An earthquake with a magnitude of at least seven on the Richter scale shook the northern portion of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island Wednesday.
The quake at a depth of 35 km near the Talaud islands between Sulawesi and the southern Philippines occurred at 1734 GMT, the US Geological Survey said.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said no major tsunamis were expected but that such waves were possible within 100 km of the epicentre. It said the quake had a magnitude of 7.4.
A Komodo dragon at the Virginia Aquarium bit the hand that fed it — literally — but aquarium officials said the incident Friday was likely more due to excitement than betrayal as the popular expression implies.
The condition of the reptile keeper was not immediately available at Sentara Virginia Beach Hospital, but the injury was not life-threatening, the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center said in a statement.
“Sanchez”, the 3-year-old Komodo dragon, was probably excited by the prospect of eating and bit the worker in a “feed response,” said Chip Harshaw, curator of reptiles and mammals.
“These kind of things happen when you work with animals like this. There is an inherent risk, and we know that,” he said.
Harshaw said he came to the worker’s aid as her hand was in the reptile’s grip. It released the worker’s hand after Harshaw put his hand on the neck of the 4 1/2-foot, 20-pound carnivore.
The biting incident was in an area that could not be viewed by visitors, the aquarium said. The aquarium has two other Komodo dragons.
Komodo dragons, which can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh as much as 365 pounds, are only found in the wild on Rinca and Komodo island in eastern Indonesia. There are believed to be 4,000 left in the world.
A new research has determined that contrary to earlier projections, few developing countries will be able to afford more efficient technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades.
The study, by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado, warns that continuing economic and technological disparities will make it more difficult than anticipated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and it underscores the challenges that poorer nations face in trying to adapt to global warming.
Many developing countries, such as Mexico, are failing to adapt technologies that are substantially more efficient and could result in reduced carbon dioxide emissions.
“There is simply no evidence that developing countries will somehow become wealthier and be in a position to install more environmentally friendly technologies,” said Patricia Romero Lankao, an NCAR sociologist, who is the lead author of the study.
“We always knew that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was going to be a challenge, but now it looks like we underestimated the magnitude of this problem,” she added.
As a result, most industrialized and developing countries are increasing their emissions of carbon dioxide.
Their economic growth is outstripping the increase in efficiency, and the demand for more cars, larger houses, and other goods and services is leading to ever-increasing emissions of carbon dioxide.
Many of the products these nations consume come from developing countries that are producing more but not gaining the wealth needed to increase efficiency.
As a result, most industrialized countries, as well as developing countries with growing economies, are increasing their emissions of carbon dioxide.
Overall, global emissions grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the 1990s and 3.3 percent from 2000 to 2006.
The United States and other technologically advanced nations are under pressure to reduce their per capita carbon dioxide emissions, while developing countries are being urged to adopt cleaner technology.
The research suggests that both goals will be difficult to achieve.
Even though the developing nations analyzed by the research team generally have smaller economies, they are responsible for about 47 percent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse gases.
If developing countries fail to become significantly more prosperous, they may be unable to protect their residents from some of the more dangerous impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise and more-frequent droughts.
While people’s awareness about toxic chemical exposure from household items-like bisphenol A in some baby bottles and lead in some toys-is said to have risen in recent times, a new study suggests that most women do not readily connect typical household products with personal chemical exposure and related adverse health effects.
“People more readily equate pollution with large-scale contamination and environmental disasters, yet the products and activities that form the backdrop to our everyday lives - electronics, cleaners, beauty products, food packaging - are a significant source of daily personal chemical exposure that accumulates over time,” said sociologist Rebecca Gasior Altman, who received a Ph.D. from Brown in this year, and is the lead author of the study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Altman revealed that the research team studied how women interpreted and reacted to information about chemical contamination in their homes and bodies.
A review of their personal chemical exposure data suggested that most women were surprised and puzzled at the number of contaminants detected, said the author.
The researcher further revealed that the women in the study initially had difficulty relating the chemical results for their homes, located in rural and suburban communities, with their images of environmental problems, which they associated with toxic contamination originating outside the home from military or industrial activities, accidents or dumping.
“This work underscores the value of having sociologists collaborate with life scientists to examine the personal experience of environmental problems. While there has been a rapid rise in bio-monitoring and household exposure assessment, we’re lacking social science data on how people respond to research that involves their homes and bodies. Our findings are among the first to examine the full ‘exposure experience’,” said Brown University sociologist Phil Brown.
