News, Articles & Reviews

Badai Irene akhirnya menerjang negara bagian New York, Minggu (28/8) dini hari waktu setempat. Gedung-gedung pencakar langit di Manhattan, New York City, diterjang angin superkencang, bahkan banjir mengancam wilayah finansial kota yang dijuluki 'Big Apple' ini.

Dengan disertai hujan deras, petir dan angin kencang, badai Irene melanda New York dengan kecepatan yang terus meningkat. Dari kecepatan awal yang mencapai 80 km/jam, kecepatan badai Irene terus meningkat pada dini hari hingga 128 km/jam.

New York yang selama ini dikenal dengan sebutan 'kota yang tak pernah tidur', kali ini persis seperti kota hantu. Sebab, sebanyak 370 ribu warganya telah dievakuasi menghindari banjir yang akan terjadi. Wilayah perkantoran di Wall Street dan Coney Island tampak sepi dan sunyi.

Seluruh alat transportasi massal juga tidak beroperasi. Kereta bawah tanah, bus, bahkan kapal ferry menuju Staten Island yang terkenal juga ikut tak beroperasi. Tak ketinggalan bandara-bandara di New York yang selama ini tekenal sibuk, juga ikut ditutup akibat badai Irene.

Tak tampak aktivitas warga New York City yang selalu sibuk seperti biasanya. Badai Irene berhasil melumpuhkan kota terbesar di Amerika Serikat ini.

Source

Badai Irene yang menerjang wilayah pantai timur Amerika Serikat (AS) berdampak pada penutupan sejumlah bandara tersibuk di negara tersebut. Akibatnya, terjadi pembatalan sekitar lebih dari 8 ribu jadwal penerbangan pada akhir pekan ini.

Seperti dilansir AFP, Minggu (28/8/2011), sepanjang wilayah pantai timur AS mengalami pemadaman listrik menyusul terjangan badai Irene. Sebanyak 2 juta orang terpaksa dievakuasi, di mana separuhnya berasal dari negara bagian New Jersey.

Dampak cukup besar juga terjadi pada operasional alat transportasi massal. Selain kereta bawah tanah dan bus tidak difungsikan, bandara juga ikut ditutup.

Bandara-bandara supersibuk di New York City, seperti John F Kennedy International Airport (JFK), LaGuardia and Newark telah menghentikan aktivitas penerbangannya sejak Sabtu (27/8), pukul 22.00 waktu setempat. Ketiga bandara tersebut dinyatakan akan ditutup hingga Senin (29/8) mendatang.

Mengutip situs yang melacak jadwal kedatangan dan keberangkatan setiap penerbangan di AS, flightaware.com, AFP menyebutkan sebanyak 8.337 penerbangan mengalami pembatalan sepanjang akhir pekan ini. Sebagian besar adalah penerbangan domestik dan jumlah tersebut terus semakin meningkat.

Source

Gempa bumi dengan kekuatan 6,5 skala richter (SR) mengguncang Bengkulu. Menurut BKMG gempa itu tidak berpotensi tsunami.

Seperti dikutip dari Badan Metereologi Klimatologi dan Geofisika (BMKG), Selasa (16/8/2011) gempa terjadi sekitar pukul 14.36 WIB, Selasa (16/8/2011). Lokasi gempa di 8.73 LS, 100.42 BT. Gempa terjadi di lautan, 547 km barat daya Bintuhan, dengan kedalaman 10 km.

Sampai berita ini diturunkan belum diketahui apakah gempa ini dirasakan kuat warga di daerah gempa.

Source

It`s Paolo, not Paul. Italian media claimed as their own the "psychic" octopus who accurately predicts World Cup results after his trainer in Germany on Sunday revealed he was caught in Italian waters.

"The octopus` name is Paolo," wrote sports newspaper Tuttosport on its website.

The news is "a small satisfaction for Italy at the end of a tournament that has given the Azzurri very little joy," wrote daily Il Corriere della Sera on its website.

Verena Bartsch, the octopus` trainer told the Sunday edition of Germany`s Bild tabloid newspaper that she caught him in April in the sea off the Italian island of Elba, near Tuscany. He was four weeks old at the time.

Bartsch`s version conflicts with Paul`s official biography, according to which the octopus is two years old and came from Weymouth, England, before moving to an aquarium in western Germany.

