On:

Wouldn?t you know it?they say the good die young, but it turns out the happy may too. Scientists have discovered that mildly depressed older women tend to live longer than those who are not depressed at all.

This is contrary to most other studies on the link between depression and mortality, which have shown that depression increases the likelihood of death within a certain time period. ?This is totally counterintuitive to what you expect to see,? says Dan G. Blazer, a Duke University professor of psychiatry and behavioral science. ?We know that depression in younger populations is very clearly associated with mortality. It?s not so clear in older populations.?
read more

On:

Sooner or later, a catastrophe from space will wipe out almost all life on Earth, according to Dr Arnon Dar of the Technion Space Research Institute in Israel. A particular type of exploding star going off anywhere in our region of the Universe would devastate our planet.

Using the latest statistics and calculations, Dar says that a supermassive star collapsing at the end of its lifetime would form a black hole and send out a beam of destructive radiation and particles that would sterilize any planet in its path. The odds are that any planet in our galaxy would be affected about once every one hundred million years. “It is a certainty; the timescales are comparable to mass extinctions seen in Earth’s geological record,” he says.
read more

On:

The collapse of a giant glacier 10 times the size of Manhattan near Antarctica last week is a natural occurrence and has not been induced by global warming, according to the British Atlantic Survey (BAS). “From the size of it, 41 nautical miles long and four nautical miles wide, it sounds as though it is a normal ‘calving’ event from the ice front,” says BAS glaciologist Chris Doake.

Disintegration of the Ross ice shelf on Thursday in the Ross Sea follows the collapse in March of the Larsen B ice shelf in the Weddell Sea near Chile, also in Antarctica. That ice shelf was the size of a small European country.
read more

On:

The explosion of a Russian airliner over the Black Sea on Oct. 4, which was not reported in the media here, raises an interesting question relating to the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island five years ago. Both planes exploded from what looked like friendly fire and crashed into the sea. Did the Ukraine, where the October event occurred, use media spin and disinformation to keep the cause of the crash secret?the way the U.S. military did? Reed Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media (AIM), a media watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. To read his provocative Insight piece about another TWA 800-type explosion, click here.

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.read more