Sunday, May 22, 2011

Flights in Risk:Iceland volcano erupts Again with 20 Kilometer Smoke Column

Iceland's most active volcano erupted on Saturday, hurling a plume of ash and smoke far into the sky, which aviation officials were closely monitoring after another volcano shut European airspace for days last year .
read here  and Here

Monday, May 16, 2011

Old levee breaches in Mississippi

The Mississippi River at Vicksburg crept to within inches of its 1927 record on Saturday, as residents anxiously watched flood waters invade their historic city.
read here 

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Atomic Clocks With Unprecedented Accuracy


 A team of physicists from the United States and Russia announced that it has developed a means for computing, with unprecedented accuracy, a tiny, temperature-dependent source of error in atomic clocks. Although small, the correction could represent a big step towards atomic timekeepers' longstanding goal of a clock with a precision equivalent to one second of error every 32 billion years -- longer than the age of the universe.
read here 

Saturday, May 14, 2011

On Pangaea, Latitude and Rain Dictated Where Species Lived

 More than 200 million years ago, mammals and reptiles lived in their own separate worlds on the supercontinent Pangaea, despite little geographical incentive to do so. Mammals lived in areas of twice-yearly seasonal rainfall; reptiles stayed in areas where rains came just once a year. Mammals lose more water when they excrete, and thus need water-rich environments to survive. Results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
read here