Rescuers used a front loader to pluck a woman and three children from the roof of a sport utility vehicle that strayed onto a flooded road after melting snow and heavy rain swelled rivers during an unusual January warm streak. But they were unable to reach her two other young children.
The children in Indiana were among five people killed nationwide Tuesday, the second day of severe weather fueled by unseasonable temperatures. Tornadoes also blew through several states Monday and Tuesday.
On Wednesday, as remnants of the storm system moved eastward, thunderstorms knocked out electricity to more than 70,000 homes and businesses in western New York, downing trees and power lines from Lake Erie to the Finger Lakes. Gusts of up to 75 mph were reported in Rochester, the National Weather Service said.
The same system produced wind gusts to 63 mph during the night in Ohio, where at least 50,000 customers were blacked out Wednesday morning.
Flood warnings remained in effect Wednesday in parts of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Missouri, the weather service said.
A tornado that hit Appleton, Ark., on Tuesday rolled a doublewide mobile home off its foundation, killing a man and injuring his wife. The trailer appeared to have rolled for 50 yards before smashing against a stand of trees in the rural area about 60 miles northwest of Little Rock.
"The tornado hit and ... it looked like his house pretty much exploded," Pope County Sheriff Jay Winters said. "It was taken completely off the blocks and just tore to pieces. They were both in the wreckage."
An explosive star within our galaxy is showing signs of an impending eruption, at least in a cosmic time frame, and has for quite some time. From 1838 to 1858, the star called Eta Carinae brightened to rival the light of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and then faded to a dim star. Since 1940 it has been brightening again, and scientists think Eta Carinae will detonate in 10,000 to 20,000 years.
Fortunately, Eta Carinae is far away, at least 7,500 light-years from Earth. If it explodes, most of its energy will be scattered or absorbed in the vast emptiness of space. It also happens to be tilted about 45 degrees from the line of sight to Earth, so any type of gamma-ray burst, a high-energy outburst expected with this star's eventual eruption, would miss the Earth. Cosmic rays would be diffused by magnetic fields, and most of the damaging light would not affect life on Earth.
In general, threats to life on Earth from supernovae are extremely small, for all except the nearest explosions — those 30 light-years away or closer.
The possibility of an asteroid walloping the planet Mars this month is whetting the appetites of Earth-bound scientists, even as they further refine the space rock's trajectory.
The space rock in question — Asteroid 2007 WD5 — is similar in size to the object that carved Meteor Crater into northern Arizona some 50,000 years ago and is approaching Mars at about 30,000 miles per hour (48,280 kph).
Whether the asteroid will actually hit Mars or not is still uncertain.
Such an impact, researchers said, could prove to be a valuable boon for planetary science since NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and a flotilla of other spacecraft are already in position to follow up any impact from orbit.
"An impact that we could witness/follow-up with MRO would be truly spectacular, and could tell us much about the hidden subsurface that could help direct a search for life or life-related molecules," said John Rummel, NASA's senior scientist for astrobiology at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters.
Observations of the asteroid between Dec. 29 and Jan. 2 allowed astronomers to slightly lower the space rock's odds of striking Mars to about 3.6 percent (down from 3.9), giving the object a 1 in 28 chance of hitting the planet, according to a Tuesday report from NASA's Near Earth-Object program office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The theory goes that dinosaurs were wiped out after an asteroid smashed into the Earth 65million years ago.
But now it has been suggested they were sent into eternity by an equally catastrophic but somewhat smaller threat - biting insects.
Disease spread by mosquitoes, mites and ticks was probably the major factor that finished off the reptiles, say scientists.
The insects could have also made it harder for dinosaurs to survive by changing the nature of plant life.
Bees and other pollinators helped promote the rapid spread of flowering plants, leading to the loss of vegetarian dinosaurs' traditional food sources. As the planteating dinosaurs declined, so would their predators.
The theory helps explain why dinosaurs took so long to die off, say husband-and - wife team George and Roberta Poinar.
According to the most widely accepted explanation, the dinosaurs vanished after an asteroid or comet hit the Earth between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods.
Another theory is that they were driven to extinction by massive volcanic eruptions in India, which led to extreme climate change.
When the calendar turned to 2007, the heat went on and the weather just got weirder.
January was the warmest first month on record worldwide—1.53 degrees above normal. It was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe's average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year.
And as 2007 drew to a close, it was also shaping up to be the hottest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere.
U.S. weather stations broke or tied 263 all-time high temperature records, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. weather data. England had the warmest April in 348 years of record-keeping there, shattering the record set in 1865 by more than 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn't just the temperature. There were other oddball weather events. A tornado struck New York City in August, inspiring the tabloid headline: "This ain't Kansas!"
In the Middle East, an equally rare cyclone spun up in June, hitting Oman and Iran. Major U.S. lakes shrank; Atlanta had to worry about its drinking water supply. South Africa got its first significant snowfall in 25 years. And on Reunion Island, 400 miles east of Africa, nearly 155 inches of rain fell in three days—a world record for the most rain in 72 hours.
