Archive by date | March 2008

Water, water everywhere

Nature made a big splash about water resources and management this week (check out the special; all free for a week). Yet more water news keeps dribbling out – probably because tomorrow is ‘World Water Day’, according to the United Nations (there’s some confusion about this actually; World Water Day is on 20 March each year, but 22 March in 2008, for reasons we can’t explain. But no matter).  Read more

Satellite shoot-down update

The ‘Splatellite’ project, in which US officials rammed a missile into a runaway satellite to prevent it from crashing into anything important, like people (see Great Beyond posting; news story; analysis – subscription required), was a complete success, according to Pentagon officials at a US Navy briefing. “None of the debris was larger than a football”, Rear Admiral Alan Hicks said. (Reuters) There have been no reports of any splattelite bits hitting Earth, he added.  Read more

Yet more treasure from the bottom of the sea

An amateur archaeologist has found an “unprecedented” collection of stone tools by sifting through materials dredged from the bottom of the North Sea (quote from National Geographic; story from ScienceDaily press release). Jan Meulmeester of the Netherlands found 28 stone ‘axes’ (small pieces of stone that have obviously been shaped by human hands into a useful blade) along with remains of animals that they probably butchered in a mass of sand scooped up by a UK construction materials supplier. They are thought to be 100,000 years old, from a time when Britain was not an island and this part of the world was not underwater.  Read more