning a business project that offers the hope of surviving a near-extinction-level event , like the one many people say the Mayans predicted will occur in 2012.
Vivos said it plans to set up 20 "multi-level, 20,000 square foot (1,858 square meters) hardened shelter," with each housing up to 200 people across the United States.
The bunkers will be designed to withstand outdoor temperatures of 700 degrees Celsius, winds of 700 kilometers an hour, flooding for 500 hours or a wave of earthquakes over 10 on the Richter scale. Besides, a portion of the bunkers even includes refurbished Cold War-era nuclear shelters.
Anyone who enjoys watching the sky for "shooting stars" will have an opportunity to observe an old and reliable meteor display over the next several days: the April Lyrids. The best time to watch will be for a night or two around the peak, April 22.
These meteors are among the oldest known, with ancient records of them dating back nearly 27 centuries. The Lyrid meteor shower is also the first significant meteor shower to appear since the beginning of the year. While it won't produce a storm of meteors, it's a respectable show for those who are patient.
"The annual Lyrid shower . . . has always been my favorite," says NASA meteor expert Peter Jenniskens. "After the low (meteor) rates in the cold months of February and March, this shower is the proverbial swallow of spring for observers in the northern hemisphere." [ ARMAGEDDON ONLINE ]
Every so often the Earth chooses to remind us that we really aren't in control of this planet . The volcanic eruption in Iceland , which started on Wednesday, is just such a reminder. As ash spews out across northern Europe - grounding all flights across Scandinavia and the UK, we begin to realise how powerless we humans really are.
But as volcanic eruptions go, the current fireworks on Iceland are a relative small fry. Scientists "rank" volcanoes according to how explosive they are, using the volcanic explosivity index (VEI) , which goes from zero to eight. The measurement is based on how much material is thrown out of the volcano, how high the eruption goes and how long it lasts. Like the scale used to measure earthquake size , the VEI is logarithmic : which means that a volcano with a VEI of five is 10 times more powerful than one with a VEI of four.
As yet, scientists haven't managed to gather enough data to calculate the VEI of Eyjafjallajökull, but Thorvaldur Thordarson, an expert on Icelandic volcanism at the University of Edinburgh, estimates that this one is probably a two or three - somewhat similar to the eruptions seen on Mount Etna on Sicily in 2002 and 2003, and the kind of eruption we expect to see somewhere on Earth at least once every year.
By contrast, the eruption of Mount St Helens, in the north-west of the US in May 1980, was a one-in-10-year event, with a VEI of around four. Meanwhile, Pinatubo's boom in the Philippines in 1991 was a one-in-50 to 100-year spectacle, with a VEI of about five or six. Bigger still was the eruption of Tambora in 1815, on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, whose ash was responsible for some of the spectacular sunsets painted by J M W Turner. Rated as a seven on the VEI scale (a one-in-1,000-year event), it was the most deadly eruption in recorded history , killing over 70,000 people.
As ash from an Iceland volcano snarled air travel across Europe, experts said an eruption of the 'supervolcano' at the Yellowstone national park would be deadly, though it is unlikely any time soon.
"The next major eruption for Yellowstone, if you have a guess, is probably thousands of years in the future," Bill Burton, a vulcanologist with the US Geological Survey, told AFP.
The volcano, dubbed a 'supervolcano' because of its enormous strength, has not erupted for hundreds of thousands of years.
It last erupted some 640,000 years ago, and the two prior eruptions were 1.3 million and 2.1 million years ago. That track record -- a major event approximately each 730,000 years -- suggests the volcano won't erupt again for another 90,000 years, though Burton noted that there is no real certainty when it comes to volcanic activity.
"You cannot be totally complacent and assume nothing is going to happen," he said.
For vulcanologists, the key is continued study of the history of individual sites. "The more we know about their past behavior makes you a little more confident about what's going to happen next," Burton said.
Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano is in the second phase of an eruption that began last month. Like all volcanos, the eruption started when boiling hot subterranean liquid rock, known as magma, found a weak spot in the Earth's crust and burst through. Scientists spent weeks analysing the gases and magma that emerged, which is then renamed as lava.
Mike Burton, senior volcanologist with the Italian National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology, said: "Thanks to its location between the glaciers, it produced a largely ash-free eruption, with abundant lava flows. I conducted measurements of the gas emissions from the eruption in collaboration with Icelandic scientists."
That phase of the eruption died down last week, but Eyjafjallajokull was not finished. A second, more powerful, eruption occurred when magma burst through at another point. Unlike the first eruption, this rupture in the Earth's crust was close to the volcano's glacier-covered summit. Fire met ice and fire won. Massive amounts of ice melted and flash floods followed.
Once the eruption melted away its icy lid, some 150 metres (492ft) thick, the volcano began to belch ash into the atmosphere.
Since the earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the advanced geodesy research group at the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) has been helping measure Earth on a global scale. First results indicate that the rotational speed of Earth has become marginally slower and days have become longer by 0.3 microseconds.