Paul has accurately predicted seven out of seven games from his aquarium home, where he is given two boxes, each containing a mussel and the flag of the two competing World Cup teams.

Source

A 14-year old German boy was hit in the hand by a pea-sized meteorite that scared the bejeezus out of him and left a scar.

"When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road," Gerrit Blank said in a newspaper account. Astronomers have analyzed the object and conclude it was indeed a natural object from space, The Telegraph reports.

Most meteors vaporize in the atmosphere, creating "shooting stars," and never reach the ground. The few that do are typically made mostly of metals. Stony space rocks, even if they are big as a car, will usually break apart or explode as they crash through the atmosphere.

There are a handful of reports of homes and cars being struck by meteorites, and many cases of space rocks streaking to the surface and being found later. But human strikes are rare. There are no known instances of humans being killed by space rocks.

Source

Previous studies have predicted that the global warming trend our planet is experiencing is so alert that we could see the Arctic region being stripped bear of its ice sheets within a few decades. But now, leading polar expert Warwick Vincent, who is the director of the Center for Northern Studies at Laval University, in Quebec, Canada, says that this could happen as early as 2013, if the current levels of ice loss continue into the following 4 years.

On Thursday, he said that the present situation in the field seems to unfortunately follow the worst-case scenario, and that the increasing global temperatures could melt the entire stretches of Arctic ice in a much shorter time span than first anticipated. “2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong – each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected,” the scientist told Reuters.

“I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there. We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality,” he recently shared with the Canadian Parliament, during a hearing.

Throughout the Arctic, the researcher noted a severe decrease in the amounts of ice in the Canadian north. He underlined that temperatures in the Ward Hunt region reached temperatures as high as 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), as opposed to the regular 5 degrees registered in other years. In addition, he mentioned, the five ice sheets that lay on Canada's Ellesmere Island, in the far north, had dropped in volume by 23 percent in 2008. These ice sheets are more than 4,000 years old.

Source

The British capital ground to a halt on Monday after the worst snowstorm in 18 years caused hundreds of flight cancellations and virtually shut down public transportation.

Shops, schools and courts shut down and long trails of commuters trudged through the streets, looking for scarce taxis or ways to work after more than four inches (10 centimeters) of snow fell overnight.

"We're not in Russia here," said Guy Pitt, a Transport for London spokesman. "We don't have an infrastructure built for constant snow."

Heathrow closed one of its two runways and reported more than 650 cancellations. Major delays and cancellations were also reported at London's other major airports at Gatwick, Luton and Stansted. London's City Airport was closed.

An Airbus 330 coming from Cyprus slid off the taxiway at Heathrow with 104 passengers on board. Cyprus Airways spokesman Kyriakos Kyriakou said there were no injuries or damage. No other incidents were reported.

There were massive traffic jams on many highways near London.

Source

A volcano near Tokyo erupted Monday, shooting up billowing smoke and showering parts of the capital with a fine ash that sent some city residents to the car wash and left others puzzled over the white powder they initially mistook for snow.

Mount Asama erupted in the early hours of Monday, belching out a plume that rose about a mile (1.6 kilometers) high, Japan's Meteorological Agency said.

There were no reports of injuries or damage from the eruption of the volcano, 90 miles (145 kilometers) northwest of Tokyo. It last erupted in August, 2008, causing no major damage.

Chunks of rock from the explosion were found about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) away from the volcano. Ash was detected over a wide area, including central Tokyo and as far as eastern Chiba.

In Tokyo's western district of Fussa, the local government office was flooded with calls from residents asking about "the mysterious white powder" falling from the sky and fire departments fielded calls from people afraid the ash was from a nearby blaze.

In the town of Karuizawa, southeast of the volcano, the ash was thick enough to obscure road markings in some areas, town official Noboru Yanagishi said.

Source

A winter storm packing snow, freezing rain and biting wind cut power to tens of thousands of customers Friday, disrupted travel and gave schoolchildren from Iowa to New England an early start on their holiday break. "One thing about it, you're going to have a white Christmas this year," said Lee Longdyke, as he shoveled a sidewalk in Pontiac, Mich., for the third time Friday morning.

More than 200 flights were canceled at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, and more than 650 at three New York City-area airports. Many remaining flights had hourslong delays.

