Forum: AO News Feed

A very large dead zone, an area of water with no or very little oxygen, is expected to form in the Gulf of Mexico this year — a trend in recent years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).Computer models put together by scientists predict that the zone will cover an area between 7,286 and 8,561 square miles (18,871 to 22,173 square kilometers) this summer, the typical time for such zones to form. The large end of the estimate is roughly the size of the state of New Jersey, and would be the largest dead zone ever recorded. The biggest one recorded to date, in 2002, reached 8,481 square miles (21,966 square km). Read More...

Nobody who was there at the time, from the most seasoned astrophysicist to the most inexperienced science reporter, is likely to forget a press conference at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in San Antonio, Texas, in January 1996. It was there that Geoffrey W. Marcy, an observer then at San Francisco State University, announced that he and his observing partner, R. Paul Butler, then at the University of California, Berkeley, had discovered the second and third planets ever found orbiting a sunlike star. The first such planet, 51 Pegasi b, had been announced by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva a few months earlier—but a single detection could have been a fluke or even a mistake. Now Marcy was able to say confidently that it had been neither. “Planets,” he told the crowd, “aren't rare after all.” Read More...

Nobody who was there at the time, from the most seasoned astrophysicist to the most inexperienced science reporter, is likely to forget a press co n ference at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in San Antonio, Texas, in January 1996. It was there that Geoffrey W. Marcy, an observer then at San Francisco State University, announced that he and his observing partner, R. Paul Butler, then at the University of California, Berkeley, had discovered the second and third planets ever found orbiting a sunlike star. The first such planet, 51 Pegasi b, had been announced by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva a few months earlier—but a single detection could have been a fluke or even a mistake. Now Marcy was able to say confidently that it had been neither. “Planets,” he told the crowd, “aren't rare after all.” Read More...

A hole opens up in the street and a fluorescent green fluid appears inside. What is that stuff?It sounds like a scene from an episode of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a Nickelodeon slime show or a toxic waste dump.But this isn’t science fiction, this sinkhole filled with fluorescent green goo is reality and it’s located on a Philadelphia street. Steven Reitz can prove it. The Northern Liberties resident shot a photo of the radioactive-looking sinkhole along Randolph Street near Girard Avenue last week. Read More...

As many as 200,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Brazil's biggest cities on Monday in a swelling wave of protest tapping into widespread anger at poor public services, police violence and government corruption.The marches, organized mostly through snowballing social media campaigns, blocked streets and halted traffic in more than a half-dozen cities, including Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Brasilia, where demonstrators climbed onto the roof of Brazil's Congress building and then stormed it. Read More...

Humans have dreamed of taking control of the weather long before Superman and James Bond villains plotted world domination. Growing concerns over climate change and major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the deadly tornado outbreaks in Oklahoma have only increased our desire to stop severe weather in its tracks. We've put vehicles on Mars and invented the Internet — why can't we alter the weather?It hasn't been for lack of trying. In the last 200 years, the clouds have proven a resilient adversary, according to the Boston Globe, resisting well-funded and imaginative attempts at manipulation by meteorologists, physicists and hobbyists. Read More...

Amid growing fears of a massive electromagnetic pulse hit from either a solar flare or a terrorist nuclear bomb, House Republicans on Tuesday will unveil a plan to save the nation's electric grid from an attack that could mean lights out for 300 million Americans. Dubbed the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act, the legislation would push the federal government to install grid-saving devices such as surge protectors to protect against an attack. It is critical that we protect our major transformers from cascading destruction. The Shield Act encourages industry to develop standards necessary to protect our electric infrastructure against both natural and man-made EMP events, said Rep. Trent Franks, the Arizona Republican who is offering up the bipartisan bill. Read More...

America's industrialized food system, the very existence of which is almost fully dependent on an endless availability of cheap oil, copious amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, untested genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), and various intense processing methods, is in its final death throes. And the ultimate consequence of this slow debacle is pointing to an end to the age of cheap food, which begs the question, are you prepared?Historic drought conditions throughout much of the U.S. this past summer have left many staple crops like corn and soy largely decimated, which is affecting practically all aspects of the food system. A substantial portion of the corn crop, for instance, is used to produce ethanol in accordance with U.S. green energy policies, which means fuel costs are rising in response to corn shortages. Rising fuel costs are thus driving up the cost of food that must be transported long distances via big rigs to grocery stores nationwide. Read More...

Read More...

Read More...

Maybe the fastest man in the world could run a 6-minute mile for 6 miles (10 kilometers) while a terrifying wall of water chased him through a coastal city. But most people couldn't. Yet a myth persists that a person could outrun a tsunami. That's just not possible, tsunami safety experts told LiveScience, even for Usain Bolt, one of the world's quickest sprinters. Getting to high ground or high elevation is the only way to survive the monster waves. I try to explain to people that it doesn't really matter how fast is coming in, the point is that you really shouldn't be there in the first place, said Rocky Lopes of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Tsunami Mitigation, Education and Outreach program. Read More...

