Reported and Edited by Linda Moulton Howe
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September 17, 2000 Sinop, Turkey - This week a discovery twelve miles off the northern coast of Turkey near the town of Sinop (SIN-op) was announced that could force archaeologists and anthropologists to rewrite history about the relationship of Neolithic cultures in Europe, Asia and Mesopotamia seven thousand years ago.
September 12, 2000 Washington, D. C. - Today at NASA headquarters in the nation's capitol, astrophysicists presented new x-ray images by the Chandra X-ray Observatory that indicate something with the mass of at least 500 of our suns is packed into a region about the size of our moon in a nearby galaxy called M82. Such concentrated mass is probably a black hole. And if so, it is the first discovery of such a large black hole outside galactic centers. Until now, scientists have found evidence of small black holes only ten to twenty times bigger than our sun (one solar mass) or massive ones millions of times more massive than our sun, but only at the center of galaxies. This new discovery is at least 600 light years from the center of M82 and could be a new type of black hole that evolves and grows from the merger of many black holes. Further, the scientists reported that the intensity of the X-rays was rising and falling every 600 seconds, a ten minute cycle. Cycles are more consistent with matter falling into a black hole than the collapse of one gigantic star.
September 10, 2000 Greenbelt, Maryland - The ozone hole over the Antarctic is the biggest it's ever been and it's only the beginning of September. Usually Antarctic ozone depletion starts in July during the South Pole's winter. That's when extremely cold air intensifies ozone destruction, reaching a peak by the end of September and into October. But this year, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland reports that already the ozone hole is larger than all of the Antarctic and extends over the southern tip of South America. That's 11 million square miles and breaks all previous records. A spokesman at the United Nations World Meteorological Observation agency in Geneva, Switzerland told reporters: "It is remarkable to find these low values so early in September, perhaps one or two weeks earlier than in any previous year."
"If the prediction of total Arctic ice melt by 2030 is correct, then it is truly frightening because I think it would result in huge ecological changes to the polar oceans, the loss of species, changes of balance. The effects on climate change around the Northern Hemisphere particularly could be quite dramatic."
- Ian Sterling, Ph.D., Zoologist and Research Scientist
September 10, 2000 Churchill, Manitoba, Canada - The Arctic and northern latitudes have been singled out by the World Widelife Fund as the most vulnerable to the rapid rate of global warming. Their sobering statistic is that 20 percent of all species in northern environments could die out as melting ice and tundra completely change the habitats.
"I have used the Hubble quite extensively to look at many dying stars and we've seen many mysterious and beautiful shapes and structures, but we've never seen such a jet-like structure."
- Raghvendra Sahai, Ph.D., Astrophysicist, Jet Propulsion Lab
September 6, 2000 Pasadena, California - At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, astrophysicists are puzzled by a bright object about 8,000 light years from earth in the constellation Centaurus. It is giving off large jet pulses that are more typical of star births. But there is also an accretion disk of gas and dust often associated with a dying star. The paradox of birth and death characteristics is forcing a re-evaluation of what has been considered a planetary nebula since the 1990s.
September 3, 2000 -
West Nile Virus in New Jersey Crows
This past week, 165 more birds - mostly crows - in central and northern New Jersey have been confirmed to be infected with the West Nile Fever virus. One was found on the campus of Princeton University. This brings the total in New Jersey this year to 322 infected birds.
July 9, 2000 New Bern, North Carolina - In southeastern Europe the past several days, temperatures above 100 degrees in many places - and up to 113 degrees in the Turkey and Romania region - have killed at least 38 people. Strong winds from the Sahara desert began blowing on Friday causing hundreds of fires in Greece, Italy and Croatia. And this is only the first of July. What happens in August and September?
July 2, 2000 Stony Brook, New York - Biologists in the Marine Sciences Research Center at State University of New York at Stony Brook are puzzled by the vigorous brown tide algal bloom this spring that has killed off most of the shellfish in Long Island's Great South Bay. Part of the problem, in addition to the more traditional link of algal blooms to pesticide and fertilizer runoffs from land, is global warming. Winter 2000 was warmer than normal and Spring 2000 was the warmest spring on record in the United States. But no one expected brown tide algae to persist through the winter and then flourish and spread as far as it has in the Great South Bay.
June 26, 2000 Boulder, Colorado - Major breaking news this past week was NASA's press conference in Washington, D. C. at NASA Headquarters on Thursday, June 22nd, to announce 250 photographs of widespread areas on Mars that closely resemble gullies and springs of water on earth.