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After our near-miss with an asteroid on March 8, an Australian government official dismissed a plea by scientists that his country should spend money searching for potentially threatening asteroids that can only be spotted from the Southern Hemisphere, calling it a ?fruitless, unnecessary, self-indulgent exercise.?

On the Australian TV show ?60 Minutes,? Peter McGauran said a lot of worries keep him up at night, but asteroids are not among them. ?I?m not going to be spooked or panicked into spending scarce research dollars on a fruitless attempt to predict the next asteroid,? he said.
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New Hampshire?s worst drought in 37 years has started a war over who controls underground water, as well as attacks on a bottled water company that wants to sell water from aquifers.

USA Springs wants to build a water bottling plant that would draw up to 439,000 gallons a day from the ground in Nottingham and Barrington, small towns in southeastern New Hampshire. That?s enough water to supply 2,200 homes a day.
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The dark spots that appear near the south pole of Mars in early spring may be a sign of life. We may be able to find out for sure when Mars Express, the European Space Agency?s Mars mission, goes into orbit around Mars in late 2003.

Agustin Chicarro, European Space Agency project scientist for Mars Express, says, ?As a geologist, I found the spots quite perplexing and very exciting.?

A controversy about the Mars spots began when Andras Horvath, Tibor Ganti and Eors Szathmary from the Planetarium and the Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest, suggested that the spots could be colonies of Martian microbes which wax and wane with the season.
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Blood-sucking flies may be to blame for the HIV epidemic being unleashed on humans, according to Gerhard Brandner of the University of Freiburg in Germany. AIDS researchers believe the HIV virus jumped species from chimpanzees to humans at some point in the first half of the 20th century, but they don?t know how it happened.

Some researchers think humans were first exposed when simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the monkey version of HIV, got into open wounds of game hunters in west or central Africa. However, German scientists think horse flies may be responsible for HIV invading humans.
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