Runways at Milwaukee's airport were closed for much of the morning because snowplows could not keep up with "whiteout conditions," airport spokeswoman Pat Rowe said.

Snowfall affected a large region, but the worst of the ice storm — and resulting power outages — was in a band across northern Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Power companies reported 60,000 customers in Illinois without service Friday, more than 35,000 in Ohio, and a whopping 180,000 in Indiana, where the area around Fort Wayne was particularly hard-hit.

"When you combine ice, which is an electric utility's nightmare, with wind, you've got some serious issues," said Indiana Michigan Power spokesman Mark Brian.

Freezing rain was also a problem in Iowa, but authorities there said only scattered power outages were reported, because there wasn't much wind to bring ice-laden tree limbs down onto power lines.

A foot or more of snow fell in parts of Michigan, and some areas reported wind gusts of up to 25 to 30 mph. Nearly 8 inches of snow had fallen in Detroit by midafternoon.

Source

This blog is supporting GrandParagon.com as a participants for Busby SEO Test. Go Indonesia Blogger!!! *Busby SEO Test is an SEO Contest from Busby - Web Solutuion*

More than 400 years after Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe challenged established wisdom about the heavens by analyzing a strange new light in the sky, scientists say they've finally nailed down just what he saw.

It's no big surprise. Scientists have known the light came from a supernova, a huge star explosion. But what kind of supernova?

A new study confirms that, as expected, it was the common kind that involves the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf star with a nearby companion.

The research, which analyzed a "light echo" from the long-ago event, is presented in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature by scientists in Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.

The story of what's commonly called Tycho's supernova began on Nov. 11, 1572, when Brahe was astonished to see what he thought was a brilliant new star in the constellation Cassiopeia. The light eventually became as bright as Venus and could be seen for two weeks in broad daylight. After 16 months, it disappeared.

Source

Scientists say they hope to find remnants of a meteor that brilliantly lit up the sky before falling to earth in western Canada. University of Calgary planetary scientist Alan Hildebrand called it one of the largest meteors visible in the country in the last decade.

Widely broadcast video images showed what appeared to be a speeding fireball Thursday night over Saskatoon that became larger and brighter before disappearing as it neared the ground. Hildebrand said Friday that he received about 300 email reports from witnesses.

"It would be something like a billion-watt light bulb," said Hildebrand, who also co-ordinates meteor sightings with the Canadian Space Agency.Tammy Evans was wakened by her 10-year-old daughter who ran into the bedroom. "She said there was a flash of light, the house shook twice and it sounded like dinosaurs were walking," Evans said.

Hildebrand suspects it broke up into pieces and he plans to investigate around Macklin, Saskatchewan near the Alberta border. Rick Huziak, an amateur astronomer in Saskatoon, helped operate a camera on top of the University of Saskatchewan physics building that captured video of the meteor.

"It was quite spectacular. The ground lights up all over the place," he said. Martin Beech, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina, said meteorites are valuable to learning about the history of the solar system. "Picking up a meteorite is almost equivalent to doing a space exploration mission between Mars and Jupiter," he said.

Source

New footage of a meteor falling from the sky in Edmonton, Canada includes footage of police dashboard.

Southern Californians endured a third day of destruction Saturday as wind-blasted wildfires torched hundreds of mobile homes and mansions, forced tens of thousands of people to flee and shut down major freeways.

No deaths were reported, but the Los Angeles police chief said he feared authorities might find bodies among the 500 burned dwellings in a devastated mobile home park that housed many senior citizens.

"We have almost total devastation here in the mobile park," Fire Capt. Steve Ruda said. "I can't even read the street names because the street signs are melting."

The series of fires has injured at least 20 people and destroyed hundreds of homes from coastal Santa Barbara to inland Riverside County, on the other side of the Los Angeles area. Smoke blanketed the nation's second-largest city Saturday, reducing the afternoon sun to a pale orange disk.

Source

Bandung, W Java (ANTARA News) - Six people, including five children, are believed to be still buried in mud in a landslide disaster which hit Nyalindung hamlet, Girimurki village Cempaka subdistrict, Cianjur district, West Java, on Thursday night, a rescue worker said.

"Seven dead victims have been lifted from the mud but six others, including five children, are still missing," rescue team chairman Rudi Syahdiar said on Sunday.

Recue workers have not been able to find the five children, namely Neneng Resa, Yayan Suryana, Yayat, Iman and Rukiah, and an adult one.

