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The Indonesian National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) has issued an alert warning regarding Mount Sinabung in Karo regency, North Sumatra, after finding increased volcanic activity. At the same time, some residents living near the massive Toba supervolcano are reporting heat, hot steam and gas emanating from the ground.

BNPB spokesperson Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said that Sinabung has the potential to spread hot ash clouds to the south and southeast as far as 7km, and the volume of lava coming from the mountain has reached 3 million cubic meters. A call for residents within 7km of the crater to evacuate has also been made. Mount Sinabung has seen two previous eruptions in recent years, once in 2010, and again in 2013.
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Billy Collins wrote a hilarious poem about dogs called “Why I No Longer Keep a Gun in the House.” It’s about his struggles with a constantly yapping dog.

I have two dogs in my life. One is purebred and very well behaved. The other is a mutt whose mother must have had an affair with a poodle. This one isn’t so polite. He’s named Smoochy. Noisy or not, Smoochy does have some practical value. He doesn’t look like it, but he’s a great guard dog and burglar alarm. He barks when anybody comes around. I call it the “Smoochy Alarm.”
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Paleoarchaeologists working in Kenya have unearthed the oldest known stone tools found to date, and say that they predate our earliest known ancestors by over half a million years.

Digging by accident at a site they didn’t originally intend to visit, Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis of Stony Brook University in New York, found stone tools that they’ve dated to 3.3 million years ago, 700,000 years older than previously found artifacts. Anthropology professor Alison Brooks, George Washington University, has examined some of the tools. "It really absolutely moves the beginnings of human technology back into a much more distant past, and a much different kind of ancestor than we’ve been thinking of."
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Britain’s Astronomer Royal, Prof Lord Rees, says that if we were to make contact with extraterrestrials from outside our solar system, it would be with intelligent machines, rather than with organic aliens.

While addressing an audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival last week, Rees said that an incoming SETI-like signal would likely be from machines built by a previous extraterrestrial civilization, since machines would be more suited to the rigors of space travel, as opposed to their biological creators, who are likely to have died out long beforehand.
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