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Moscow is slowly thawing out from its heaviest snowfall in 40 years, in a harsh winter that caused the deaths of 205 people.

Now people are facing a new hazard: falling icicles. Three people have been killed by falling icicles this winter, and the city?s pavements have turned into a huge network of ice rinks. Many are closed off by police tape and the government has put up signs warning about the icicle hazard.

These are no ordinary icicles?they can reach several feet in length and when they descend from tall buildings, they are like daggers falling to earth. 74 people have been struck by them so far this winter. An 18-year old soldier was killed by falling ice at his military base.
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Our government spied on the Soviet Union for decades, but now that the cold war is over, they?re aiming their sights on us.

The April 2001 issue of Popular Mechanics reveals that two powerful intelligence gathering tools the U.S. created to eavesdrop on the Soviets are now being used to monitor Americans. One system, known as Echelon, intercepts and analyzes our phone calls, faxes and e-mail, looking for ?key? words.

The other system, Tempest, can secretly read the displays on personal computers, cash registers and automatic teller machines. Whitley Strieber was personally warned by a government agent 15 years ago that the data on his computer was being read in this way.

For the full Insight article, click here.
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Invisible asteroids and other cosmic bodies made of a new form of matter may pose a threat to Earth, according to an Australian physicist.

Robert Foot of the University of Melbourne claims that a meteorite composed of mirror matter, which is an invisible dark matter that is said to make up over 95 percent of the universe, could impact the Earth without leaving behind any fragments.

An asteroid made up of mirror matter may have been responsible for the Tunguska blast, which destroyed acres of Siberian forest in 1908. Scientists have attributed the mysterious destruction to a meteor impact, but no traces of a meteor have ever been found.
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New evidence from satellites orbiting the Earth has put an end to an doubts about whether greenhouse gases are actually increasing.

Until now, researchers depended on ground-based measurements and theoretical models to measure the increase. New sets of data taken from two satellites orbiting the Earth have now provided the first directly observable evidence of a rise in greenhouse gases.

?It?s the first time that we have seen observationally that these changes are really having an effect on the radiative forcing of the climate,? said Dr. Helen Brindley, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College in London. Radiative forcing is the measure of the climate effects of greenhouse gases.
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