Our April Fools Day stories left some people clueless, outraged others, but gave most of you a big laugh.
Newspapers around the world take April 1st seriously, as well. Monday?s news stories included news of a floating department store, a cow-breeding finance minister and a call for bribes to be legalized.
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Cuban geologist Manuel Iturralde says that an examination of rock samples that will be collected in a few months should shed further light on what could be an ancient sunken city deep off Cuba?s coast.?These are extremely peculiar structures … They have captured all our imagination,? says Iturralde. ?If I had to explain this geologically, I would have a hard time.?
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Rivers in the U.S. fell to historic low levels during the past months. Using U.S. Geological Survey data that tracks the flow of rivers nationwide, researchers have identified 59 points on 57 rivers that reached record low levels in March.
This analysis showed that 40 of those points also reached a record low in one of the months of December, January or February. Less water flowed down these rivers than at any comparable time in at least 30 years and, in many cases, as long as 80 years.
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A team of American and Canadian researchers has found proof of global warming: the temperature of the Earth?s crust is increasing at a remarkable rate. ?We can now say we truly have global warming,? says Dr. Hugo Beltrami, a geophysicist at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.
Until now most data on global warming has been obtained from the atmosphere, polar icecaps and oceans, but Beltrami?s team looked at continental rocks, which cover about 30% of the planet?s surface. They studied 616 deep bore holes that were drilled into rock formations from Africa to the Arctic and found evidence of a sharp rise in temperature over the past 500 years.
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