Home  »  Headline News

On:

Like the vast majority of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, nearly everyone in the town of Axum in Ethiopia believes the lost biblical Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a stone chapel on the grounds of their largest church, where it has been safeguarding Ethiopia for nearly 3,000 years.

Thousands flock to churches in Axum and throughout Ethiopia for Timkat, an Ethiopian celebration of the baptism of Jesus Christ. At the center of the festivities are ?tabots,? tablets kept in every Ethiopian Orthodox church that symbolize the ark.

?I can understand that outsiders are skeptical? about the ark, says Mersa Belay, head priest of Axum, 370 miles north of Ethiopia?s capital, Addis Ababa. ?They do not have our faith.?
read more

On:

An exploding star may have destroyed part of Earth?s protective ozone layer two million years ago, killing off some forms of ancient marine life. Narciso Benitez, of Johns Hopkins University, says the ?missing smoking gun? of a mass extinction that occurred far in the past was the revelation that a stellar cluster with many large, short-lived stars prone to producing supernovae passed near Earth?s solar system several million years ago.
read more

On:

If an asteroid impacted the Earth, the devastation would be so great that statistically, you are more likely to die from a space rock impact than in a plane crash. When asteroid 2001 YB5 flew past the Earth on January 7, 2002, it missed the planet by 300,000 miles, but at the speed the Earth is travelling in its orbit, that distance amounts to only a few hours.

So what is NASA doing about this? They?re practicing defensive wargames in space, so we can attack an incoming killer asteroid before it gets to us. Peter Schultz of Brown University says, ?We?re going to have some revenge on a comet called Tempel 1 with the Deep Impact mission.?
read more

On:

With global warming, large parts of southern England and Wales are at risk from malaria. Scientist say the disease is most likely to arrive in river areas and low-lying wetlands. Humans become infected when bitten by a mosquito that is carrying the parasite.

Researchers at Durham University in the U.K. used a mathematical model to predict how global warming will increase the threat of malaria in coming years. They studied vivax malaria, which can be transmitted by a species of mosquito commonly found in Britain, Anopheles atroparvus. A rise in temperature encourages the mosquito to breed and feed more rapidly and also speeds up the maturation of the malaria parasite.
read more