The wimpy comet Elenin, which vaulted into the public spotlight as a so-called "harbinger of doom," has met its own demise, and its remains won't be back for another 12,000 years, NASA scientists say.
The comet made a swing through the inner solar system in recent months, coming closest to Earth on Oct. 16, but by that time all that was left were crumbs. The fate of comet Elenin, it seems, was sealed in September during its closest approach to the sun.
"Elenin did as new comets passing close by the sun do about two percent of the time: It broke apart," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement Monday (Oct. 25). "Elenin's remnants will also act as other broken-up comets act. They will trail along in a debris cloud that will follow a well-understood path out of the inner solar system. After that, we won't see the scraps of comet Elenin around these parts for almost 12 millennia."
Thousands of residents are rushing to leave the Thai capital Bangkok, which is braced for potentially severe flooding over the weekend.
The city's bus and train stations and many roads are jammed by crowds of people attempting to flee.
People in several northern districts of the capital - some of which are now 90% submerged by rising water - have been told they should evacuate immediately.
More than 360 people have died in Thailand's worst flooding in decades. The crisis is an early test for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, who took office in August and has previously been criticised for failing to take the flood threat seriously enough.
"It's a crisis, because if we try to resist this massive amount of floodwater, a force of nature, we won't win," Ms Yingluck said.
A dazzling aurora light show amazed skywatchers across North America, from Canada to Arkansas, and other northern regions Monday night (Oct. 24), painting the sky with striking green and even rare red hues.
The aurora display, also known as the northern lights, was touched off by a wave charged particles unleashed by a massive sun storm on Saturday, which took two days to reach Earth, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center operated by the National Weather Service and NOAA.
"These were the most vibrant I've ever seen," Canadian skywatcher Colin Chatfield of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan told SPACE.com in an email. "I was also able to see red with the naked eye, which I've never seen before either. Simply put, they were amazing." [LS]
The total of U.S. state debt, including pension liabilities, could surpass $4 trillion, with California owing the most and Vermont owing the least, a new analysis says.
The nonprofit State Budget Solutions combined states' major debt and future liabilities, primarily for pensions and employee healthcare, unemployment insurance loans, outstanding bonds and projected fiscal 2011 budget gaps. It found that in total, states are in debt for $4.2 trillion.
The group, which follows state fiscal conditions and advocates for limited spending and taxes, said the deficit calculations that states make "do not offer a full picture of the states' liabilities and can rely on budget gimmicks and accounting games to hide the extent of the deficit."
The 7 billionth person on Earth will draw his or her first breath on Oct. 31, at least according to estimates by the United Nations. Assuming all systems are in working order, that baby will also create its first output that same day, in the form - to put it delicately - of a dirty diaper.
That dirty diaper is only the tip of an iceberg of human manure produced around the globe every day. It might seem a reasonable question to ask how humanity will deal with this output of feces as the world's population creeps toward 10 billion by 2100. But that question presumes we have the poop problem under control now. Here's the bad news: We don't.
Approximately 2.6 billion people around the world lack any sanitation whatsoever. More than 200 million tons of human waste goes untreated every year. In the developing world, 90 percent of sewage is discharged directly into lakes, rivers and oceans. And even in developed countries, cities depend on old, rickety sewage systems that are easily overwhelmed by a heavy rain. [Livescience]
Catastrophic magnitude-7 shocks are rare in the region, but not unexpected.
The magnitude-7.2 earthquake that rattled eastern Turkey on Sunday was a rare, powerful temblor for the area, but not entirely a surprise given the web of active faults in the region, earthquake scientists say.
Turkey rumbles often and has seen many destructive earthquakes throughout recorded history. The last major quake to strike the country was the Izmit earthquake of 1999, a magnitude 7.6 to the west of Sunday's quake. The Izmit quake killed 17,000 people, injured 50,000 and left 500,000 homeless.
Magnitude 7 earthquakes don't happen very often in the area, but that doesn't mean it's surprising to see one there. "We pretty much expect this sort of thing," said Don Blakeman, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. [msnbc]
America and Europe face a "disaster in the making" because of Congress budget cuts to a critical weather satellite, one of Barack Obama's top science officials has warned.
The satellite crosses the Earth's poles 14 times a day, monitoring the atmosphere, clouds, ice, vegetation, and oceans. It provides 90% of the information used by the National Weather Service, UK Met Office and other European agencies to predict severe storms up to seven days in advance.
But Republican budget-cutting measures would knock out that critical capacity by delaying the launch of the next generation of polar-orbiting satellites, said Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.
"It is a disaster in the making. It's an expression of the dysfunction in our system," said Lubchenco, who was speaking at a dinner on the sidelines of the Society of Environmental Journalists meeting in Miami.
Rina has strengthened rapidly over the northwestern Caribbean and is now the 6th hurricane of the 2011 season.
More strengthening is expected and Rina could become a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) in the next day or two.
Rina will move very slowly in the general direction of the Yucatan Peninsula in the coming days.
Digging continues at dozens of collapsed buildings in Ercis and Van as death toll of 7.2-magnitude quake rises to more than 200.
