"Around 15,000 years ago, as the last ice age was melting down, you didn't want to be standing in Idaho's Clark Fork River Valley. Giant glacial Lake Missoula stretched 174 miles behind an ice dam ready to burst.

When the 2,000-foot-high ice dam did go, the lake surged downstream with a flow ten times greater than the flow from all the world's present rivers combined....Geologists call this a superflood. Several occurred at the end of the last ice age.....But much controversy still remains over the magnitude of these floods, their timing and the extent to which they differ from floods that scientists can observe and measure today."

The debate is about uniformitarianism versus what is obvious from the evidence. It fails to mention poleshifts which would also cause superfloods throughout the world. Story is at UniSci and Newswise

"Manuel Iturralde, research director of Cuba's Natural History Museum, has joined Canadian exploration company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) in efforts to solve the mystery of the smooth, geometrically shaped, granite-like rocks. They are laid out in structures resembling pyramids, roads and other structures at more than 600 meters deep (2,000 feet) in a 20 km-square (7-3/4 mile-square) area."

MSNBC: ADC plans to take a specially designed robot to the site in a few months to take samples of the rocks and the sediment they are embedded in to try to date them and seek signs they may have once been on dry land. They will also be searching for any sign of human life such as drawings, sculptures or artifacts. ''To drill samples from these structures is not easy because they look like granite. And to drill granite at a depth of 600 meters is very difficult,'' Zelitsky said.

Electric Warrior: It appears that the videotape is being analyzed by the Marine Archaeology and Anthropology Center of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. The experts' work is centered around the inscriptions found on the stones, which were undoubtedly made by humans. It has been proven that the stones were cut and dressed to fit one another and form larger structures.

Very little is known about the inscriptions, except that they are numerous and are found practically throughout the underwater site. Symbols and drawings of unknown significance have also been found.

The wizards of early Europe wore hats of gold intricately embellished with astrological symbols that helped them to predict the movement of the sun and stars."

Call me a skeptic, but nowhere in the article does it mention how heavy these hats must be!

In Germany scientists are investigating genes in a huge way...

"...two years ago an international team of scientists decoded the entire genetic recipe of a plant - the Arabidopsis weed. They found that it consists of around 25,000 genes (by way of comparison: bacteria have around 4,000, yeast 6,000 and humans 34,000 genes), each of which makes a protein."

Now they are doing something very painstaking, but very worthwhile - creating new varieties by mutating genes one at a time...

"So far, in excess of 100,000 mutants have been created, said Dr Arno Krotzky, managing director. Some of the lines have a gene turned off while the rest have genes turned on. "Our goal is to investigate the function of all 25,000 genes in plants. This will require several hundred thousand experiments to investigate the complex interactions between genes, their functions and the regulation of these functions."

"Companies could soon be modifying everything from the farm animals that produce our food to our pets....The extra DNA is simply injected into an animal's bloodstream. Within a couple of weeks, it is integrated into a high proportion of cells in many different tissues"....reports New Scientist

Meat will one day be grown in factories

New Scientist reports:

In a bid to make a simple source of nutritious food for long-distance space travellers, scientists at Touro College in New York have managed to make slices of fish grow bigger. Their achievement holds out the prospect of growing meat in industrial quantities from the muscle cell lines of various animals or fish.

"This could save you having to slaughter animals for food," says project leader Morris Benjaminson....Benjaminson's group cut chunks of muscle five to 10 centimetres long from large goldfish. After washing the chunks in alcohol, they immersed them in a vat of fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich liquid extracted from the blood of unborn calves, which biologists usually use for growing cells in the lab.

After a week in the vat, the fish chunks had grown by 14 per cent....

Nature.com reports:

"Handprints and footprints 20,000 years old reveal that people lived on the Tibetan plateau at the height of the Ice Age - 16,000 years earlier than scientists had thought. The newly found signs of life cast doubt on the idea that a glacier a kilometre thick covered the plateau at that time."

Perhaps: Prior to a pole shift 10,000 or so years ago, the North Pole was situated in Hudson Bay. This would mean Tibet was at the Equator, and probably warmer than today.

The North Magnetic Pole could soon abandon Canada, migrate north of Alaska and eventually wind up in Russia, according to a Canadian scientist.

