There’s a new viral pneumonia spreading around Western Ukraine at an alarming rate, described as “rather serious”. While the world’s concerns center around H1N1 at the moment, this is seemingly a new type of flu (or as the article says, “flue”) that has already claimed lives and has enough people sick with spread potential that emergency meetings are being called and people are being advised to stay home.
Learn more about the scare here.
This past Monday, March 1st, an asteroid whizzed by Earth, flying between the Earth and the moon, just 66,000 km away from us. It was at least 65 feet wide (possibly more than double that), and was travelling 12 miles per second. Now that’s hardly an extinction level event, but it sure would hurt. One of those lands on a small town and we’ll start to remember to respect that which falls from the sky.
Here’s the full article.
According to Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D), America (and in turn the world) dodged political and economic collapse and turmoil last September. After an electronic half-trillion-dollar run at the banks in the space of an hour or two, the Treasury took some measures to resolve the matter, further described here, with an accompanying video.
Nothing can inspire a sharpening of pitchforks more than a global economic collapse, afterall, and the current economic situation is far from over. If this is truly a near-miss on the scale the man describes, then who knows what’s to come.
Time to buy some gold. Yarr.
Researchers at Aberdeen University have created a robot that learns and semi-sentiently manages its own evolution.
As this article notes as it reports, this is very much asking for it. You can just picture a couple of Scottish scientists peeling out of the lab parking lot, chased by their Scottish robot fiend with an icy stare and karate chop hands sprinting towards the rear bumper, who just realized that he should turn his limbs into spinning buzzsaw lasers in order to better compost you and drink your oil.
Imagine you’re playing piano and you think “fuck, chicks love piano - I could use a few more fingers” and then you bloody make it happen. The robot social scene’s shaping up to be cooler than ours.
Ok - there’s good news and bad news. I always start with bad news.
The bad news is that the presence of large amounts of solar particles near the Earth’s magnetic field show that the shield that normally keeps these particles out isn’t in good shape. We’re in the low point of the solar cycle at this point, but when it picks up around 2012, we can expect this solar issue to “interfere with satellites’ power sources, endanger spacewalkers, and even knock out power grids on Earth.”
The good news is, the cool ass colors in the aurora found at the Earth’s poles will be magnified and intensified as solar activity increases.
Full story here.
