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Sudden Acute Respiratory Distress has reached Houston. Presumably it will be in San Antonio soon. Because of scarring to my lungs when I was young, I am apt to be very seriously threatened by this illness, so it is a matter of great concern for me. We have stopped going to parties, movies, anything that involves a gathering. I won?t say that we?re scared, but we are being very cautious. I think that anybody who comes down with a sudden high fever should certainly seek medical attention immediately. I know that I will.
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SETI scientists who used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to analyze 150 radio signals collected in the world’s biggest computing project found no signs of intelligent life. Susan Lendroth, of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, which sponsors Seti@home, says, “The odds are probably against a quick find but SETI researchers around the world hope that they will one day find evidence of an alien civilization.”

Since 1999, millions of people from more than 200 countries have been running a special screensaver program on their desktops that uses their PC?s downtime to sift date from radio telescopes that might be communications from space.
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With the excitement about SARS, it’s easy to forget that Lyme Disease season is coming again. Lyme is carried by ticks that hitch a ride on mice and deer. The increase in Lyme may be caused by the decrease in large forest areas, because the ticks do better in suburbia. White-footed mice, which are the main carriers of infected ticks, are more abundant in forest fragments, because there are fewer predators there. These mice especially like areas smaller than five acres. And deer are thriving in the suburbs, again because their predators can’t live there.
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If you have to have an earthquake, don’t have a shaky one?have a slow one. That’s what?s happening in the Northwest right now: an earthquake is slowly unleashing energy that measures 6.7 on the Richter scale. But it’s releasing it over weeks rather than seconds, so no one can feel it. The quake, which started Feb. 26 and seems to be finally coming to a halt, stretches from northwest Washington state to southwest British Columbia.

An earthquake has been predicted in that general area for years?will this take care of the situation? Alas, no?”These slow slips aren’t reducing the stress on the locked zone,” says Herb Dragert, of the Geological Survey of Canada. “They’re actually, in little pulses, adding a tiny bit of stress to the locked zone.”
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