Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Solar alert: Incoming solar flare 11 a.m. EST

A coronal mass ejection (CME) produced by Saturday's M6-class flare is heading toward Earth. According to analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the cloud could deliver a glancing blow to our planet's magnetic field on July 31st around 1500 UT (+/- 7 hours) http://www.spaceweather.com/images2012/30jul12/forecasttrack_strip2.jpg

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

3.5 magnitude earthquake shakes Northern Utah

Cache County, Utah — A minor earthquake shook Northern Utah Friday afternoon. The earthquake occurred about 1 mile southeast of Trenton at 1:53 p.m. According to University of Utah Seismograph Stations, the quake registered as a 3.5 magnitude event. It was felt throughout Cache County, as well as in parts of southeastern Idaho. According to the United States Geological Survey, slight tremors registered in Woods Cross. Many people in the area felt the quake, but it did not cause any damage http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=21242255&s_cid=rss-148

Lightning kills pregnant Amish woman on due date

July 24, 2012 GARRETT, Pa. (AP) — A pregnant Amish woman picking berries in the woods near her Pennsylvania home was killed by lightning on her due date. The fetus also died. State police say 36-year-old Mary H. Yoder was with her husband and two children late Tuesday morning when a storm moved in. Yoder took shelter under a pine tree while her husband and the children ducked under a different tree. Police say lightning struck a few minutes later, killing Yoder and her fetus. Trooper Steven Limani tells the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that Tuesday was the due date.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

On the brink of depression; Dow down 181

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Europe is a tinderbox waiting for a spark. The euro-zone crisis has gone beyond the prospect of breaking up the euro to the threat of an economic collapse that could plunge the world into a second Great Depression, writes Darrell Delamaide. • Moody's 'core' warning flags yield-chasing risk | Yield on Spanish 10-year stays elevated The financial volatility in Europe may have created a situation that is now beyond the capacity of policy makers to control or curb. When an accomplished fixer like Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organization and the longtime chief of staff for former European Commission President Jacques Delors, describes the situation in Europe as “difficult, very difficult, very difficult, very difficult,” you know it is time to run for cover. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/euro-crisis-brings-world-to-brink-of-depression-2012-07-24

Monday, July 23, 2012

Lobstermen finding more odd colors in the catch

(AP) PORTLAND, Maine - When a 100-pound shipment of lobsters arrived at Bill Sarro's seafood shop and restaurant last month, it contained a surprise - six orange crustaceans that have been said to be a 1-in-10-million oddity.
"My butcher was unloading them and said, 'Oh, my gosh, boss, they sent us cooked dead lobsters,'" said Sarro, owner of Fresh Catch Seafood in Mansfield, Mass. "He then picked one up and it crawled up his arm." Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown. But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters - one color on one side, another on the other - have jumped. It's now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57478172/lobstermen-finding-more-odd-colors-in-the-catch/

Thursday, July 19, 2012

SOLAR ALERT: Giant sun flare explosion, almost X-class

Spaceweather.com July 19, 2012 - Sunspot complex AR1520-1521 erupted again on July 19th, this time producing an M7-class solar flare that almost crossed the threshold into X-territory. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash: The explosion produced a bright coronal mass ejection: movie. The cloud should miss Earth. Although the explosion occured on the other side of the sun's western limb, our planet could feel some effects. The blast site is magnetically connected to Earth by backward-spiralling lines of magnetic force. Protons accelerated by the flare are being guided to us by those lines of magnetism, and a mild radiation storm is underway. Solar flare alerts: text, voice.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Four nuclear power reactors shut down Wednesday

Updated: 11:35 a.m. - Several nuclear plants on the U.S. East Coast, including Exelon's Limerick nuclear plant, were shut down early Wednesday and New York's Consolidated Edison power company reduced the voltage in parts of Manhattan as the obsessive heat wave stressed the region's power system. http://www.mcall.com/

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

On 65th anniversary of Roswell ‘UFO’ crash, questions remain

Like Fox Mulder, some people still want to believe.
On July 8, 1947, a crash in Roswell, N.M., was the spark that started UFO fever burning in the U.S. And for some, that passion is just as intense today as when they first learned that a crash in the desert had been labeled a UFO -- and quickly re-labeled a weather balloon by government officials.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Magnitude 3.5 earthquake strikes near Big Bear City

LA Times - A shallow magnitude 3.5 earthquake was reported Thursday morning three miles from Big Bear City, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 11:18 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 2.5 miles.According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from the town of Big Bear Lake, 11 miles from Lucerne Valley, 28 miles from San Bernardino and 82 miles from the Los Angeles Civic Center. In the last 10 days, there have been two earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.

Monday, July 2, 2012

"Hot and hotter" forecast as heat wave bakes eastern U.S.

Reuters) - Relentless heat was forecast for much of the eastern United States for a fourth straight day on Monday, after violent storms killed at least 15 people and knocked out power to more than 3 million customers. "Hot and hotter will continue to be the story from the plains to the Atlantic Coast for the next few days," the National Weather Service said. Emergencies were declared in Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C., during the weekend because of damage from storms that unleashed hurricane-force winds across a 500-mile (800-kilometre) stretch of the mid-Atlantic region. Almost 2.4 million people from Illinois to Virginia were still without power Monday morning, with the biggest concentration of outages in the Washington, D.C. area.

Evidence of 'God particle' found

GENEVA (AP) -- Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist. But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle. Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle known as the Higgs boson - all but proving it exists - but doesn't allow them to say it has actually been glimpsed.

Washington-area outages ‘almost unprecedented’

Washington Times - Scorching heat adds to woes as residents wait for electricity - Outages numbered in the hundreds of thousands for a second day, as officials warned residents across Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia that power might not be restored until late in the week, and crews worked in temperatures nearing triple digits to make repairs from a devastating storm that claimed more than a dozen lives. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/1/area-outages-almost-unprecedented/?page=all#pagebreak

Welcome to World UFO Day

According to PanARMENIAN.Net,  July 2 marks World UFO Day dedicated to the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects. The first World UFO Day was celebrated in 2001.
This day is used to encourage governments to declassify their knowledge about sightings throughout the history. Many governments are believed to have gained exclusive information about UFO’s through their military departments.
A subject that still raises a lot of curiosity is the Roswell incident in 1947 when a believed UFO crashed in Roswell New Mexico, Conscious Life News said.
An unidentified flying object, often abbreviated UFO or U.F.O., is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object, often associated with extraterrestrial life.
Studies have established that the majority of UFO observations are misidentified conventional objects or natural phenomena—most commonly aircraft, balloons, noctilucent clouds, nacreous clouds, or astronomical objects such as meteors or bright planets with a small percentage even being hoaxes.
After excluding incorrect reports, however, most investigators have acknowledged that between 5% and 20% of reported sightings remain unexplained, and therefore can be classified as unidentified in the strictest sense. Many reports have been made by such trained observers as pilots, police, and the military; some have involved simultaneous radar tracking and visual accounts. Proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis suggest that these unexplained reports are of alien spacecraft, though various other hypotheses have been proposed.