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There’s a dust bowl growing in China that’s far bigger than the one that hit the U.S. in the 1930s. It’s so big it was being studied from space?how dust affects global warming was one of the science projects on board the shuttle Columbia. China fought hard to have the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing, but now they’re worried that the city will be a desert by the time the athletes arrive. 40% of China may soon become a desert and it’s affecting other countries as well. Chinese dust clouds regularly make it all the way across the Pacific to the U.S. Dust has shut down schools and airports in South Korea and Japan, and one Korean car factory has started shrink-wrapping its cars as they come off the assembly line.
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Scientists are working with computer nerds to find a cure for smallpox using screen savers. Their idea is to use the idle processing power of 2 million personal computers to look through millions of molecular combinations in hopes of finding one that fights smallpox. Although we have a smallpox vaccine, it can have serious side effects, and there’s no cure once you have the disease. To volunteer, download a screen saver that will run whenever your computer has memory to spare. When it connects to the Internet, your computer will send data back to a central hub. The combined power of 2 million personal computers is 30 times more than the fastest supercomputer. The same technique has been used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life.
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Searchers are looking in a town in east Texas for a top-secret object from the space shuttle Columbia. Hundreds of National Guardsmen, federal agents, state troopers, and volunteers have invaded the tiny Texas town of Bronson, searching for the mystery object. They’ve gone block by block and hacked through the thick woods that surround the town. State troopers told photographers they will be asked to leave the area if something is found that should not be photographed. The searchers were given a picture of the object, which was marked “Secret Government Property.” The Houston Chronicle says the object is a communications device that handles encrypted messages between the shuttle and the ground. And NASA thinks Columbia may have been hit by space junk.
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Scientists long scoffed at Star Trek style teleportation, but now they’ve changed their tune. While they don’t think they’ll be able to instantly move people from place to place, Swiss scientist Nicolas Gisin has been able to make small amounts of matter disappear down a telephone line in one laboratory and reappear in another, 180 feet away. “It is amazing, the way information from one photon suddenly appears in another photon,” says physicist Raymond Laflamme.

Albert Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance.”
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