Reported and Edited by Linda Moulton Howe
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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.
June 18, 2000 Asheville, North Carolina - This weekend, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center announced that this spring of 2000 has been the warmest on record for the United States. NOAA reports that during this spring season, "every state in the continental U. S. was warmer than its long-term average. ... The extremely warm temperatures contributed to worsening drought conditions in many areas of the country. Parts of the Southeast, Midwest and
- Robert O. Becker, M. D., Orthopedic Surgeon
May 14, 2000 London, England - The British government this past week received a medical research recommendation that controls be placed on mobile phone use, especially for all young people under the age of sixteen. Tayside University Hospitals in Scotland reported that in its study of the sort of microwave radiation emitted by cell phones on worms - scientists discovered changes in proteins consistent with cooking of the tissues. The British report said that children in particular are considered to be at risk because their nervous systems are still developing and because the smaller size of a child's skull allows greater absorption into the brain tissue of the low level microwaves emitted by mobile phones. Right now in Britain, one in four mobile phone users is under 18 years of age.
"Foremost is the rapidness with which the water level has dropped three feet over the past two years. On Lakes Michigan and Huron, this is the largest two year drop that we've had in our 140 years of record."
- Frank H. Quinn, Ph.D., May 2000 Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory
May 7, 2000 Ann Arbor, Michigan - Drought has taken hold in the Great Lakes in a severity not seen since the mid 1960s and the 1930s. With water levels in the lakes near record lows, big cargo ships can no longer carry the heavy loads they used to. So far in 2000, the Great Lakes Carriers Association estimates it's having to lighten each trip by about 8,000 tons and the costs are climbing. For example, iron ore and coal are valued at $35/ton per trip. So, every 8,000 pounds left behind to get a cargo ship across the shrinking lake waters is a loss of $300,000 in cargo.
April 30, 2000 Raleigh, North Carolina - There was an astonishing discovery in the Hell's Creek sandstone of northwestern South Dakota back in 1993: a 13 foot long dinosaur with a heart in its rib cage. It's all fossilized, of course, but now modern CT scanning technology has confirmed it's four chambered with one aorta like warm-blooded animals today, not the cold-blooded reptilian metabolism assumed for dinosaurs over the past 150 years.
April 24, 2000 MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts Ten years ago on April 24, 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was launched with its imperfect mirror. Later astronauts repaired it. Since then, Hubble has provided some of the most astounding photographs of the universe over the past decade. And recently, Hubble and the Chandra X-Ray telescopes were focused on a spot in the Big Dipper about 6,000 light years from earth to help solve a mystery.
April 20, 2000 Greenbelt, Maryland - This winter, NASA and a European Commission sent two NASA research aircraft up to 70,000 feet above northern Sweden to measure gasses in the upper atmosphere. The specific concern was ozone levels. The stratosphere was much colder than normal this winter which makes ozone deterioration worse. And even though satellites and ground instruments monitor the atmosphere, there hadn't been direct measurement by instruments on a high flying plane since 1992. The result? More than 60 percent of the Arctic ozone at 11 miles above the North Polar region had been depleted.
April 16, 2000 Washington, D. C. - This past week, President Bill Clinton declared a large section of the Sequoia National Forest in California to be a "national monument" in order to permanently preserve the giant redwood trees. The President used his executive authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act which allows U. S. Presidents to safeguard objects of historic or scientific interest without going to Congress.
April 2, 2000 Santa Fe, New Mexico - The New Mexico legislature is in session and in February 2000 State Representative J. Andrew Kissner (Las Cruces, Dona Ana County) was successful in having a once-secret experimental microwave radar station at El Vado in Rio Arriba County north of Los Alamos added to the New Mexico State Historical Register. The importance of the El Vado radar site is underscored by the fact that its construction was specifically authorized by President Harry S. Truman himself.