"They might have been carried away by the river's water current but workers will continue to carry out excavations in several landslide spots," Syadiar said.

It was reported earlier that forty houses were buried by landslides in the landslide Thursday evening.

According to Rustam S Pakaya, head of the ministry's Crisis Mitigation Center, the landslides occurred in six locations in Girimukti village, Cempaka sub district, and Cibokor village, Cibeber sub district.

Two residents suffered bone fractures and two others were slightly injured, and rushed to Hasan Sadikin Hospital in Bandung, West Java, he said.

The landslides forced 351 people to evacuate themselves to a village office.

"We have provided medicines, 50 body bags, and Rp25 million in cash to help the landslide victims," Pakaya said.

In Girimukti village, most of the houses were destroyed by a landslide and only few were still standing.

Source

The O'Brien County sheriff's office is looking for the owner of two unusual four-legged creatures found wandering on a golf course in Primghar. Two hinnies, a cross between a stallion and a female donkey, were found about two weeks ago.

Deputy Dean Fjeld said officials corralled the pair and took them a city pasture. So far, no one has claimed them.

Fjeld said if the owners don't show up, there's a chance the animals could be auctioned.

Fjeld said it's possible the animals were abandoned because of tough financial times.

Source

The US is bracing itself for the arrival of Hurricane Ike, which has strengthened to a category two storm as it travels over the Gulf of Mexico.

The storm has already killed more than 70 people in the Caribbean and caused widespread destruction.

In Haiti, the United Nations says about 800,000 people, nearly half of them children, are in temporary shelters.

US President Bush has declared a state of emergency in Texas, where the storm is due to make landfall on Saturday.

Authorities in the US say at least two-thirds of oil and gas production has been stopped in the Gulf of Mexico as a precaution.

The storm has maximum sustained wind speeds of nearly 100mph (155km/h) and meteorologists say it is likely to develop into a major hurricane on Thursday.

Source

WASHINGTON - China's giant earthquake in May near Chengdu caused so much geologic stress in the Tibetan Plateau that it doubled the chance of more big quakes along three neighboring faults, scientists reported.

"The magnitude 7.9 quake on 12 May has brought several nearby faults closer to failure and could trigger another major earthquake in the region," the American Geophysical Union said in a statement.

This happens because of a domino-like effect where the movement of one piece of Earth's crust forces another piece to move up, down and away, geophysicists reported.

"One great earthquake seems to make the next one more likely, not less," said Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey. "We tend to think of earthquakes as relieving stress on a fault. That may be true for the one that ruptured, but not for the adjacent faults."

The May quake that killed nearly 70,000 people and made 5 million homeless occurred along the Longmen Shan fault. This rupture in the Earth doubled the probability of future earthquakes along the Xianshuihe, Kunlun, and Min Jiang faults, which lie about 90 miles to 280 miles from the Longmen Shan fault, the scientists said.

Source

Denpasar, (ANTARA News) - Fenomena alam yang cukup ganjil yakni berubah-ubahnya warna air kembali muncul di permukaan Danau Batur, Kecamatan Kintamani, Kabupaten Bangli, sekitar 75 kilometer utara Kota Denpasar.

Kemunculan warna air yang berubah-ubah kali ini, merupakan yang kedua kalinya terjadi di Danau Batur setelah sebelumnya muncul pada akhir Nopember 2007, ungkap beberapa warga di sekitar danau, Senin.

Pada kejadian tahun lalu, permukaan air danau berubah menjadi coklat atau hijau kekuning-kuningan dari yang biasanya tampak membiru atau putih bening di bagian tepinya.

Sementara perubahan yang terjadi sejak pertengahan pekan lalu, antara lain ditandai dengan munculnya warna keputih-putihan disertai buih yang nyaris menyerupai busa detergen di permukaan air danau.

"Kami takut kalau air danau yang merupakan sumber air bersih warga selama ini, tiba-tiba mengandung racun atau unsur yang membahayakan lainnya," kata Nyoman Gunada, penduduk yang bermukim di tepi barat Danua Batur.

Senada dengan Nyoman Gunada, Gede Tindih, tokoh masyarakat Kintamani yang juga mantan anggota DPRD Bangli, mengatakan, terkait munculnya kecurigaan warga terhadap kemungkinan air danau membahayakan, perlu dilakukan upaya penelitian oleh pihak yang berwenang.