The magnetic pole, which has steadily drifted for decades, has picked up its pace in recent years and could exit Canadian territory as soon as 2004.

...and some crazy couples have been trying to conceive their child right on the North Magnetic Pole....

Report is at CNN and Unknown Country

Sony SDR-4X:

Just under 23 inches tall and weighs 14 pounds.

The gyroscope (as in Segway) motion control system enables SDR-4X to go places and do things its predecessors couldn't, such as balance on a moving platform and walk on carpet, It also showed off its ability to walk on uneven surfaces, and even gets back up when it's pushed over.

SDR-4X has the ability to remember the faces of 10 people and can even recognize emotions from facial features. It also understand continuous speech.Drawing from its vocabulary of 60,000 words, an SDR-4X displayed Tuesday asked a guest in a high, squeaky voice: "Please hold still for a minute while I memorize your face."

Honda ASIMO:

Weight: 43kg (85 pounds or so) Height: 1,200mm (48 inches or so)

"In addition to its compact size, ASIMO features a people-friendly design that is attractive in appearance and easy to live with"

Standing 120 cm tall, the nickel-cadmium battery-powered Asimo is the only remote-controlled humanoid robot in the world that can walk at various speeds, climb up and down stairs and perform simple tasks such as pushing carts and using tools. It can also shake hands, wave and bow.

Groovy Japanese Asimo site and English specs

Prices:

SDR-4X would be priced about the same as a luxury car and available by the end of the year. Honda currently leases Asimo to businesses for $152,400 a year

Also: check out the pretty Posy robot from Flower Robotics Inc

"Axel Heilberg Island:...Located within the Arctic Circle north of mainland Canada, a full 8/9ths of the way from the equator to the North Pole, the uninhabited Canadian island is far enough north to make Iceland look like a great spot for a winter getaway.... 45 million years ago Axel Heilberg, still as close to the North Pole as it is now, was covered in a forest of redwood-like trees known as metasequoias"

The trees have long been used as evidence of a pole shift, yet scientists are trying their best to find an alternative explanation:

Fact: Axel Heilberg spends four months of each year in continuous sunlight and four months of each year in continuous darkness. New scientific non-answer: “We don’t have plants that can survive under those conditions today, let alone forests...Jahren’s group is working to see if the isotope chemistry of the fossils can help them learn how the metasequoias’ metabolism compared to those of contemporary plants"

Fact: It's too cold for them to grow there New scientific non-answer: "Axel Heilberg’s forests probably received equatorial water and warmth from a prehistoric weather pattern unlike anything in existence today."

Fact: The fossils look recent New scientific non-answer: “Some of this stuff looks about like driftwood on the beach, but it’s 45 million years old,” Jahren says. “These fossils are chemically preserved at a level you usually would expect to see in something that’s only 1,000 years old.”

MSNBC reports:

The study, appearing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, analyzed ancient tree rings from 14 sites on three continents in the northern hemisphere and concluded that temperatures in an era known as the Medieval Warm Period 800 to 1,000 years ago closely matched the warming trend of the 20th century.

...the study shows Earth to be “capable of rapid changes and long periods of above average warmth on its own without greenhouse warming."

Wait, there's more...Ice shelf stories misled the public Plus...Tuvalu isn't sinking after all

The data reveal the internal dynamics of the galaxy and show huge pair of jets hurling material thousands of light-years away from what is probably a black hole at the core.

There may have originally been an extra planet, which lost its spot, burst through the asteroid belt, causing many asteroids to scatter and bombard other planets (and our moon).

Astronomy.com reports:

"...a body with about half the mass of Mars, originally located about 1.9 AU from the sun, and with an orbital inclination of zero. The planet would slowly be nudged by the other planets into an eccentric orbit which had the planet cross the asteroid belt and then fall into the sun about 600 million years after its creation."

It appears that they just ran computer models for ages until something fitted. They seem to have shown that it could of happened, but won't be able to prove that it definitely did.

BBC reports:

"Valuable clues to the pace of evolution have been found in the bones of long-dead penguins recovered from the Antarctic.

DNA samples from these bones, one almost 8,000 years old, have given researchers in New Zealand a better idea of the speed of the "molecular clock" scientists use to investigate the evolutionary history of animals.

