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Gulf of Mexico ‘dead zone’ twice what it was last year, but not a record
This year’s so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area where a lack of oxygen kills sea life that can’t swim away, is twice the size of last year’s, according to scientists, but it’s not a record.
The recurring area of low oxygen covers 5,840 square miles of the Gulf floor this year. Scientists had expected a record zone area due to a wet spring.
The zone is created each year when farm fertilizer from the Mississippi River Basin washes into the Gulf of Mexico, feeding algae blooms that, in turn, die and sink to the bottom of the mouth of the river. There they decompose and use up the oxygen.
Scientists from Louisiana State University and the University of Michigan had expected a wet spring to bring record levels of nutrients to the Gulf, leading to a dead zone that could have approached or exceeded the largest ever recorded — the one in Read more…
Mexico and Canada declared part of US homeland by Senate maps (Video)
As an aide holds up a poster, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) speaks during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee July 31, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC (AFP Photo / Alex Wong)
Sen. Dianne Feinstein referred to the US, Canada and Mexico as “the Homeland” at an NSA Senate briefing on Wednesday, presenting a map that united the three nations as one.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting held to acquire details on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, Sen. Feinstein (D-Calif.) made a geographic mistake in which she united three large countries into one. The error went by without comment during the briefing, but generated a significant response upon Read more…
China endures worst heat wave in 140 years
A child cooks shrimp and an egg in a frying pan heated by a manhole cover on a hot summer day on July 31 in Jinan, China. It has been so hot that eggs are hatching without incubators and a highway billboard burst into flames in one of the worst heat waves in 140 years. AP
SHANGHAI (AP) – It’s been so hot in China that folks are grilling shrimp on manhole covers, eggs are hatching without incubators and a highway billboard has mysteriously caught fire by itself.
The heat wave — the worst in at least 140 years in some parts — has left dozens of people dead and pushed thermometers above 104 degrees F in at least 40 cities and counties, mostly in the south and east. Authorities for the first time have declared the heat a “level 2” weather emergency — a label normally invoked for typhoons and flooding.
“It is just hot! Like in a food steamer!” 17-year-old student Xu Sichen said outside the doors of a shopping mall in the southern financial hub of Shanghai while her friend He Jiali, also 17, complained that her Read more…
Next round of smartphones to incorporate biometrics
Biometrics Research Group, Inc. expects that biometrics will become integrated within a wide number of mobile devices in the near future. Integration will be driven by smartphone and tablet manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung Electronics, which we expect will add both fingerprint and gesture recognition functionality to their mobile devices within the next year.
In January, at the Consumer Electronics Show, a Samsung Android phone was demonstrated which included a fingerprint sensor underneath its screen. Developed by Validity, a firm that creates biometric authentication solutions for mobile devices, the sensor allowed a user to log into an Android-based smartphone with a single swipe of a finger. Using a fingerprint authentication system entitled “Natural Login”, Validity will not only enable security access to mobile devices, but will also allow validation of e-commerce transactions.
As extensively reported in BiometricUpdate.com, Apple is also undertaking incorporation of biometric technologies into its devices. Apple entered into an Read more…
Violence will rise as climate changes, scientists predict
Death Valley in July. (David McNew / Getty Images / July 14, 2013)
Long before scientists began to study global warming, author Raymond Chandler described the violent effects of dry, “oven-hot” Santa Ana winds gusting through the city of Los Angeles.
“Every booze party ends in a fight,” he wrote in his 1938 story “Red Wind.” “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.”
While social commentators have long suggested that extreme heat can unleash the beast in man, formal study of the so-called heat hypothesis — the theory that high temperatures fuel aggressive and violent behavior — is relatively new. Using examples as disparate as road rage, ancient wars and Major League Baseball, scientists have taken early steps to quantify the potential Read more…
Is Our Sun In The Very Early Stages Of Shutting Down?
Something is up with the sun. It has begun to behave very erratically, and scientists don’t know quite what to make of it. Sunspot activity appears to be slowing down with each new cycle and absolutely gigantic holes have started to appear in the sun. At the moment, the sun is approaching the peak of its 11 year cycle, and an increasing number of scientists are becoming concerned about what the next cycle will bring. If sunspot activity continues to diminish, could the sunspot cycle eventually die altogether? Is it possible that we could be approaching another ice age? Even worse, could the increasingly erratic behavior of the sun be an indication that the sun is dying? Traditionally, scientists have taught that the sun won’t die until billions of years from now, but in recent years astronomers have observed stars similar to our own sun suddenly begin to behave very erratically and then Read more…
XKeyscore: The NSA program that collects ‘nearly everything’ that you do on the internet
If you were shocked by the NSA’s Prism program, hold onto your hat: The NSA also operates another system, called XKeyscore, which gives the US intelligence community (and probably most of the US’s Western allies) full access to your email, IMs, browsing history, and social media activity. To view almost everything that you do online, an NSA analyst simply has to enter your email or IP address into XKeyscore. No formal authorization or warrant is required; the analyst just has to type in a “justification” and press Enter. To provide such functionality, the NSA collects, in its own words, “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” Perhaps most importantly, though, it appears that HTTPS and SSL might not protect your communications from Read more…
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