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We hear so much about soldiers coming home from Iraq with missing limbs due to insurgency bombings, but a more pervasive problem is that gunfire is making many of our soldiers deaf.

Gunfire can have a profound impact on soldiers’ hearing, and the long-term effects carry over to their post-military lives. A recent study found soldiers have a major risk of hearing loss due to the “impulse noise” associated with gunfire, often leading to acoustic trauma in 10 to 15% of soldiers returning from active military duty. Researcher David R. Nielsen says, “Long-term hearing loss?severely impacts our soldiers’ abilities to transition back to civilian life.”

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Dr. J. E. Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for SpaceScience and their lead climate scientist, is warning that sea levels could rise fifteen feet over the next hundred years. He says that the scientific community’s fear of saying this publicly is threatening our ability to act before it is too late. Sea level rise will cause a continuous catastrophe starting much sooner, as one low-lying area after another is submerged, and storm surges become steadily more dangerous.
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We may be able to travel to that newly discovered Earth-like planet sooner than we think, since a physicist thinks he has found a way to travel close to the speed of light.

Physorg.com reports that researcher Franklin Felber is making discoveries that will solve “the two greatest engineering challenges to near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during rapid acceleration.”
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Not many people know that Oxford?the seat of higher learning in the UK?has a special museum dedicated to shrunken heads. These may have to be returned to South America for burial, and if this is the case, an artist has offered to have HIS OWN head shrunken and put on display after his death. In BBC News, Sean Coughlan reports that the Pitt Rivers museum has rejected Ted Dewan’s offer, despite the fact that Dewan is quoted as saying that “I shall?leave enough funding specifically to cover the costs of storage, shrinking, curating, and maintenance of the shrunken head in the Victorian display case.” To see how Dewan’s head would look if shrunken, click here.

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