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These days I notice the same thing everyone else does: Most people walking (or driving!) along are in their own little world, oblivious to the larger world around them, because they are either talking on a cell phone with an earpiece in their ear or texting. It’s become a world of walking cocoons.

I’m woefully behind on all this technology because, while I do correspond with friends on email, I don’t have a cell phone that texts. I haven’t yet updated my antiquated cell phone because Whitley and I, as business partners, share a cell phone number (although he’s the one who actually carries the phone). When it comes to cell phones, I’m like someone who is still using a dial, while everyone else is pushing buttons.
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What creates a Katrina? – Hurricane season is starting up again, and scientists are launching a major field project next month in the tropical Atlantic Ocean to solve a central mystery of hurricanes: Why do certain clusters of tropical thunderstorms grow into the often-deadly storms while many others dissipate? The results should eventually help forecasters provide more advance warning to those in harm’s way. It turns out that one of the things that causes hurricanes to grow is phyloplankton, which is an essential ingredient for the fish we eat and the air we breathe. But too much of it can lead to BIGGER storms.
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The plastic kind – Plastic pollution is a big problem in the ocean right now and we can’t wait until tomorrow to clean it up.

By dragging fine-meshed nets along the ocean’s surface, researchers found that while there is a great deal of it there, the volume seems to have stopped increasing, probably due to new laws that prohibit ships from dumping their trash in the ocean. Plastic, which does not dissolve, is still a major problem, though: They found pieces of it in 60% of the over 6,000 samples of trash they examined.
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Our sun isn’t the only star that flares up into sunspots every 11 years. In a bid to unlock longstanding mysteries of the Sun, including the impacts on Earth of its 11-year cycle, an international team of scientists has successfully probed a distant star and found that it ALSO has an 11-year cycle.

The scientists studied a star known as HD49933, which is located 100 light years from Earth in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, just east of Orion. When they examined the star’s acoustic fluctuations (sounds), they detected the signature of “starspots,” areas of intense magnetic activity on the surface that are similar to sunspots.
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