Altman said: “This research illustrates how science is beginning to play a paramount role in discovering and redefining environmental problems that are not immediately perceptible through direct experience. Pollution at home has been a blind spot for society. The study documents that an important shift occurs in how people understand environmental pollution, its sources and possible solutions as they learn about chemicals from everyday products that are detectable in urine samples and the household dust collecting under the sofa.”
While some scientists and government officials are afraid that the findings of the study might provoke fears, Altman and colleagues insist that people who have learnt about chemicals in their homes and bodies are eager for more information about how typical household products can expose them to chemicals that may affect health.
The study involved 25 women who had participated in an earlier Silent Spring Institute’s Household Exposure Study (HES), which tested for 89 environmental pollutants in air, dust and urine samples from 120 Cape Cod households.
The study found about 20 target chemicals per home on average, including pesticides and compounds from plastics, cleaners, furniture, cosmetics, and other products.
According to the authors, about all of the HES participants chose to learn their personal results, and the 25 selected for the current research were interviewed about their experiences learning the results for their home and the study as a whole.
Bolivian farmer Primo Rivera had long wondered about the dents in a rocky hill near his home. Paleontologists solved the mystery this month: they are fossilized dinosaur footprints — the oldest in Bolivia.
“I used to come to look at the prints when I was a kid … but I didn’t know what had made them,” said Rivera, 35, who lives in the southern province of Chuquisaca.
The fossilized footsteps that intrigued Rivera for two decades are thought to be about 140 million years old, much older than other dinosaur prints found in the Andean country.
“The footprints we’ve found are important because they’re the oldest ever found in Bolivia … and the oldest footprints of Ankylosaurus ever found in the Southern Hemisphere,” said Argentine paleontologist Sebastian Apesteguia in Buenos Aires.
Apesteguia, who led a two-week expedition sponsored by Chuquisaca’s regional government, thinks the footprints belong to three different kinds of dinosaurs, including Ankylosaurus, an armored herbivore.
He said some of the prints were about 14 inches long, suggesting that the dinosaurs were “medium-sized … about nine or 10 meters (about 30 feet) in length.”
Close to the larger prints, the paleontologists found smaller ones that probably belonged to baby dinosaurs, indicating the offspring “were given some kind of care,” Apesteguia said.
Rivera said he first spotted the imprints about 20 years ago, but could never figure out what they were.
A few years ago, he visited a dinosaur park near Sucre, Chuquisaca’s regional capital, and noticed that the dinosaur footprints on show resembled the holes near his parent’s home.
Sucre is renowned for having the largest set of fossilized dinosaur footsteps ever discovered.
When Rivera bumped into members of Apesteguia’s team doing research near his village of Icla, and told them about the holes.
“It was a stroke of luck that this man had been intrigued by the footprints since he was a child,” said paleontologist Pablo Gallina, who along with Apesteguia, works for Argentina’s Felix de Azara Natural History Foundation.
Scattered showers were forecast Tuesday from the Gulf Coast to the upper Midwest, while it was expected to pour in the Pacific Northwest and light rain could linger in the Great Lakes.
Severe weather was possible in eastern Texas, which could see moderate to heavy rain. Lake-effect snow and rain was likely to diminish in New England, though showers could stick around over the eastern Great Lakes.
Warm, dry conditions were forecast for the Southeast, where fire danger threatened the eastern Gulf states.
As much as 4 inches of rain was forecast for Oregon and Washington. Scattered rain and snow showers were expected to persist over the central Rockies.
Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Monday ranged from a low of minus 1 degree at Hazelton, N.D., to a high of 89 degrees at McAllen, Texas.
An animal rights activist who as a child was the voice of “Lucy” in several “Peanuts” television specials has been convicted of contempt of court.
A judge Thursday found that Pamelyn Ferdin violated an injunction barring the harassment of University of California, Los Angeles faculty members who do research on animals.
She demonstrated outside the researchers’ homes and distributed fliers that included their photographs, home addresses and phone numbers.
Ferdin faces up to five days in jail and a $1,000 fine. She says she has “every right to hand out the leaflets” and plans to appeal.
Ferdin also appeared as a child on “The Odd Couple” and “The Brady Bunch.”
The influential former president of OPEC’s second largest oil producer Iran on Friday called the world financial crisis a tsunami which has dragged down oil prices and caused a huge loss of revenue.
