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The source of the highly annoying Kokomo, Indiana hum, that has been making some people sick since 1999, has now been identified. An acoustics consulting firm says two industrial fans are sources of a mysterious sound.

Jim Cowan of Acentech, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was hired by the town to make a 10-month study of the hum. He finally traced it to low-frequency and infrasonic tones coming from local industries, and narrowed it down to a cooling tower fan on the roof of Kokomo’s DaimlerChrysler Casting Plant and an air compressor fan at Haynes International.

Both companies have agreed to silence their fans. Haynes International has installed a muffler, and DaimlerChrysler is working on the problem.
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Earlier we wrote that everyone in California should get a pet mouse, so they’ll be warned when another earthquake is on the way. Now Japanese researchers say dogs may also be able to predict earthquakes, and scientists there do seem to have predicted the big quake that hit last week.

Kiyoshi Shimamura says that he began noticing an increase in dog bites and other complaints about dogs shortly before earthquakes hit. He examined the records of 12 public health centers in the parts of Japan that were struck by the 1995 Kobe quake that killed 6,000 people.
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We have so many computer viruses and worms today because Microsoft essentially won the lawsuit which accused the company of stifling competition. This means that virtually all PCs use the same Windows operating system and thus share the same vulnerabilities, which can be easily passed on to other computers. Only the minority of Mac users escape. And companies that block spam are giving up because of a “zombie attack” by spammers.
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The CIA has requested that the Justice Department investigate a possible leak in the White House that revealed the name of an agent in a sensitive position, and may have compromised numerous CIA field officers and assets, possibly endangering some of them. Former acting ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate whether or not Saddam Hussein was trying to buy enriched uranium there.

Ambassador Wilson reported that the information was not credible, but it nevertheless appeared in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech. CIA Director George Tenet accepted responsibility for the information’s presence there when it was revealed that it was not true.The White House later blamed British intelligence for the false information.
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