It is the California earthquake hardly anyone has heard of — strong enough to rip 362km of the San Andreas Fault and make rivers run backward, but leaving nothing like the cultural scar inflicted by the San Francisco quake of 1906. Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of the 7,9-magnitude Fort Tejon quake.
Not long after puny Pluto was stripped of its planethood, Janis Robinson started selling ”Pluto is a planet” T-shirts on the internet. Robinson, who said she ”rolled her eyes” after Pluto got the boot, hopes her buyers will send a message that kicking out the far-out rock is downright goofy.
Doctors in Los Angeles are prepared for a marathon surgery to separate 10-month-old twin girls joined from the chest to the pelvis. The operation, scheduled to begin early on Wednesday, was expected to last 24 hours. It was considered more complex than other separation surgeries involving conjoined twins because so many organ systems were involved.
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/ 13 February 2006
Researchers scouring the remote forests of the African island nation of Madagascar have found that tiny assassin spiders, grotesque-looking bugs that prey on other spiders, are more diverse than previously thought. Assassin spiders, which grow to less than 0,3cm long, are notorious for stabbing helpless spiders with their sharp, venom-filled fangs.
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/ 6 December 2005
Nearly two years after Nasa’s twin rovers parachuted to Mars, a Jekyll-and-Hyde picture is emerging about the planet’s past and whether it could have supported life. Both Spirit and Opportunity uncovered geologic evidence of a wet past, a sign that ancient Mars may have been hospitable to life.
Nasa hopes to give astronomers their first peek at the inside of a comet by blasting a stadium-sized hole through one of the heavenly bodies. If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1 — about 130-million kilometres away from Earth at the time of impact.