“This is the first wave of the tsunami to reach us. The oil price has fallen from 147 dollars a barrel to around 64 dollars. This is a huge loss” for Iran, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said in a Friday prayer sermon on state radio.
“Our economists and government and parliament officials should cooperate and be prepared. The first wave has arrived and it was dangerous for oil-producing nations,” added Rafsanjani.
He heads the Expediency Council, Iran’s top arbitration panel, and also the Assembly of Experts which supervises the work of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“We have to be able to control future such waves or they will inflict serious harm on our society, especially the poor,” Rafsanjani said.
Oil prices hit record highs in July of above 147 dollars a barrel, but plunged to their lowest for 17 months on Friday, despite news that OPEC will cut output by 1.5 million barrels per day.
New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for December delivery, tumbled to 62.85 dollars a barrel — a price last seen in May 2007.
Ahead of Friday’s OPEC meeting in Vienna, Iran urged a cut in the cartel’s output to combat the sharp dive in oil prices as the world battles a financial crisis experts say it is the worst since last century’s Great Depression.
Rushing to ease endangered species rules before President Bush leaves office, Interior Department officials are attempting to review 200,000 comments from the public in just 32 hours, according to an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has called a team of 15 people to Washington this week to pore through letters and online comments about a proposal to exclude greenhouse gases and the advice of federal biologists from decisions about whether dams, power plants and other federal projects could harm species. That would be the biggest change in endangered species rules since 1986.
In an e-mail last week to Fish and Wildlife managers across the country, Bryan Arroyo, the head of the agency’s endangered species program, said the team would work eight hours a day starting Tuesday to the close of business on Friday to sort through the comments. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne’s office, according to the e-mail, will be responsible for analyzing and responding to them.
The public comment period ended last week, which initiated the review.
House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., whose own letter opposing the changes is among the thousands that will be processed, called the 32-hour deadline a “last-ditch attempt to undermine the long-standing integrity of the Endangered Species program.”
At that rate, according to a committee aide’s calculation, 6,250 comments would have to be reviewed every hour. That means that each member of the team would be reviewing at least seven comments each minute.
It usually takes months to review public comments on a proposed rule, and by law the government must respond before a rule becomes final.
“It would seem very difficult for them in four days to respond to so many thoughtful comments in an effective way,” said Eric Biber, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Along with other law professors across the country, Biber sent in 70 pages of comment.
Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall told the AP on Tuesday that the short time frame for processing the comments was requested by Kempthorne and would set a record.
“There is an effort here to see if this can be completed” before the administration is out, Hall said. He said the goal was to have the rule to the White House by early November. In May, the administration set a Nov. 1 deadline for all final regulations.
How fast the rule is finished could determine how hard it is to undo.
A new administration could freeze any pending rules. But if the regulation is final before the next president takes office, reversing it would require going through the entire review and public comment period again — a process that could take months and that sometimes has taken years.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama already has said he would reverse the proposal. Congress also could overturn the rules through legislation, but that could take even longer. Sen. John McCain’s campaign has not taken a position on the Bush administration’s proposed change in endangered species regulations.
Environmentalists said the move was the latest attempt by the Bush administration to overrule Congress, which for years has resisted efforts by conservative Republicans to make similar changes by amending the law.
Criticism from environmental groups and Democratic leaders prompted the Interior Department to extend the public comment period from 30 days to 60 days.
“Somebody has lit a fire under these guys to get this done in due haste,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive director of Defenders of Wildlife and the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Clinton.
The Interior Department received approximately 300,000 comments over the 60-day comment period, many critical of the changes. About 100,000 of them were form letters, Hall said.
Weather permitting, Chandrayaan 1, India’s first mission to the moon, will lift off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh Oct 22, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman G. Madhavan Nair said Friday.
Addressing reporters on his arrival here, Nair said the countdown for the unmanned mission was proceeding on schedule.
‘A final decision would be taken on the 17th of this month. All the tests so far have been successful. Weather permitting it should lift off on the 22nd,’ Nair said.
Once that happens, India will join the elite club of space-faring nations that have the wherewithal to undertake such complex and challenging missions.
The Chandrayaan-1 mission involves placing a 525-kg spacecraft in lunar orbit to help expand scientific knowledge about the moon besides upgrading India’s technological competence and providing challenging opportunities for planetary research to the younger generation.
