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According to the new chief of the UN climate advisory, small islands are in severe danger of drowning as climate change raises sea levels. “Small island states will be really badly affected. A lot of them will be submerged – the Maldive islands, all those in the South Pacific and the Caribbean islands,” says Rajendra Pachauri, who was elected chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last week. “Japan could suffer difficulty although Japan is not quite as vulnerable as some of the small islands.

“In the next three, four, maybe five decades we will see the impact of climate change such as sea level rise, impact on agriculture, impact on water, impact on health because there are certain diseases and viruses which could increase,” Pachauri says. read more

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You hear the siren and see the flashing lights out of the corner of your eye?not another ticket! You pull over and along comes?a cop on a Segway scooter?

It could happen to you in Atlanta, where the police are riding the new $9,000 scooters. The police have invested in a battalion of Segway Human Transporter vehicles. The battery-powered, two-wheeled scooters can go a maximum speed of 15 mph, so they?ll be best for chasing muggers and purse-snatchers.
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According to research by Dr. Michael Cherington of the Lightning Data Center at St. Anthony Hospital in Denver and his colleagues, it?s possible to be struck by lightning while inside an airplane.

Their report describes the first known case of a flight attendant who suffered long-term effects after he was struck by lightning while seated in the rear section of the plane. There was no damage to the plane or to other passengers.

“Lightning strikes to commercial airplanes in flight are relatively common, yet passengers and crew are seldom injured,” says Cherington. “We believe the case reported here is the first in the medical literature where the occupant of an airplane has suffered long-term effects from a lightning-induced electrical event.”
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According to a classified CIA report, intelligence officials believe the Chinese military is planning wide-scale cyber-attacks on American and Taiwanese computer networks, including Internet-linked military systems. The wave of hacking attacks would be launched by Chinese students.

The new CIA report makes it clear that U.S. intelligence are concerned that authorities in Beijing are actively planning to damage and disrupt U.S. computer systems through the use of Internet hacking and computer viruses. However, the assessment concludes that China does not have the technical sophistication to do broad damage to U.S. and Taiwanese systems.
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