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A group of engineers plan to fire supersonic jets of salty water towards storm clouds in order to trigger lightning. If it works, they say their system could ultimately be used to protect people and property from lightning strikes.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, says lightning hits around 600 people each year in the U.S., killing 100. The majority of victims are in sports grounds or playgrounds when struck. The strikes lead to $5 million in insurance claims every year, so predicting when and where lightning will strike is important.
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On the National Geographic website, Bijal P. Trivedi reports on an NPR interview by Alex Chadwick of Charles ?Chip? Stanish, a UCLA archaeologist who is searching in the remote highlands of Peru for the lost temples of the Pukara, an ancient people that preceded the Inca by more than 2,500 years.

Stanish thinks that ancient Pukara was one of the first civilizations to engage in regional trade. He looks for sites along a 2,000 year-old road linking the Peruvian highlands with Amazonian lowlands, where he believes he will find important trade goods buried among the ruins.
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NASA researchers have found that more sunlight entered the tropics and more heat escaped into space in the 1990s than in the 1980s, meaning there was less cloud cover to block incoming radiation or to stop the heat from escaping into the atmosphere. They determined this after examining 22 years of satellite measurements.

?Since clouds were thought to be the weakest link in predicting future climate change from greenhouse gases, these new results are unsettling,? says Dr. Bruce Wielicki of NASA. ?It suggests that current climate models may, in fact, be more uncertain than we had thought. Climate change might be either larger or smaller than the current range of predictions.?
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Eric Schmitt and James Dao report in The New York Times of February 4 that the top Marine general for Central Asia and the Persian Gulf is moving his headquarters to Bahrain from Hawaii. His counterparts in Army, Navy and Air Force have already moved to the region.More than 1,000 war planners, logistics experts and support specialists are now at sophisticated command posts in the region, ready to act. This is the first time so many senior commanders have been placed in war-ready positions since the gulf war in 1991. General Tommy Franks, of the military Central Command, remains at his headquarters in Tampa, Florida, but is traveling frequently to the region. These moves suggest that new U.S. attacks against terrorism may be imminent.
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