...The DNA they extracted from these remains indicated the molecular clock was ticking two to seven times faster than previously thought."

I'm unsure what this Yahoo report is trying to tell us...

Same features:

"The little creature, about the size of a small dog, had horns under its eyes and a small frill similar to those seen on the giant triceratops that evolved later, the researchers in China and the United States said."

Different purpose?

"It would have grazed on plants, and its horns were almost certainly no good for defending itself.....Its distinctive neck frill may have been a anchor for powerful jaw muscles, rather than a display feature meant to attract or intimidate other liaoceratops..."

It evolved horns before they were useful. This isn't Darwinism, this is intelligent, forward-thinking design.

"The drawing was published in William Corliss' newsletter Science Frontiers (Sept. / Oct. 2000). The pictures illustrates the so called "... 'Tombs of the Genii', as they appeared circa 1876. These towering standing stones were - and perhaps still are - located on the Kora River in what was Soviet Turkestan, Siberia. When you learn of their sizes, you'll realize that these lithic monsters must still be there... The largest of these standing stones rises 75 feet above ground level and probably penetrates 12 feet below. Its weight is in the neighborhood of 3,800 tons! This is more than 10 times the weight of Er Grah, the largest standing stone in Brittany and more than twice the size of the massive Trilithon still languishing in its quarry at Baalbek, Lebanon. This latter stone is routinely calimed to be the largest dressed monolith in the world. It isn't! ..." Any confirmation or information about these gigantic monoliths could be send to Mr. Ulrich Dopatka (dopatka@legendarytimes.com). More and other discoveries are published in our journal Legendary Times."

This might be the standing stone equivalent of the Chinese pyramids!

"Space radiation is one of the most deadly hazards human crews of interplanetary missions face. The Martian Radiation Environment Experiment, known as MARIE, has revealed that space radiation is more intense than scientific models have indicated.

Similar instruments are on space shuttles and the international space station, but MARIE is the first radiation detective to travel beyond Earth's magnetosphere....The exposure to the heavy nuclei, up to and including iron nuclei, is "approximately three times" what the astronauts are receiving on the ISS", reports Cosmiverse

This means manned flights to Mars will be more risky:

"Being away from Earth for three years would mean that every cell of your body would be transversed by a galactic ray, and we just don't know what that would do to people.", reports National Geographic

"In the first major Inca find in four decades, Peruvian and British explorers say they have discovered a hidden city...Located on a narrow ridge around 11,000 feet up in Peru's windswept, southern Andes, the Inca citadel of Corihuayrachina is a mysterious gathering of religious platforms, funeral towers, and food storehouses...It is about 22 miles southwest of the famous Inca citadel of Machu Picchu....

Peter Frost said he found Corihuayrachina -- eyeing it from afar but not able to actually reach it -- when he was leading a group of tourists through the remote region in 1999. Funded by National Geographic Society, Frost was finally able to set foot on the cloud-shrouded site two years later in June, 2001, trekking four days along winding mountain paths with a team of scientists and excavators". A television special will screen in May.

Reports from Reuters/Yahoo, Washington Post, BBC and AP/MSNBC

The 4-foot (1.219 metre) long mural comprised possibly only 10 percent of a massive wall painting in a room whose dimensions were still unclear. The site, which also includes an 80-foot high pyramid, have been known to looters for years, but archaeologists have only just visited it.

Reports from Reuters and Christian Science Monitor

"One of the largest asteroids known to have approached the Earth zipped past about 450,000 kilometres away on March 8 - but nobody recorded it until four days later....The object, now called 2002 EM7, was hard to spot because it was moving outward from the innermost point of its orbit, 87 million km from the Sun. When it passed closest to the Earth - just 1.5 times the distance to the Moon - it was too close to the Sun to be visible."

Preliminary calculations indicate 2002 EM7 has several chances to hit the Earth in the next century, with odds of one in six million to one in a billion, reports New Scientist.

It isn't so rare, says Jim Scotti (University of Arizona), "Simply put, objects the size of the Tunguska impactor pass within the distance that 2002 EM7 did about 25 times every year." Rocks the size of 2002 EM7 come by nearly 100 times a year.