Hundreds of residents of Clarksville, Tennessee town have been told to stay indoors and turn off their air conditioners after small, ultra-light planes dropped a mysterious, powdery substance over 2 subdivisions there on Thursday evening.

The unknown substance was dropped on about 180 homes. Initial Tests have reported that it is not anthrax, and further testing will be done to try to determine what it is.

Clarksville is near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division. The parkway near the base was shut down at about 9 p.m. The Red Cross has set up services in a nearby elementary school, in case they are needed.
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About 35 million years ago, when dinosaurs were already extinct but the Appalachian Mountains were still covered in tropical rain forests, an asteroid more than a mile wide, moving at supersonic speed, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off North America.

Traveling at about 70,000 miles per hour, the asteroid or comet dove through several hundred feet of water and several thousand feet of mud and sediment. Billions of tons of ocean water were propelled into the air as high as 30 miles and vaporized. Millions of tons of debris and rocks were ejected into the atmosphere. The collision incinerated everything along the East Coast, triggered gigantic tsunamis, and destroyed marine life in the surrounding area.
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An newly-evolved species has a much better chance of surviving for a long time if it first appears right after a mass extinction. University of Cincinnati geologist Arnold Miller has found that the trend holds true no matter what was the ultimate cause of each mass extinction. New species were more widespread and fared better over the long run.

Miller used a database of marine fossils to examine longevity trends throughout the Phanerozoic era of the last 540 million years. In four separate cases, he found that creatures that first appeared following mass extinctions survived for longer periods of time than those that appeared at other times.
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Britain?s foot and mouth epidemic may have been caused by a cloud of infected dust blown from the Sahara, according to scientists. They have linked the outbreak to a massive cloud of sand that swirled out of northern Africa several days before the disease was first reported.

Dr. Dale Griffin, of the U.S. Geological Survey, says, ?Satellite images show a dust cloud moving over the Atlantic and reaching Britain on February 13th. One week later, foot and mouth broke out in the UK. Given that the disease?s incubation period is seven days, that is one heck of a coincidence.?
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