Individual weather extremes can't be attributed to global warming, scientists always say. However, "it's the run of them and the different locations" that have the mark of man-made climate change, said top European climate expert Phil Jones, director of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in England. Worst of all—at least according to climate scientists—the Arctic, which serves as the world's refrigerator, dramatically warmed in 2007, shattering records for the amount of melting ice.
2007 seemed to be the year that climate change shook the thermometers, and those who warned that it was beginning to happen were suddenly honored. Former Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Oscar and he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of thousands of scientists. The climate panel, organized by the United Nations, released four major reports in 2007 saying man-made global warming was incontrovertible and an urgent threat to millions of lives.
Landslides and floods triggered by heavy rain have left more than 120 people dead or missing on Indonesia's Java island, as rescuers struggled on Thursday to pull out bodies buried under thick mud.
Officials said thousands of people have been left homeless after their houses were submerged by floods or buried by landslides in villages near the Bengawan Solo river, which lies about 500 km from the capital, Jakarta.
About 40 people were missing after floods swept away a bridge in Madiun district in East Java province on Wednesday, a local police officer said. In neighboring Central Java province, about 1,000 rescuers, police and soldiers tried to unearth 26 people buried in mud from steep slopes in Tawangmangu, a hilly area that has been hardest hit by landslides on Java. Rescuers had to use manual equipment, spraying the mud with water to soften it.
"We are only left with basic tools, such as spades and ploughs, yet we face a 7-to 9-meter blanket of mud," local police chief Rikwanto told Reuters by telephone.
Workers pulled out 12 more bodies on Thursday, bringing the confirmed death toll to 48, said Heru Pratomo, head of the disaster relief agency in Karang Anyar district, of which Tawangmangu is part. Another body was found and 14 were still missing in two neighboring districts, rescue officials said.
Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.
Ms Bhutto - the first woman PM in an Islamic state - was leaving an election rally in Rawalpindi when a gunman shot her in the neck and set off a bomb.
At least 16 other people died in the attack and several more were injured.
President Pervez Musharraf condemned the killing and urged people to remain calm but angry protests have gripped cities across the country.
Security forces have been placed on a state of "red alert" nationwide.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack. Analysts believe Islamist militants to be the most likely group behind it.
Three years after the devastating tsunami that destroyed coastal communities around the Indian Ocean, the exact death toll remains uncertain. But survivors' tales of similarly massive waves sweeping in from the ocean are passed down by elders in certain communities and may be enough to save lives in the event of another disaster like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a researcher says.
The tsunami that struck the coasts of Thailand, India and Indonesia on December 26, 2004 caused very high mortality in the affected regions, with anywhere from 10 to 90 percent of local populations being killed depending on the location. The region-wide death toll is estimated to have exceeded 200,000 .
But a similarly intense tsunami that struck northern Papua New Guinea in 1930 caused a fraction of the deaths compared to the 2004 disaster, with only 0.1 percent to 1 percent of the coastal population being killed. The key to this lower death toll were stories of tsunamis that had been passed down across the generations to the area residents, said tsunami researcher Simon Day, a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has been researching evidence of ancient tsunamis in Papua New Guinea.
"Oral traditions are a very efficient means of tsunami education," Day said. Day presented his findings at a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union. (Source : Live Science )
A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.
Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.
Asteroid 2007 WD5 is expected to hit Mars on January 30, 2008 with odds of impact at 1 in 75. The speed of the asteroid will reach 12.8 km/h. The crater that will be left on Mars after the impact will be similar to the well-known Meteor Crater in the state of Arizona.
If the asteroid slams into Mars , the impact will most likely occur in the equatorial area, where Opportunity rover has been exploring the red planet since 2004.
Astronomers detected Asteroid 2007 WD5 at the end of November 2007. It is currently flying halfway between Earth and Mars.
The above-mentioned Meter Crater in Arizona was created about 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch when the local climate on the Colorado Plateau was much cooler and damper. At the time, the area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and camels. It was uninhabited by humans, the first of whom are thought to have reached North America only around 13,000 years ago.
The impact produced a massive explosion equivalent to at least 2.5 megatons of TNT – equivalent to a large thermonuclear explosion and about 150 times the yield of the atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki . The explosion dug out 175 million tons of rock. The shock of impact propagated as a hemispherical shock wave that blasted the rock down and outward from the point of impact, forming the crater. Much more impact energy, equivalent to an estimated 6.5 megatons, was released into the atmosphere and generated a devastating above-ground shockwave.
The awesome explosion and devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia -the largest impact event in recent history- may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates. The Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations run counter to prior theories of a mini black hole or comet as the cause.
The energy of the blast was estimated to be between 10 and 20 megatons of TNT — 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The explosion felled an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers, and measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.
