So what's to say that the next major tsunami event doesn't befall the Pacific Northwestern region this time? Researchers from the San Diego State University are currently looking into a study which will simulate the next "megathrust" disaster event by running several scenarios through the San Diego Supercomputer Center's DataStar supercomputer. You can find out more about the results of this study by reading the full article.

Resident Evil 4 much? The Las Plagas virus from Capcom's zombie franchise might be a thing out of fiction, but it could have been based off of fact. And the fact is, our world is also home to a nasty amoeba that eats brains.

They're called Naegleria fowleri: microscopic amoebas that reside in warm lakes and other stagnant bodies of water. They make their way up a person's nose, latch on to the brain where they start feeding on brain cells, and eventually cause death within two weeks.

Two days ago, the Naegleria has claimed its latest victim. A boy from Arizona spent a day with his family in Lake Havasu to celebrate their father's birthday. They frolicked on the beach, splashed around, the works. A week later he started complaining about a headache that wouldn't go away. He was taken to the hospital and was diagnosed with what they thought was meningitis.

It wasn't only until later after the boy had passed away did they realize the real culprit. Doctors have speculated that the kid got infected by the Naegleria a few days before his death, coinciding with his time down at Lake Havasu.

It is indeed a sad story. On top of that though is the alarm that this news has brought to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). They've noticed a considerable spike in the number of deaths from the Naegleria. This year alone, there have been six victims already in North America. They speculate that, though these cases are rare, it could eventually rise in the future.

Michael Beach of the CDC said that "This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases." He also warns the public to not panic about it. Nose clips can reduce the chances of the Naegleria from getting into your head. To begin with, the amoeba has to be sprayed way up your nose for it to latch on. Which means, don't be too boisterous when playing in warm water and try to be more careful when you're doing somersaults.

Some lab tests have been able to stop the amoeba though, but Beach remains that there is little chance of survival once a person gets infected.

Natural beats artificial? According to a study released by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, at least 40, 000 birds in North America die every year due to striking electricity-generating wind turbines. The figure is further broken down to the estimate that it takes around 30 turbines to kill one bird every year.

In comparison, bird deaths due to the domestic house cat have been attributed to figures in the hundreds of millions.

Similar studies conducted in Europe seem to point at similar figures, with a published report in Spain - the third largest wind power-producer in the world - indicating similarly low bird deaths attributed to their turbines.

But while these reports indicate a gradual debunking of the strongly held belief that wind turbines are a major cause of avian death, environmentalists from Europe don't appear to be thoroughly convinced.

"My personal opinion is that the evidence base is very poor," says Andrew Pullin head of the Birmingham, UK-based Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation regarding the US report.

Spanish environmentalist Alvaro Camiña, who monitors 70 of his home country's 140 wind farms comments that the numbers don't provide for all important details. He states the case of the griffon vulture: "It's important to know the mortality of large birds because they have a lower number of offspring. Even a small number of deaths can affect a population."

On the other side of the fence, wind turbine-dependent power firms assert that the bird deaths attributed to their machinery is  taken out of context. "I heard that over 1,000 birds a year run into the Washington Monument. Should we tear that down?" said PowerWorks president Rich Koebbe regarding the matter. "We're out here trying to do a job to save the Earth. We even save birds, since they are twice as vulnerable to pollution as humans."

When Earth's first global gravity fields were mapped back in 1960, researchers found out that Canada's Hudson Bay has lower gravity.

With the help of satellite pair GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), it was confirmed the other day that this was due to the crust in that area rebounding slowly after the end of the last ice age and convection in the planet's mantle.

The piece of crust - an ice sheet actually - is called Laurentide and covered a big part of North America during the last ice age. There are portions where the ice is three kilometers thick therefore depressing the crust beneath it.

The ice did melt around 20,000 years ago but it has been rebounding rapidly recently (12mm per year). The mantle, on the other hand, drags the overlying tectonic plates with it as it moves. GRACE can't detect the slow movements but one work around for scientists was to subtract the post-glacier effect from the region's overall gravity signal.

This means that even though the rebound is complete, locations away from tectonic plate boundaries are still affected by mantle convection. GRACE is a joint mission of the German Aerospace Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that was launched into space back in 2002.

The study was led by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics geophysicist Mark Tamisiea in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About two centuries ago, people all over the world started reporting sightings of snowflakes as large as dinner plates plummeting from the sky. None of those sightings were verified until recently because the fragility of the flakes made it hard to document the phenomenon. The scientists of today, however, say that these stories may not be whoppers after all.

Meteorologists say that although the snowflakes are fragile and can easily be broken up by wind, there's a very slim chance that some actually make it to the ground.

"There is every reason to suppose that such instances might occur almost every day during winter somewhere in Europe or the maritime fringes of North America and Asia," he said. But, he added, such extraordinary snowfalls "are seldom reported or authenticated," said William Pike of the Royal Meteorological Society in Britain.

And Pike isn't the only one who thinks so. "Clearly, they exist, because people pull them out of their freezers. Some of these things can be very, very rare, but not impossible," says Kenneth Librecht of the California Institute of Technology. Librecht asserted that the laws of physics have not ruled out the existence, or the possibility thereof, of such flakes to exist.