When to get out of Dodge (GOOD) is the question a lot of survival minded people ask themselves. Sometimes, in the case of massive flooding or earthquake damage, the answer is obvious: get out now!But looking ahead to a time when the rule of law and the structure of our society may not be reliable, when do we know that it’s time to get out, to leave the security of our homes and, hopefully, move on to a safer location? Last month I asked a number of survival and preparedness experts to weigh in on this question. You can read Part 1 of their responses here (http://thesurvivalmom.com/2013/06/08/how-will-you-know-when-the-balloon-goes-up-advice-from-survival-experts/). Now for Part 2, another set of experts weigh in with their assessment of, “How will you know it’s time to get out of Dodge?” Read More...

The National Security Agency (NSA) is in the information harvesting business — and business is booming.That’s why the nation’s premier covert intelligence gathering organization has been building a million square-foot data mining complex in Bluffdale, Utah, that will house a 100,000 square foot “mission critical data center.” The NSA’s official mandate is to listen to and decode all foreign communications of interest to the security of the U.S. But given the fact the NSA already reportedly intercepts 1.7 billion American electronic records and communications a day, it makes sense that they would need to expand operations beyond its sprawling headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. Read More...

After the massive crash that rocked global markets in 2008, as Congress, central bankers and major financial institutions met in secret to mitigate the crisis, billionaires like Warren Buffet were buying up shares of some of the hardest hit companies.At the time, the world was literally on the brink (http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/confirmed-were-literally-on-the-brink-of-catastrophic-collapse_01062011) of an unprecedented economic collapse. It was so serious, in fact, that members of Congress were told (http://www.infowars.com/martial-law-will-be-declared-if-banker-bill-not-passed-in-house/) that should they fail to come to an agreement the fallout would leave the United States in such a state of disarray that martial law would be declared and tanks would be deployed to major American cities. Read More...

Britain is to urge the G8 to take action against the spread of drug-resistant microbes as medical and veterinary experts warn that co-ordinated international action is needed to prevent soaring rates of potentially lethal infections turning into a public health catastrophe.David Willetts, the science minister, will propose far-reaching measures that would clamp down on the overuse of antibiotics by GPs and hospital doctors. He will also try to restrict usage on farms and fisheries, where the drugs are blended with feed to boost yields. Read More...

Twenty-seven vehicles slammed into each other during a sandstorm that blinded drivers on Interstate 80 in rural northern Nevada, killing a truck driver, seriously injuring several other people and sapping already thin emergency resources, officials said.Humboldt County sheriff's dispatchers called in virtually every medical, law enforcement and fire worker in the sparsely populated area after drivers reported near-apocalyptic conditions Monday evening on I-80 at Winnemucca, according to officials at Humboldt General Hospital there. A mine rescue crew also assisted, while a charter bus helped transport victims. Read More...

What would you do if a 15 hour dust storm with winds up to 60 miles an hour hit your home and afterwards there were three foot drifts of dirt covering everything that you owned? As crazy as that sounds, that is exactly what is now happening in some areas of the western United States. Three years of severe drought has turned the soil of much of the western United States into a fine powder that the wind can easily pick up. As a result, we are seeing “apocalyptic” dust storms unlike anything the region has seen since the days of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Farmers and ranchers are literally watching their valuable topsoil being blown away by the wind and there is not a whole lot that they can do about it. Read More...

In America today there is a great rushing storm, a swirling hurricane of clashing opinions and ideologies that defy coherent organization and classification. This social tempest has been triggered by certain revelations among the general public on issues which we in the Liberty Movement have long been aware. The fact that our government is bought and paid for by international corporate interests, the fact that our government has positioned itself to spy on ALL Americans without warrant and without probable cause, the fact that our government is instituting policy initiatives that target common citizens as enemy combatants, the fact that every one of our Constitutional rights is being deliberately torn away; these things are not news to us, but to many once ignorant people, they are a shock to the system. Read More...

If your skies are clear early tomorrow morning, it might be worth your while to step outside and look for shooting stars.For a short time, maybe an hour (quite possibly less than that), stargazers might be treated to a brief flurry of meteor activity — or nothing at all. The uncertainty surrounding tomorrow's meteor shower is part of a mystery that goes back more than 80 years. On the evening of June 11, 1930 three members of the American Meteor Society (AMS) reported a bevy of meteor activity occurring between the hours of 10:15 and 10:45 p.m. local time in Maryland. Read More...

Tornadoes are well known to cause plenty of havoc on Earth, but who would've guessed that they were also hitting other areas of our solar system? A recent video released from NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory shows a speeded-up version of a 38-hour tornadic incident on the sun, an example of potentially dangerous space weather. Throughout the one-minute clip, multiple tornadoes can be seen making contact with the sun. According to Space.com’s YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/VideoFromSpace) page, the footage captured June 3-4 shows plasma moving across the sun’s surface, which is also commonly referred to as “sun tornadoes.” Read More...