Ever questioned how safe your drinking water is? Well, the Associated Press did. In the process of their investigation, they were able to uncover some startling facts on drinking water. They found out that there were still various drugs in the water which everybody had access to. Find out the details in the full article.

New contracts for the next-gen space systems have landed at NASA's Michoud Facility in New Orleans which will provide a boost to the state's current economy that's still being rebuilt after hurricane Katrina ravaged the land and its people. The new contracts will bring more jobs and higher wages to New Orleans. Check out the rest of the details at the full article.

Who said black cats bring bad luck? In Rhode Island, a two-year old white feline named Oscar joining you in bed means you're going to die a few hours after.

The Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and other illnesses are treated, adopted Oscar as a kitten. Six months have passed before they noticed that he does his rounds, sniffing and observing patients, before curling up beside those that will die in less than four hours.

After observing Oscar in 25 cases, the staff came to believe that the cat is very accurate. Since then, family members of patients "chosen" by the furry death bringer are notified on what's about to happen. Even David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University, believes Oscar's ability. He stated in an essay on the New England Journal of Medicine:

He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die. Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one.

Another doctor from the nursing house, Dr. Joan Teno, who specializes in treating the terminally ill, said that Oscar is better in predicting death than people who work there.

Oscar is serious about his work, and very moody about it. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," said Dosa. Once, a family wanted the cat off the dying patient's bed. He was taken out, but his meows were nothing but signs of displeasure.

Up to now, it can't be explained how the feline can "predict" death. Teno suggests that the cat may be using the scents of dying patients, or he can tell by looking at the nurses' behavior. Staff in the nursing center don't mind if Oscar is left shrouded with mystery. A wall plaque was even given to him for his "compassionate hospice care."

Photo from Associated Press

You may think that the certain states that have the best economies in the U.S. are also the worst polluters in the country, but what the Associated Press found out is that that particular notion isn't exactly accurate.

As a matter of fact, the level of pollution is actually more relative to the measures that each state takes to curb the threat of global warming by minimizing the exhaust of carbon dioxide through legislation and technology. You probably won't believe that Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Alaska are among the most notorious.

The Associate Press found out through an investigation spanning almost four years which started in 2003 that coal-fired power plants that used to generate cheap electricity is actually the major source of air pollution. Second are emissions from vehicles that include cars and aircraft. When tallied, it reflects that Texas is, by far, leading the charge towards catastrophic climate change.

As a matter of fact, the amount of carbon dioxide that Texas gives off is more than that of second and third placers California and New York. It's also interesting to point out that California and Pennsylvania have twice that of Texas' population.

Frank O'Donnell of Washington's environmental group says, "Some states are benefiting from both cheap electricity while polluting the planet and make all the rest of us suffer the consequences of global warming." He added, "I don't think that's fair at all."

Under the U.S. federal system, individual states have the right to decide what mode of power sourcing they want. Environmentalists and critics of the Bush administration have pointed to the White House as the holder of the key to the deadlock by coming up with measures that will set up a blanket policy to cover all the states. A possible adoption of the Kyoto Protocol that seeks to cut emissions was rejected by President Bush in 2001, favoring technological measures to cut air pollution. Implementation and results have yet to be shown.

A report by the Associated Press informs that Daniel Dzurisin, a geologist at the US Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano believes that Mount St. Helens may be following the example of Kilauea in Hawaii in that it has become an "open system." Basically this means that magma is being replaced from a reservoir beneath the volcano as fast as it emerges as lava at the surface.

The Geologist notes that this was observed from the domebuilding eruption that started last 2004 and that continues at a relatively unchanged pace.

Analysis of digital elevation models made from high-resolution aerial photographs reveal that, the flow has grown from roughly eight cubic yards, per second, to slightly more than one cubic yard per second. Since last April it has been fairly constant at 0.6 cubic yards per second. They note that this is about equivalent to nine truckloads of lava every two minutes

Dzurisin notes that the longer the eruption continues, the more likely that a direct pathway has developed for molten rock to emerge from the beneath the earth's crust to the planet's surface. Dzurisin does note however, that it will take them another year the reach a more definite conclusion.

The experts say that they know that St. Helens is capable of eruptions that could last for decades. Moreover, one has to note that the ongoing eruption at Kilauea started in 1983. All those "lava flows in our backyard" stories come from Hawaii and Kilauea. Will we be hearing about lava flows in Vancouver in the near future? Time will tell.

This month, American astronaut and US Navy Captain Lisa Marie Nowak got arrested and subsequently charged with attempted murder of US Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, a woman Nowak thought was her rival for another astronaut's affections.

This happening spawned talk of how NASA deals with unstable astronauts in space. As you may well know, would-be space scientists are carefully tested and screened to eliminate those who are unstable. A mentally unstable astronaut could cause all sorts of havoc that could endanger their crew members in a space station.

It turns out that NASA has a detailed set of written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. Associated Press declares that these procedures include binding the questionable astronaut's wrists and ankles with duct tape, tying him down with a bungee cord and injecting him with tranquilizers if necessary.

There are no weapons, no guns in a space shuttle; a bullet could pierce a space ship and could kill everyone. There are no stun guns on hand, either. As a precaution, space station kits contain anti-depression and tranquilizers, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medications. No NASA astronaut has ever been treated with these medications while on space; then again, like what was mentioned above, it seems that there's nothing a roll of duct tape couldn't fix.

 

It had to be a record launch for the space agency. As reported by the Associated Press, NASA launched the most number of satellites in a rocket - FIVE - last Saturday. This was part of a mission to study geomagnetic substorms in the Earth's atmosphere. The satellites are collectively known as THEMIS, for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during Substorms (not to be confused with THEMIS, the Thermal Emission Imaging System on the Mars Odyssey orbiter).

Scientists believe that geomagnetic substorms help intensify aurora displays (which is a good thing), as well as short out communications satellites, knock out power grids, and nuke airline passengers and spacewalking astronauts with high levels of radiation (definitely not good). And they don't know how they occur. Definitely not good either, considering what they could do to airline passengers.

The mission team at the University of California-Berkeley ground station confirmed that THEMIS was working fine after launch.

They're rather manly men, those cops. They're not the type of people we'd associate the color pink with, and if it's possible, some cops in Kansas City would prefer if they never had to escort criminals into a pink jail cell.

After hearing a scientific report about pink jail cells making inmates less aggressive, the Kansas City Police Department decided to put the info to good use by repainting their jails pink. Needless to say, the pink scheme didn't turn out well, having no visible effect on the inmates and becoming an annoying fact of life for some members of the KCPD.

To give you an idea of the "pinkitude", the Associated Press described it as such: "The Police Department covered the ceiling and door and part of the wall in the isolation room with a Pepto-Bismol shade of pink. Another cell was made bright pink. Door trims and moldings all around the jail were painted pink, accented with turquoise." Yes folks, that doesn't sound very manly at all. The turquoise may have had something to do with messing up the calming effect, but you can be sure they won't test that theory with another all-pink prison.

Alas, Kansas criminals will have no choice but to accept their sentence in the middle of a lonely, gray cell. Perhaps they like it better that way.