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A dozen tribesmen with picks and shovels climbed the Mount Pinatubo volcano last week on the dangerous mission to drain the crater lake that threatens their villages with massive floods if the volcano explodes, as it is threatening to do.

Their aim is to carve a notch in the volcano?s crater, to slowly release water from the rising lake, by chopping 16 feet off the lowest point of Pinatubo?s summit. When the notch is completed, geologists predict another 16 feet of already-weakened wall will give way, draining about 530 million cubic feet of water in five hours. The lake contains an estimated 7 trillion cubic feet of water.
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The September 2001 issue of Discover Magazine has an interview with physicist David Deutsch of Oxford University in English, who believes that parallel universes are real. If Deutsch?s ideas are correct, there is more than one ?you,? and you are reading this article countless times, in many different universes. In other universes, the article doesn?t exist, you don?t own a computer, don?t know how to read. In still others, you are already dead, haven’t been born, will never exist.

Does it ever end?

In a word, not really.
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Cosmic rays are eating away at the Earth?s protective ozone layer, according to Canadian radiation scientists Qing-Bin Lu and Leon Sanche of the University of Sherbrooke. They claim to have discovered an important process underlying the growing ozone hole over the southern hemisphere. But atmospheric scientists are not so sure.

Lu and Sanche analyzed ozone and cosmic ray data taken from ground stations, weather balloons and satellites. In a paper in Physical Review Letters, they report a strong correlation between cosmic ray intensity and ozone depletion across different levels of the atmosphere and different latitudes. They also found that changes in ozone concentration matched fluctuating cosmic ray intensity between 1979 to 1992.
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How has foot-and-mouth disease, which closed off access to the English countryside for much of the summer, affected the number of crop circles that have appeared this year?

According to BBC News, the numbers have increased dramatically.

Wiltshire farmer Tim Carson had only one new circle appear on his land this year, until restrictions were lifted a month ago. ?I had a phone call to ask if the footpaths were open round our way,? he says. ?I said ?Yes,? and that night a crop circle appeared. Read into that what you will.? He adds, ?We had one circle during the restrictions and then the footpaths were reopened and we have had six since then.?
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