"Kami harapkan yang berwenang dapat melakukan penelitian secepatnya," kata Tindih sembari menambahkan, jangan lantas setelah membawa musibah, baru terpikir untuk melakukan tindakan.

Menurut dia, air danau yang tiba-tiba keruh dan berbuih belakangan ini, perlu secara cepat disikapi oleh yang berwenang untuk itu.

"Siapa tahu memang tercemar gas atau cairan beracun, atau juga sebagai pertanda adanya letugas gunung di dasar danau, mengingat Dabau Batur terletak di bagian kaki Gunung Batur yang dikenal aktif," katanya.

Linggih mengatakan, bisa saja air danau berubah warna karena adanya lubang solfatara gunung api aktif di dasar danau, atau tumbuhnya plankton dalam jumlah yang besar di air danau.

Source

Serang (ANTARA News) - After the Bandung-based Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Center of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources has declared Mt Anak Krakatau in top alert status, tourists are strongly advised not to climb the volcano in the Sunda strait, because on certain times it was still spewing red-hot rocks and toxic gasses.

"We are still strongly advising tourists not to climb Mt Anak Krakatau," head of the Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Center Surono said in Bandung.

He said that after the activity of Mt Anak Agung has stopped recently, its status was lowered from alert III to alert II by the center in Bandung.

But tourists were still not allowed to ascend the volcano, except up to two kilometers from the cauldron which had been declared as top danger zone.

"We have also established coordination with the managers of tourist facilities, like hotels, in the area in warning guests not to ascend the mountain at all," he said.

There was a time, when the volcano was active, a French tourist tried to ascent the volcano, but later fainted after inhaling toxic gasses, and hit by flying red-hot rocks to his eventual death, Surono said.

Source

MANILA, Philippines - Rescuers battled huge waves and strong winds Sunday to reach a ferry that capsized during a deadly typhoon in the Philippines a day earlier, but found no immediate signs of the more than 740 passengers and crew.
ADVERTISEMENT

Coast guard frogmen who managed to get to the stricken ship got no response when they rapped on the hull with metal instruments, then had to give up for the night due to the strong waves.

"They haven't seen anyone. They're scouring the area. They're studying the direction of the waves to determine where survivors may have drifted," coast guard spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Arman Balilo said.

Rescuers hoped to get inside on Monday, likely with U.S. assistance requested by the Philippine Red Cross. Typhoon Fengshen has killed at least 137 people across the sprawling archipelago, setting off landslides and floods, and knocking out electricity.

So far, 10 people from the ferry are known to have made it to land. Six bodies, including those of a man and woman who had bound themselves together, have washed ashore, along with children's slippers and life jackets.

Officials were checking reports that a large number of survivors might have reached one nearby island and that a life raft was spotted off another, coast guard spokesman Cmdr. Antonio Cuasito said.

Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday he was praying for the victims of the ferry disaster, particularly the large number of children aboard. The Philippines is predominantly Catholic.

The typhoon-prone Philippines was the site of the world's worst peacetime maritime disaster when the ferry MV Dona Paz sank in 1987, killing more than 4,341 people.

Source

Earthquake-hit province was destroyed or damaged, a forestry official said Tuesday. China's May 12 temblor centered in Sichuan devastated a vast area of wild habitat for endangered species, including the giant panda, Cao Qingyao, a spokesman for the State Forestry Administration, told reporters.

"We still cannot reach some of the local habitats, so it's impossible to assess the exact losses," Cao said.

The endangered panda is revered as a national symbol in China, where about 1,600 pandas live in the wild, mostly in Sichuan and the neighboring province of Shaanxi. Another 180 have been bred in captivity.

Forty-nine nature reserves, including the popular Wolong Nature Reserve, were damaged throughout Sichuan, Cao said, making up 2 million acres. The facility, which used to house 64 pandas, was badly damaged by the quake and one panda died.

The center remains closed to visitors, and might not open again until next year. Six pandas have been sent to another reserve in Sichuan, and eight have been sent to Beijing for an Olympics stay at the Beijing Zoo that was planned before the quake.

The earthquake also badly damaged forestry resources in the affected areas, Cao said. Direct economic losses to the forestry business were $3.3 billion and 232 forestry workers were killed, he said.

Source