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September, 2004, has been a terrible month on planet earth. We have suffered one of the greatest sequence of storms in recent memory, with devastation from the United States to China to Bangladesh.

As I am writing this, the death toll in the United States is close to a hundred. At least a thousand people have been killed in Haiti, 64 in Grenada, and Grenada has been ruined as a country, with every hotel on the island damaged or destroyed, the electrical system destroyed and the nutmeg plantations entirely destroyed. Both of Grenada’s major industries, tourism and nutmeg farming, are ruined. The suffering in Haiti is unspeakable, as hungry and thirsty people wade in waters that stubbornly won’t go down, amid the stench of rotting corpses.
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Sleep researchers now think that dreams are produced in graymatter that’s deep in the back of the brain. Scientistsstudying a woman who lost her ability to dream after astroke in that area are trying to discover if dreams haveany meaning.
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Some of the earliest settlers of America may have come fromAustralia, southern Asia, and the Pacific, instead of overthe Bering ice bridge (which no longer exists) from Siberia.Ancient bones 12,000 years old have long and narrow headsthat are very different from the short, broad skulls oftoday’s Native Americans, who trace their origins from thenorth. This means that present-day Indians were not thefirst people here.

In bbcnews.com, Paul Rincon quotes archeologist SilviaGonzalez as saying, “They appear more similar to southernAsians, Australians and populations of the South Pacific Rimthan they do to northern Asians. We think there were severalmigration waves into the Americas at different times bydifferent human groups.”
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During the SARS epidemic, we reported that it killed somecats (including big ones in zoos). Now it’s been discoveredthat the deadly bird flu that’s been spreading through Asiacan be caught by cats as well, who can then pass it on toother felines. Scientists don’t know if cats can spread theflu to people.

Why wasn’t this discovered before? World HealthOrganization’s influenza chief Klaus Stohr says, “One[reason] is nobody looked.” WHO scientists now plan toexamine household cats whenever they investigate humanbird-flu infections. When they checked in Vietnam, theyfound the cats in flu patients’ homes were healthy.
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