Rescue teams are digging frantically through dozens of collapsed buildings in eastern Turkey after a strong earthquake caused severe damage and left more than 200 people confirmed dead – a toll expected to rise substantially. [guardian]
Turkey fears volcano eruption
Turkish seismologists fear that the earthquakes that hit the province of Van on October 23 can cause eruption of Nemrut volcano located northwards of Lake Van. Mt. Nemrut is near Tatvan, a small town in the eastern Anatolian province of Bitlis. The mountain rises from the southwestern shore of Lake Van, and enters the district of Ahlat to the north.
At least 217 were killed and more than 1,000 people injured when a powerful earthquake struck Turkey, collapsing dozens of buildings and pulling down phone and power lines in the southeast of the country, officials and witnesses said. More than 1,000 people are feared killed in the earthquake. [pan]
Fewer U.S. companies expect to hire new workers in coming months, as business economists grow increasingly pessimistic about the overall economy's growth in the coming year.
Nearly 85 percent of economic experts surveyed expect the economy to grow at a meager 2 percent or less over the next 12 months, according to the National Association for Business Economists. In July only 23 percent of the survey's respondents predicted such slow growth.
Additionally, the number of companies that plan to hire more workers fell from 42 percent to 30 percent, while the number of companies laying workers off rose. The group reports that 13 percent of respondents have reduced their staff, up from 8 percent in July. [cbs]
An earthquake in south-eastern Turkey has killed more than 200 people, with hundreds more casualties feared. Rescue teams worked through Sunday night trying to free survivors crying out for help from under rubble.
The Turkish interior minister, Idris Naim Sahin, said the 7.2 magnitude quake on Sunday killed 100 in the city of Van and 117 in the badly hit town of Ercis, 60 miles (100km) further north. The death toll was expected to rise.
Overseeing emergency operations in Ercis, Sahin said a total of 1,090 people were known to have been injured and hundreds were missing. [guardian]
It seems as if violence is everywhere, but it's really on the run.
Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon.
Yet, historically, we've never had it this peaceful.
That's the thesis of three new books, including one by prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem. [YAHOO]
Turkey's prime minister says the 7.2-magnitude earthquake in eastern Turkey has killed at least 138 people.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Sunday's earthquake has killed at least 93 people in the city of Van and 45 people in the nearby town of Ercis.
He says some people are still trapped under rubble, but gave no figures.
Erdogan says about 350 people have been injured in the quake.
The quake sent tens of thousands fleeing into the streets, screaming or trying to reach relatives on cell phones as apartment and office buildings cracked or collapsed. [AP]
It could be the first official report of tsunami debris from Japan nearing Hawaii.
A new report coming from a Russian ship have UH researchers changing their predictions. Since the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, researchers have been predicting it would take about two years for the debris from Japan to hit Hawaii's west-facing beaches.
“We have a rough estimate of 5 to 20 million tons of debris coming from Japan,” said UH computer programming researcher Jan Hafner. An average of 10 million tons of debris, the same amount released into the north Pacific basin in one year, was dislodged and set adrift in one day.
The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.
That figure is likely to shock many experts as it is far higher than many current estimates. A previous UN estimate had expected the world to have more than 10 billion people by 2100; currently, there are nearly 7 billion.
The new figure is contained in a landmark study by the United Nations Population Fund (Unfpa) that will be released this week. The report –The State of World Population 2011 – is being compiled to mark the expected moment this month when somewhere on Earth a person will be born who will take the current world population over the 7 billion mark, and will be released simultaneously in cities across the globe.
As many as 1,000 people were feared killed on Sunday when a powerful earthquake hit southeast Turkey, destroying dozens of buildings and trapping some victims alive under rubble.
As night fell, survivors and emergency workers battled to pull people out of the debris in the city of Van and town of Ercis, where a student dormitory collapsed.
Residents in Van joined in a frantic search, using hands and shovels and working under floodlights and flashlights, hearing voices of survivors crying for help under mounds of shattered concrete in pitch darkness and bitter cold.
Early bird skywatchers set your alarms: The annual October meteor shower will peak before sunrise on Saturday as the Earth passes through a stream of leftover dust from the famous Halley's Comet.
The Orionid meteor shower promises to offer skywatchers with a dark sky and good weather up to 15 meteors per hour at its peak, according to a NASA forecast.
"Although this isn't the biggest meteor shower of the year, it's definitely worth waking up for," said Bill Cooke, head of the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office, in a statement. "The setting is dynamite."
The Orionids will emanate from a point in the southeastern sky (as viewed from the northern mid-latitudes) near the raised arm of Orion the Hunter, the constellation that gives them their name. From there, they streak across Taurus the Bull, the twins of Gemini, Leo the Lion, and Canis Major. The sky map of the Orionid meteor shower here shows where to look to see the "shooting star" display.
That time of the month again... =(
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Once again, the world failed to end, despite a high-profile prediction from a radio preacher in California.
Harold Camping, the 90-year-old leader of Family Radio International, stirred a global frenzy when he predicted that the Rapture would take 200 million Christians to heaven on May 21. When the Rapture didn't occur, Camping said he got his Bible-based calculations wrong and revised his prophecy to set the world's end on Friday, Oct. 21.
But as Friday morphed into Saturday around the world, there was no sign that doomsday had come. Two moderate quakes jolted the San Francisco Bay area on Thursday, and floods threatened to swamp Bangkok, but no world-shattering changes took place — sparking this typical Twitter refrain: "Dear Harold Camping, Worst. Apocalypse. Ever."
