Magnetic north pole drifting fast

BBC NEWS: "The Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America so fast that it could end up in Siberia within 50 years, scientists have said. The shift could mean that Alaska will lose its northern lights, or auroras, which might then be more visible in areas of Siberia and Europe. The magnetic poles are different from geographic poles, the surface points marking the axis of Earth's rotation. Magnetic poles are known to migrate and, occasionally, swap places. 'This may be part of a normal oscillation and it will eventually migrate back toward Canada,' Joseph Stoner, a palaeomagnetist at Oregon State University, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco."

Women With Breast Cancer Face Increased Risk Of Developing A Second Cancer

A new large-scale study on women with breast cancer found a 25 percent increase in the risk of developing a new non-breast cancer compared to women without cancer. The study, published online December 8, 2005 in the International Journal of Cancer, the official journal of the International Union Against Cancer (UICC), is available via Wiley InterScience (http:/%u200B/%u200Bwww.interscience.wiley.com/%u200Bjournal/%u200Bijc).

Scientists: Fissure Could Become New Ocean

Yahoo! News: "ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Ethiopian, American and European researchers have observed a fissure in a desert in the remote northeast that could be the 'birth of a new ocean basin,' scientists said Friday. Researchers from Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. have been observing the 37-mile long fissure since it split open in September in the Afar desert and estimate it will take a million years to fully form into an ocean, said Dereje Ayalew, who leads the team of 18 scientists studying the phenomenon. The fissure, now 13 feet wide, formed in just three weeks after a Sept. 14 earthquake in a barren region called Boina, some 621 miles north east of the capital, Addis Ababa, said Dereje."

NASA in fight over lost UFO records

Space: "PITTSBURGH - Researchers and witnesses who believe a UFO landed in the woods of western Pennsylvania 40 years ago are marking another anniversary today: two years since a lawsuit was filed to get NASA to release records of what happened.A National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman says there's no cover-up: The 'UFO' was a Russian satellite but government records documenting it have been lost.Leslie Kean, an investigative reporter backed by the Sci Fi Channel, and a group connected to the cable TV channel sued NASA two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.Kean wants files on what happened Dec. 9, 1965, in the unincorporated hamlet of Kecksburg, about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Witnesses described a fireball in the evening sky, and a metallic, acorn-shaped object about 12 to 15 feet high and 8 to 12 feet in diameter that landed gently in the woods, according to media accounts at the time."

Great Lakes near ecological breakdown: scientists - Yahoo! News

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Stresses from polluted rivers to invasive species threaten to trigger an ecological breakdown in the Great Lakes, a group of scientists hoping to sway U.S. environmental policy said on Thursday. Seventy-five scientists who study the world's largest collective body of fresh water released their report on the myriad problems that need cleanup or restoration ahead of two key policy announcements next week. 'This is just a critical period for the Great Lakes,' Andy Buchsbaum, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Great Lakes office, said about next week's announcements. A task force comprising federal agencies, Congress, local government officials and regional Indian tribes is scheduled to release its much-anticipated final plan for preserving the Great Lakes requested by U.S.

The Hubris of the Humanities

The Hubris of the Humanities - New York Times: "The best argument against 'intelligent design' has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we're an argument at best for 'mediocre design.' But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.The problem isn't just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you. What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people.'The great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had,' C. P. Snow wrote in his classic essay, 'The Two Cultures.'The counterargument is that we can always hire technicians in Bangalore, while it's Shakespeare and Goethe who teach us the values we need to harness science for humanity. There's something to that. If President Bush were about to attack Iraq all over again, he would be better off reading Sophocles - to appreciate the dangers of hubris - than studying the science of explosives. But don't pin too much faith on the civilizing influence of a liberal education: the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe. And similar arguments were used in past centuries to assert that all a student needed was Greek, Latin and familiarity with the Bible - or, in China, to argue that all the elites needed were the Confucian classics. Without some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines."

Mars Express: We have H20

MARSIS Uncovers Underground Ice The upper image is a radargram from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), showing data from the subsurface of Mars in the layered deposits that surround the north pole. The lower image shows the position of the ground track on a topographic map of the area based on Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data. The images are 458 kilometers (285 miles) wide. The MARSIS echo trace splits into two traces to the right of center, at the point where the ground track crosses from the smooth plains onto the elevated layered deposits on the right. The upper trace is the echo from the surface of the deposits, while the lower trace is interpreted to be the boundary between the lower surface of the deposits and the underlying material. The strength of the lower echo suggests that the intervening material is nearly pure water ice. The time delay between the two echoes reaches a maximum of 21 microseconds at the right of the image, corresponding to a thickness of 1.8 kilometer (1.1 mile) of ice. The total elevation difference shown in the topographic map is about 2 kilometers (1.2 mile) between the lowest surface (magenta) and the highest (orange). MARSIS is an instrument on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. NASA and the Italian Space Agency jointly funded the instrument. The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter is an instrument on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. Credit: ASI/NASA/ESA/Univ. of Rome/JPL/MOLA Science Team

Scientists Say Slower Atlantic Currents Could Mean a Colder Europe - New York Times

By ANDREW C. REVKIN Published: December 1, 2005 Scientists say they have measured a significant slowing in the Atlantic currents that carry warm water toward Northern Europe. If the trend persists, they say, the weather there could cool considerably in coming decades. Some climate experts have said the potential cooling of Europe was paradoxically consistent with global warming caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping 'greenhouse' emissions. But several experts said it was premature to conclude that the new measurements, to be described today in the journal Nature, meant that such a change was already under way.The currents, branching off from the Gulf Stream, are part of an oceanic system that disperses tropical heat toward the poles and makes Northern Europe far warmer than its latitude would suggest.Warming, in theory, could stall the salty, sun-heated, north-flowing currents by causing fresh water to build up in high-latitude seas as ice melts and more precipitation falls.The scientists, from the National Oceanography Center in Britain, measured sea temperature, currents and other conditions across the Atlantic from the Bahamas to Africa last year and found a 30 percent drop in the flow of warming waters since a similar set of measurements were taken in 1957. The team, led by Harry L. Bryden, wrote that even though they had measurements from only 5 years out of the past 50, the pattern of change seen at various depths supported the idea that the shift was a significant trend and not random variability."