New research suggests that people living in large cities are more likely than small-town residents to exhibit psychotic-like symptoms such as paranoia and delusions. In a study of more than 7,000 people in the Netherlands, investigators found that both full-blown psychotic disorders and milder psychosis-like symptoms were more common among those living in urbanized areas. The link was most apparent among people born and raised in densely populated areas, suggesting that childhood environment may create ?enduring liabilities? for adult psychiatric health, according to Dr. Jim van Os of Maastricht University and his colleagues, who reported their findings in the July issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
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Between 1962 and 1979 the NSF Polar Research Vessel Eltanin surveyed Antarctic waters, studying the ocean and ocean bottom. In 1964, the ship photographed an unusual object at a depth of 13,500 feet. At the time, there was no submarine that could have carried a piece of technology to this depth.

The object appears to be a pole rising from the ocean floor with twelve spokes radiating from it, each ending in a sphere. The spokes are at fifteen degree angles to each other. It is located approximately 1,000 miles south of Cape Horn, beneath some of the most inhospitable seas in the world.
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For the last several years the U.S. Navy has been making plans to deploy Low Frequency Active Sonar (LFA), a new extended-range submarine-detection system that will create noise billions of times more intense than before in the world?s oceans. The National Marine Fisheries Service has proposed issuing a permit that would allow the Navy to proceed with LFA deployment and, in the process, to harass, injure, or even kill marine mammals while flooding the ocean with sound. The Navy wants to use LFA to deploy a global surveillance system to hunt for a new generation of silent enemy submarines. But marine scientists and environmentalists are fighting the proposal, saying it could prove lethal to whales and other marine mammals.
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The key to improving weather forecasts may lie in the discovery of atmospheric ?hot spots?– regions in which small changes in conditions magnify quickly into large changes in the weather.

Researchers from the University of Maryland have shown that not all chaos on a weather map is equal, and they?ve developed a technique for identifying regions they call chaos hot spots. These hot spots shift location on a regular basis and cover about 20 percent of the global map at any given time.

?This work has tremendous potential for improving both the accuracy of existing forecasts and for increasing the length of time into the future that the weather can be predicted accurately,? says math professor James Yorke, principle investigator for the research project. read more