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The two ?mystery? cases of anthrax that killed an elderly woman in Connecticut and another woman in the Bronx, may have been caused by spores blown on the wind from the Trenton, New Jersey postal center where anthrax-laced letters were processed in October. If this is the case, the fear that anthrax was carried widely across the country by contaminated mail may not be true.

These two anthrax deaths were not associated with contaminated mail. The places where the two women lived?the Bronx in New York City and Oxford, Connecticut?both lie on a straight line running 47 degrees northeast from Trenton.
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Every person in the world would be fingerprinted and registered under a universal identification plan to fight illegal immigration and identify the movements of potential terrorists that was outlined at a United Nations meeting. The plan was suggested by Pascal Smet, the head of Belgium?s independent asylum review board, at a meeting with ministers from many other countries. Smet says the European Union is already considering a Europe-wide system, using either fingerprints or eye scanning technology, to identify citizens.
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NASA scientists have discovered that a huge release of methane from gas that had been frozen beneath the ocean floor heated the Earth by up to 13 degrees Fahrenheit 55 million years ago. They used a computer simulation to better understand the role of methane in sudden climate change in the far past. While today?s greenhouse gas studies focus on carbon dioxide, methane is 20 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere.

In the last 200 years, atmospheric methane has been increasing, along with carbon dioxide. In fact, methane has more than doubled due to decomposing organic materials in wetlands and swamps and emissions from gas pipelines, coal mining, increases in irrigation and livestock flatulence.
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The odds are good that eventually our planet will be hit by an asteroid or a comet, as it has many times before. Engineers and scientists here at NASA?s Langley Research Center are trying to spot these hazards before they sit. One good place to set up an astronomical alarm system is on the Moon.

A large number of asteroids larger than a half-mile across are in orbits that bring them close to Earth. If any of them were to hit our planet, it would cause social and environmental upheaval. Locating the whereabouts of these objects is the major job of several Earth-based telescopic searches.
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