The Guinness Book of Records says that the largest snowflake ever found was in a Montana snowstorm in the 1800's when a rancher captured a flake 15 inches in diameter. That record may soon be broken though. NASA and other space agencies are expected to hunt for these marvels by 2015 with weather satellites all at the low price of $1 billion.

Thank God this isn't the Cold War, or the communists might have taken full advantage of what a new U.S. study just discovered. China actually has the ability to pound the West Coast with devastating hurricanes.

Does all that sound a little too sci-fi? They won't do that with a weather manipulation gizmo of sorts. All China needs to do is dump enough carbon and aerosol in the air and they're locked and loaded.

According to a study conducted at the Texas A&M University, the industrial boom in China and the Indian subcontinent have resulted in a higher degree of air pollution in these countries. Smoke from vehicles, power plants, and factories have increased dramatically and lowered air quality in the said regions.

The emissions given off by the industries contribute to a higher degree of cloud formation which is blown off across the Pacific Ocean and into North America, leading to an increase of more than half the old number of storms battering coastline states. This is most evident during the winter when China burns more fuel to generate heat for homes and industries.

The Chinese government has responded to the issue well, coming up with political measures to address the problem. The only thing the country needs to figure out now is how to make their solution work given the fact that they're building a new power plant every week.

These photos are but some of the amazing collection taken on the March 3 Lunar eclipse. If you missed it, then there's no need to fret, cause it actually happens at least two times a year. The only thing that you'll have to hope for is that the next time it happens, you'll be right on its visibility map.

The most recent Lunar eclipse graced parts of all seven continents, including the eastern half of North America. Many moon-loving people had a grand time watching the phenomenon of the moon passing through our planet's shadow. For more of them wonderful images of the event, head on to our Read link below. A moonful of pictures still await.

  

Watching the documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth" made me squirm - not because it's fugly, but because of the thought that those documentary scenes could happen to our Earth if we don't take appropriate actions.

So what's with the global warming talk? If you live in the Midwest and East parts of North America, then you'd know that these places are experiencing an unusually warm winter.

MSNBC reports that temperatures are running 10 and 10 degrees higher than normal in those places. Ice fishing tournaments in Minnesota were cancelled for lack of ice and golfers at Chicago are having a grand time at the fairways.

Nothing wrong with that, but heck, it's still January. In fact, New York City experienced a November and December without snow for just the second time. The first time that happened was way back in 1877.

Meteorologists have given explanations as to the possible reasons of the weird weather. They said that this due to the combination of El Nino and jet stream. El Nino can lead to milder weather especially now that it is under way in the Pacific Ocean; while jet stream, which is a high-altitude air-current responsible for holding back warm Southern air, is going farther north than usual over the East Coast.

This is also affecting winter-related businesses. Ski resorts are praying for cold weather to arrive soon and firewood businesses are struggling to make ends meet. As for the global warming clause, meteorologists also said that this weather change isn't caused by global warming since weather is somewhat prone to short-term fluctuations. That's the silver lining in this scenario...for now.

The pristine unborn, still pulsating in its mother's womb - images not too many of us have ever seen, except maybe during our last visit to our high school Biology lab. Given the various leaps we have had into viewing the vast reaches of space, maybe it's about time we took a look into the inner universe of the uterus.

First the first time, a lot of us will be taking our first glimpse of animals before birth, still growing in the wombs of their mothers thanks to a combination of ultrasound scans, micro cameras, and computer images brought together by Jeremy Dear's film team for Pioneer productions.

"The images in the film are a testament to the ingenuity and patience of the production team led by Yavar Abbas and Dr David Barlow, who worked with some of the world's leading vets to obtain these pictures." As Dear said, "Animals were trained to sit still near the scanners and we also inserted cameras into the womb via the elephant's rectum-But it has been worth it. In one sequence we follow an elephant developing. When it is finally born, there is not a dry eye in the house."

The pictures taken from a total of three different animals in different stages of development: An elephant, a golden retriever, and a dolphin. These pictures are going to be featured in the two-hour National Geographic Channel program "Animals In The Womb", which will be expected to air in North America some time next month, and also on Channel 4 in the UK by next year.

A major scientific study says that if current trends continue then there will be virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the next 50 years. The research incorporated scientists from many institutions in Europe and the Americas. It drew from four distinctly different kinds of data.

First are catch records from the open sea. This gave scientists a picture of declining fish stocks. Records show that the global catch fell by thirteen percent between 1994 and 2003. Next, historical records from coastal zones in North America, Europe and Australia also show declining yields, in step with declining species of diversity. This means that not only the numbers for the fish catches are down, other kinds of seafood are down too.

Then, experiments have shown that recursions in diversity tend to bring reductions in size and robustness of fish-stocks. The final part of the jigsaw is data from areas where fishing has been banned or heavily restricted.

However, the study fails attribute damage to marine numbers to individual activities such as over-fishing, pollution or habitat loss; the study instead shows the cumulative harm done across the board. Even so, a key implication of the research is that more of the oceans should be protected.

The bottom line is that the protection of our marine resources requires political will to act on scientific advice. This is something that research leader Boris Worm finds lacking in Europe. Worm says: "I'm just amazed, it's very irrational, you have scientific consensus and nothing moves. It's a sad example; and what happened in Canada should be such a warning, because now it's collapsed it's not coming back."

What happened in Canada you say? The Grand Banks cod of eastern Canada has apparently fallen into terminal decline. So long fishies, and thanks for all the meat.