So normally I reserve this blog for family-related news and funny stories starring my kids, but I felt the need to share what I came across in the news yesterday. I was on my lunch break, between school and work and was surfing the web on my phone. It could be that yesterday was just a bad news day...but everything I read was totally scary. Here are some examples:
- As Somali pirates brazenly maintain their standoff with American warships off the coast of Africa, the cargo aboard one Iranian ship they commandeered is raising concerns that it may contain materials that can be used for chemical or biological weapons.
Some local officials suspect that instead of finding riches, the pirates encountered deadly chemical agents aboard the Iranian vessel. They ransacked the ship and searched the containers. But in the days following the hijacking, a number of them fell ill and died, suffering skin burns and hair loss, according to reports. The pirates were sickened because of their contact with the seized cargo, according to Hassan Osman, the Somali minister of Minerals and Oil, who met with the pirates to facilitate negotiations. The massive shipping company that controls the vessel, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line (IRISL), was recently designated by the U.S. Department of the Treasury over nuclear proliferation concerns. IRISL, which is accused of falsifying documents to facilitate the shipment of weapons and chemicals for use in Iran's missile program, is blocked from moving money through U.S. banks as well as from carrying food and medical supplies as part of U.S. trade sanctions against Iran. By Joseph Abrams Fox News... Good thing we just had the Iranian President on Larry King Live...that should stop him from inflicting biological/chemical terror on us for sure... - There's a ticking time bomb underneath the oceans, and it's about to go off, some scientists say.
A Russian research ship trawling the Arctic off Siberia's northeastern coast has found huge amounts of methane bubbling up from the seafloor, according to reports in London's Independent newspaper and the Canadian Press wire service.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, trapping 20 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. While there's little of it in the atmosphere, there are gigantic frozen deposits of it, called methane clathrates, trapped in rocks in seabeds all over the world.
One of the leading global-warming doomsday scenarios involves all that methane thawing out as sea temperatures rise, then rushing to the surface and into the air, creating a runaway warming scenario.
Now there's some evidence that's beginning to happen.
"For the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface," Swedish researcher Orjan Gustafsson, aboard the Russian ship Jacob Smirnitskyi, told the Independent in an article published last week.
Huge methane releases may have been responsible for mass extinctions in Earth's distant past. Whether or not you believe in global warming...this is just a little scary... and finally... - A federal judge in Hawaii has dismissed a lawsuit trying to stop the world's largest atom smasher.
U.S. District Court Judge Helen Gilmor ruled Friday that federal courts don't have jurisdiction over the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, near Geneva.
Two Hawaii residents sued because they feared that the machine could create small black holes or other phenomena that could destroy the planet.The collider is a 17-mile ring of superconducting magnets that will send high-energy beams of subatomic particles crashing into each other, fracturing atoms into more fundamental particles that can be observed and studied.
Scientists hope the machine will reveal how the tiniest particles were first created after the "big bang," which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars, planets and everything. ...Maybe there are just some things we're not supposed to know...
Anyhoo...this is a pretty scary place to live if you ask me. Back to living in a bubble tomorrow with more kid pics and mommy stories!
1 comment:
Yikes! That is so scary, although that Large Hadron Collider was started I think last week and then broke. lol
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