Headline News (Page 3,129)

A single strand of DNA contains more potential computing power than a thousand supercomputers. If DNA segments are used as data bits, trillions of molecular chains can be chemically combined. The result is that computations can be carried out in seconds that would take a supercomputer centuries.

A team led by Chemistry professor Michael C. Pirrung of Duke University has now devised a method of printing DNA on glass chips. This makes using it for computational purposes much easier, and suggests yet another major breakthrough in the journey toward really effective computers.
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Hurricane Floyd appears poised to strike the Florida coast with extreme force, and Hurricane Gert is gathering strength behind it in the south Atlantic. Floyd is an exceptional storm, having grown to Category 5 in just a few days.

In part this is due to a phenomenon explained in the upcoming Art Bell/Whitley Strieber book The Coming Global Superstorm (In Stores December 14). As global warming increases, the difference in the temperature between the lower and upper atmosphere is getting larger and larger. This is spawning ever greater hurricanes and more intensive and frequent tornadoes worldwide, and accounts for last spring’s worldwide outburst of tornadoes, which occurred even in places like China, where they are virtually unheard of.
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New Scientist – Physicist Mark Hadley of the University of Warwick claims that he has solved the problem of quantum weirdness. Particles at the subatomic level remain in a fuzzy state called “superposition” until something affects them, whereupon they instantly focus into a definite form. They may also be ‘entangled’ or connected in some way that causes particles separated over long distances to change either other’s condition at speeds faster than light.

It has been theorized that the change in a particle from the fuzzy uncertain state to certainty could be caused by the application of a measuring tool, or even by the simple fact that it has been noticed by a conscious, aware mind.
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From Oklahoma through Kansas and into Missouri, a storm system of unprecedented ferocity marched through the night of May 3-4, 1999. Storms like these had not been seen since April 3-4, 1974 when more than 300 people were killed during an outbreak of at least 148 tornadoes that crossed 11 midwestern states. The 1999 storm system was unusual because more than one F-5 tornado apparently developed. On average, only one F- 5 tornado strikes the U.S. in a year. The scale, developed by Tetsuya Theodore Fujita of the University of Chicago, runs from F-1 a moderate tornado with winds up to 72 miles per hour, to F-5, with winds up to 318 mph. At least 45 people lost their lives in this deadly storm system, and thousands were left homeless.
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