|  Stunning Ice-Covered Great Lakes Seen from Space (Photo)  | A deep freeze has settled in over the Great Lakes this winter and a new image released by NASA shows the astonishing extent of the ice cover as seen from space. NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image of the lakes on the early afternoon of Feb. 19, 2014. At the time, 80.3 percent of the five lakes were covered in ice, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL), part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Earlier this month, ice cover over the Great Lakes hit 88 percent for the first time since 1994.
| Read More » 'Priceless' Dinosaur Track Stolen Near Moab  | A three-toed dinosaur track has vanished from public lands in Utah, and Bureau of Land Management officials are looking for help recovering the fossil. "They're priceless to us," said Rebecca Hunt-Foster, a paleontologist at the BLM field office in Moab. The BLM became aware of the theft on Tuesday night, when a local outfitter who gave tours of the area noticed a triangular slab of rock about 1 foot long and 3 feet wide (30 by 90 centimeters) missing. "There are at least three different types of dinosaurs that have left tracks there," Hunt-Foster told Live Science.
| Read More » Deadly 'Sneaker Waves' Get Warnings, Thanks to Forecaster  | That's the pervasive message along the coasts of Northern California and parts of Oregon, and for good reason: On a seemingly perfect sunny day, when tame-looking waves are lapping the sand, the unwary beachgoer can be bowled over and pulled into the cold Pacific waters by an unexpectedly large wave surging up the beach. Sneaker waves, as they are colloquially known, can strike seemingly without warning and have been responsible for numerous deaths in recent years. "For much of the West Coast, sneaker waves kill more people than all other weather hazards combined," Troy Nicolini, a forecaster with the National Weather Service office in Eureka, Calif., said during a presentation on the threat at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, held in Atlanta earlier this month. Nicolini, a California native who has worked in the Eureka area for 15 years, initially thought that the deaths that resulted from these stealthy waves were a matter of people being careless near a dangerous ocean, but in time he started to notice a pattern in the accounts of those who survived the onslaught: The larger waves were always preceded and followed by a calm ocean, disappearing just as quickly as they came.
| Read More » Tornadoes in February? Why That's Not Uncommon  | An outbreak of severe weather battered parts of the midwestern and southern United States yesterday (Feb. 20) with damaging winds and strong storms, including several tornadoes reported in Illinois and Georgia. The same system is working its way over the East Coast today (Feb. 21), with several tornado warnings and watches issued already. But it's February, not April, when tornado season usually gears up, so what gives? While the main tornado season typically stretches from spring to early summer, wintertime twisters are not altogether uncommon, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.
| Read More » Cat Nights: See Lions and a Lynx in the Evening Sky  | They're sharing space with three big cats, Leo, Leo Minor, and Lynx, which are all found relatively close together. The United States cat population is significantly higher than the dog population (82 million versus 72 million), according to Hal Herzog, a professor of psychology at Western Carolina University. Two centuries ago, some star atlases depicted a cat: Felis, the creation of an 18th-century Frenchman, Joseph Jerome Le Francais de Lalande (1732-1807). The starry sky has worried me quite enough in my life, so that now I can have my joke with it."
| Read More » UrtheCast Cameras Outside Space Station Send First Data Home  | The two commercial cameras that will keep a constant watch over Earth from outside the International Space Station have beamed their first bits of test data back home. The Vancouver-based company UrtheCast has not publicly released any pictures of videos showing its cameras' view of the planet just yet. But company officials announced this week that they have successfully downlinked camera data to the ground station in Moscow from both their high-resolution camera and medium-resolution camera. They've even acquired test imagery from the medium-resolution device.
| Read More » Did Nazis Study Insects for Use in Biological Warfare?  | Was the Nazi SS studying insects with the intent of launching a bug-based attack? Scholars have known for decades the feared SS (Schutzstaffel or "protection squadron") in Nazi Germany had established an entomological research institute at the Dachau concentration camp. Documents that survived World War II describe experiments related to biological warfare. After reading through historical documents, including those descriptions of experiments and their results, a modern-day entomologist has concluded the SS wanted to create creepy-crawly weapons.
| Read More » Tadpoles Turn to Cannibalism Only When Desperate  | Though seemingly docile creatures, tadpoles can get snippy when hungry, and sometimes end up eating each other when the stakes are high. Many species of frogs, salamanders and other amphibians demonstrate some degree of cannibalism, particularly when resources are scarce. Researchers based at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada wondered whether cannibalism was the most nutritious dietary option for tadpoles — common throughout northern North America. "Any species that is the same as your own would theoretically be an ideal diet because they are going to contain all of the nutrients that you require for growth and development, in supposedly the correct proportions," study co-author Dale Jefferson told Live Science.
| Read More » Why Some Rich, Educated Parents Avoid Vaccines Health officials in the San Francisco Bay Area are warning local residents that thousands of them may have been exposed to measles, a potentially deadly disease that was once eliminated in the United States but has rebounded in recent years. The latest measles threat started when an infected student at the University of California, Berkeley, rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train system earlier this month, possibly exposing hundreds of thousands of people to the disease, the Los Angeles Times reports. And in a worrisome trend, it's the college-educated residents of affluent areas who are skipping vaccinations. "It's that whole natural, BPA-free, hybrid-car community that says, 'We're not going to put chemicals in our children,'" Dr. Nina Shapiro, of UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, told Salon.com. Read More » | |
