An inexplicable sleeping sickness is affecting one in ten residents of a village in Kazakhstan in Russia.
Villagers in Kalachi have been affected by the mysterious disease for the past two years, but to date, no cause for the illness has been determined and, despite teams of virologists, radiologists, toxicologists and doctors collaborating to solve the mystery, they have been unable to find a cure.
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Despite the fact that it is believed to make up around eighty per cent of the matter in the universe, so-called "dark matter" remains an enigma to scientists. It is totally invisible as it neither absorbs or emits light, and its presence has so far been determined only via its gravitational interaction with visible matter.
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In 1976, the Viking program’s orbiter and lander reached Mars, and the lander’s life experiments returned data that the scientists who had designed them had expected to see if living organisms were present in the soil. However, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, fearing that a positive finding about life on the red planet would cause their Mars funding to be diverted to the manned spaceflight program, issued various denials and succeeded in clouding the picture sufficiently to insure that robotic programs would continue.
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Off the West Coast of the United States, methane gas is trapped in frozen layers below the seafloor. New research from the University of Washington shows that water at intermediate depths is warming enough to cause these carbon deposits to melt, releasing methane into the sediments and surrounding water.
Researchers found that water off the coast of Washington is gradually warming at a depth of 500 meters, about a third of a mile down. That is the same depth where methane transforms from a solid to a gas. The research suggests that ocean warming could be triggering the release of a powerful greenhouse gas.
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