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For years, residents in parts of England have cowered behind their doors at night, because Big Cats stalk the countryside. Now it’s pigs in New Jersey. For weeks, residents there have seen a mysterious 600 pound pig walking the streets. Sharon Kiefer saw it while she was walking her dogs at 6 am. “It must have been lying flat,” Kiefer says. “When we rounded the bend, it started rising up out of the woods. I know I screamed loudly.” She called the dogcatcher, but he wouldn’t go near the pig since it was an uncastrated male. “It could be aggressive,” says Kiefer, although her dogs chased it away. “It ran as fast as my dogs. Now that’s scary.”
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The ice and snow storms that shut down parts of the U.S. may not be over yet?there may be more to come, due to an El Nino in the Pacific Ocean. “El Nino is one of the driving forces behind these kinds of winter storm systems, which develop in the South and head east,” says Conrad C. Lautenbacher of NOAA. El Nino occurs when surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean remain above average for more than a few months. This can affect wind patterns high in the atmosphere resulting in changed weather in many parts of the world.

Despite the recent storms, NASA says 2002 has been the second warmest year on record. There?s been a record-breaking period of warm weather in recent years, with 2001 the third warmest year on record. But 1998 still holds the record.
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Smallpox is the worst disease known to man?it killed half a billion people from 1880 to 1980, before it was finally eradicated in 1980. But the smallpox vaccine can be deadly too, and that’s the problem we face today. Scientists say it’s the most dangerous vaccine ever invented. Should the U.S. population be given a vaccine that can cause dangerous, sometimes fatal reactions?

The vaccine used today is essentially the same as the one created in 1796. Dr. Paul Offit says, “We tend to think of vaccines as being very safe and every effective, which they are. But all the vaccines that we use today are the result of modern technology. That?s not true of the smallpox vaccine. It has a side effect profile that we would not accept for vaccines today.”
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Air pollution can cause genetic damage that is passed on by fathers to their children. Tests on mice show that those who breathed air near a smoke-belching steel mill had fewer babies and the ones they did have had more genetic mutations than normal. Almost all the extra mouse mutations were inherited from the fathers, suggesting that steel workers, who are mostly male, put their children at extra risk. “Our findings suggest that there is an urgent need to investigate the genetic consequences associated with exposure to chemical pollution through the inhalation of urban and industrial air,” say researchers Christopher Somers and James Quinn.
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