“The asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller than we had thought,” says Sandia principal investigator Mark Boslough of the impact that occurred June 30, 1908. “That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had believed.”
Because smaller asteroids approach Earth statistically more frequently than larger ones, he says, “We should be making more efforts at detecting the smaller ones than we have till now.
The Department of Homeland security is forging ahead and finalizing plans to use a network of spy satellites for domestic surveillance despite the fact that the Congressional committee supposedly overseeing the program has had no update on it for over three months.
A report in today's Wall Street Journal suggests that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is in the process of finalizing a charter for the program this week, regardless of the fact that it is supposed to be suspended.
The DHS had declared that the program was "on hold" after its existence was made public in August, prompting an outcry amongst civil libertarians and lawmakers.
Demands to justify the congressional legality of the satellites, which were originally mandated for foreign surveillance, followed the revelation that a new department branch called the National Applications Office would oversee the program and be responsible for providing images from the satellites to non military law enforcement agencies.
Critics have called for cuts to DHS funding, stressing that the program is in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus act, which prevents the use of military for domestic law enforcement. It also violates the fourth amendment as the satellites are capable of seeing through the walls of people's homes.
The planet Mars was closest to Earth Tuesday night at 11:45 Universal Time since 2003 and will be the closest until 2016, U.S. astronomers said as quoted by media reports Wednesday.
People are able to see Mars by naked eyes till early February 2008, as the planet moves opposite the sun and nearest the Earth.
On average Mars moves closest to the Earth every two years and two months. These periodic encounters are due to the differences in the two planets' orbits. Earth goes around the sun twice as fast as Mars, lapping the Red Planet about every two years. Both planets have elliptical orbits, so their close encounters are not always at the same distance.
This year, Mars comes as close as 54.8 million miles (some 87 million km) -- not as close as the historic pass-by of 2003 (55.36 km), but still a night-brightener.
Although 2003 offered astronomers a view of Mars closer than this year's approach, Hubble's most recent detailed look at the red planet shows it's free of dust storms. However, ice crystal clouds in the northern and southern polar caps can be seen.
A probable active glacier has been identified for the first time on Mars.
The icy feature has been spotted in images from the European Space Agency's (Esa) Mars Express spacecraft.
Ancient glaciers, many millions of years old, have been seen before on the Red Planet, but these ones may only be several thousand years old.
The young glacier appears in the Deuteronilus Mensae region between Mars' rugged southern highlands and the flat northern lowlands.
"If it was an image of Earth, I would say 'glacier' right away," Dr Gerhard Neukum, chief scientist on the spacecraft's High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) told BBC News.
"We have not yet been able to see the spectral signature of water. But we will fly over it in the coming months and take measurements. On the glacial ridges we can see white tips, which can only be freshly exposed ice.
This is found in very few places on the Red Planet because as soon ice is exposed to the Martian environment, it sublimates - or turns from a solid state directly into gas.
The infamous Tunguska explosion , which mysteriously leveled an area of Siberian forest nearly the size of Tokyo a century ago, might have been caused by an impacting asteroid far smaller than previously thought. The fact that a relatively small asteroid could still cause such a massive explosion suggests "we should be making more efforts at detecting the smaller ones than we have till now," said researcher Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.
The explosion near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River on June 30, 1908, flattened some 500,000 acres (2,000 square kilometers) of Siberian forest. Scientists calculated the Tunguska explosion could have been roughly as strong as 10 to 20 megatons of TNT — 1,000 times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima .
Wild theories have been bandied about for a century regarding what caused the Tunguska explosion, including a UFO crash , antimatter, a black hole and famed inventor Nikola Tesla's "death ray." In the last decade, researchers have conjectured the event was triggered by an asteroid exploding in Earth's atmosphere that was roughly 100 feet wide (30 meters) and 560,000 metric tons in mass — more than 10 times that of the Titanic.
The space rock is thought to have blown up above the surface, only fragments possibly striking the ground.
Now new supercomputer simulations suggest "the asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller than we had thought," Boslough said. Specifically, he and his colleagues say it would have been a factor of three or four smaller in mass and perhaps 65 feet (20 meters) in diameter. (Source : Live Science )
A cosmic explosion that seems to have come out of nowhere—thousands of light-years from the nearest collection of stars—has left astronomers baffled.
The blast, one of the brightest this year, was detected by spacecraft from the Inter-Planetary Network on Jan. 25 and satellites were used to pinpoint its location to a region of the sky in the constellation Gemini.
The explosion was a type called a long-duration gamma-ray burst, which are thought to be powered by the death of a massive star. But images taken after the glow of the burst, dubbed GRB 070125, had faded away showed no galaxy at the location.
The Department of Homeland security is forging ahead and finalizing plans to use a network of spy satellites for domestic surveillance despite the fact that the Congressional committee supposedly overseeing the program has had no update on it for over three months. 
