February 11, 2001 Upton, New York - There was an announcement this week from the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York that has shaken up particle physicists. Something unknown is causing muons to wobble in a strong magnetic field differently than predicted. That could mean that the fundamental structure of the universe is not quite what physicists thought.
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February 11, 2001 Atlanta, Georgia - The London Times reported this week that animal feed protein contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as BSE or mad cow disease, is estimated to have reached 70 countries through exports by a British company between 1988 and 1996. The company, Prosper de Mulder based in Doncaster, northern England, admitted to the Times that its animal feed was exported as pig and poultry food which were not banned until 1996, but could still have been mixed up with cattle feed which was illegal. The BSE-contaminated pig and poultry food was exported to Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Malta, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Thailand. The United Nations is now warning all countries that have imported cattle or animal feed from western Europe, especially Britain, to be concerned about the risk of BSE and variant CJD.
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"We aren't aware of any mammalian decline of either this magnitude
or geographic extent. It's really kind of mind boggling, actually."
- Tim Tinker, Marine Ecologist, University of California, Santa Cruz
February 7, 2001 Santa Cruz, California -
Changing Environment and Impact On Animals
The past ten years have been the warmest in a thousand years; the Arctic ice cap has shrunk over the past three decades to about half the size it was.
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February 4, 2001 Denver, Colorado - This past week, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned countries around the world to be concerned about the risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) known as mad cow disease. In a formal statement, FAO said: "All countries which have imported cattle or meat and bone meal from Western Europe, especially Britain, during and since the 1980s can be considered at risk from the disease."
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"The idea of having a planet that really warmed 10 degrees Fahrenheit is rather baffling. That's the same change we saw back to the last Ice Age. And obviously that was a hugely different kind of world to live on. So, if we really experience something at that high end of temperature warming, it sounds like there is a possibility for widespread disaster."
January 28, 2001 New York City The largest decline in a mammal population ever recorded by modern scientists has occurred in the otter population of the Aleutian Islands off the west coast of Alaska. In the 1980s, as many as 100,000 otters inhabited the islands. Today, there are only about 6,000 left. And 70% of that decline occurred between 1992 and 2000, a rate of decline that scientists say is unprecedented for any mammal population in the world. Researchers have been trying to find out what happened. And the answer seems to be global warming. Warmer ocean currents in the Aleutians have driven out the huge population of seals and sea lions that used to be the staple food of killer whales. When the seals and sea lions disappeared, the whales turned to otters for food. As water temperatures increased, so did the salmon population. Salmon have attracted sharks. So, in a few short years a warmer water temperature has transformed the once safe mammal sanctuary of the Aleutian Islands into a feeding ground for predators.
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January 21, 2001 Europe - Mad cow disease once thought to be confined to England continues to be found in western Europe. This past week scientists announced the discovery of a diseased cow in Italy. The term "mad cow" comes from the shaking and stumbling of sick animals before they die. The scientific name is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, now thought to have spread by recycling meat and bone meal from infected animals back into cattle feed. But even after strict measures were taken in England and other European countries to eliminate infected cattle feed, mad cow disease cases have been reported in several western European countries.
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"We weren't expecting to find a sample at 4.4 billion because our prejudice said that the earliest part of the earth was so violent that no samples would be preserved.Now, we realize that is not correct."
- Prof. John Valley, Geologist, University of Wisconsin, Madison
January 14, 2001 Madison, Wisconsin - Another surprising find on earth is revolutionizing thinking about what the earth was like at its beginning. For the past fifteen years, geologists have been studying very ancient rock outcroppings in the Australian outback at a place called Jack Hills several hundred kilometers northeast of Perth.
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January 7, 2001 Austin, Texas - Sixty-six million years ago more than 75% of all living earth creatures died. It was the end of a warm period called Cretaceous and the beginning of another named Tertiary. At that "K-T boundary," as scientists call it, there was a major, worldwide change that exterminated the dinosaurs. Experts have argued about the cause of the global extinction for at least two centuries. Twenty years ago physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter, reported the discovery of a worldwide layer of clay that has a high iridium content right at the K-T boundary layer in the earth's crust. Iridium is rare on earth, but abundant in some comets and asteroids, so the Alvarez team theorized that a comet or large asteroid must have hit the earth. When scientists looked for the greatest concentration of iridium, the data took them to the northwestern corner of the Yucatan peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. There they found the massive 60-mile wide underwater crater called Chicxulub now thought to be the impact site.
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January 6, 2001 Laurel, Maryland - NASA said OK this week to America's and the world's first attempt to land on an asteroid - or at least touch down briefly. Scientists on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) team at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland have been controlling NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft orbiting the asteroid Eros since February 14, 2000. Now, nearly one year to the day on February 12, 2001, NEAR's rocket engines will be turned on to slow the orbiter's descent toward Eros at about 7 miles per hour.
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December 31, 2000 Rhinebeck, New York - As 2000 comes to an end and the true first year of the 21st Century begins, The Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, New York has released its list of Top Trends for 2001 and beyond. They include: Ugly Americans, Recession Proofing, Peace Talks on the Drug War, Immigration issues, Closed Minds, Involuntary Simplicity, Re-Unionizing of the Soviet Union and Corporate Dumbsizing, Round 2.
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