A man in Dorset has been left mystified after tiny blue spheres fell from the sky into his garden. Steve Hornsby said [they] came raining down late on Thursday afternoon during a hail storm.

He found about a dozen of the balls in his garden. He said: “[They're] difficult to pick up, I had to get a spoon and flick them into a jam jar.” The Met Office said the jelly-like substance was “not meteorological”.

Mr Hornsby, a former aircraft engineer, said: “The sky went a really dark yellow colour…As I walked outside to go to the garage there was an instant hail storm for a few seconds and I thought, ‘what’s that in the grass’?”

Walking around his garden he found many more blue spheres were scattered across the grass. He said: “The have an exterior shell with a softer inner but have no smell, aren’t sticky and do not melt.”

Josie Pegg, an applied science research assistant at Bournemouth University, speculated that the apparently strange phenomena might be “marine invertebrate eggs”.

Photos: Alex E. Proimos

Today has been the coolest day all week in the Northeast of the US.  The Midwest, Northeast and Southern parts of the country have been experiencing consecutive days of high temperatures and humidity which have contributed to many deaths throughout the country. What is the cause of this cantankerous heat and is it an indication of future affects of global warming? The National Geographic reports:

A stubborn high-pressure system is the culprit behind the dangerously high heat wave that’s been baking much of the U.S., experts say.

The high-pressure system—a large area of dense air—is being held in place by upper-level winds known as the jet stream. Within the system, dense air sinks and becomes warmer, and since warm air can hold more moisture than cooler air, there’s also very high humidity. (Learn more about Earth’s atmosphere.)

Stationary high-pressure systems aren’t unusual during the summer, according to Eli Jacks, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.

But what sets this system apart is its size and strength.

“It’s exceptionally strong and very wide, covering thousands of miles from border to border and from the Rocky Mountains to the East Coast,” Jacks said.

[Continues at National Geographic]

Sunspot activity, which follows an 11-year cycle, is due to peak in 2013 after which it will start to wane slightly. But astronomers think the next upswing will be less intensive than normal, or could fail to happen at all. That could affect weather on Earth because low solar activity has been linked to low global temperatures in the past.

Three studies, presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s solar physics division, all point towards declining sunspot activity into the next decade.

Between 1645 and 1715 almost no sunspots were observed, a solar period which came to be called the Maunder Minimum. During those decades Europe suffered frequent unusually harsh winters, and the time was later termed the Little Ice Age.

But Joanna Haigh professor of atmospheric physics at Imperial College London, cautioned: “In any case, the cooling effect is only ever temporary. When the sun’s activity returns to normal, the greenhouse gases won’t have gone away.”

TEHRAN — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday accused Western countries of devising plans to “cause drought” in the Islamic republic, as he inaugurated a dam in a central province.

“Western countries have designed plans to cause drought in certain areas of the world, including Iran,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying in the central city of Arak in Markazi province.

“According to reports on climate, whose accuracy has been verified, European countries are using special equipment to force clouds to dump” their water on their continent, he said.

By doing so, “they prevent rain clouds from reaching regional countries, including Iran,” Ahmadinejad charged. Iran has experienced several droughts in recent years.

For more information, see original article.

“Artificial clouds” driven by solar-powered engines might be deployed at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to help keep the stadiums from overheating. Each cloud, as a short video hosted over at the BBC explains, “is constructed from an advanced, lightweight, and strong carbon-fiber material.”

The interior of the cloud is injected with helium gas to make it float. The cloud hovers like a helicopter and is remotely controlled. In this way, the cloud hovers over the football ground, shielding it from direct sunlight and providing a favorable climatic environment. The cloud is also programmed to continuously change its shielding position according to the prevailing east-to-west path of the sun.

After all, I suppose it makes sense that the next step in temporary event architecture will be a remote-controlled swarm of rearrangeable horizontal and vertical surfaces, forming ceilings, roofs, walls, floors, ramps, and stairways.

However, justifiable skepticism aside, there is something fantastically interesting in the suggestion that a regional architecture, whose formal and technical history includes several centuries’ worth of portable tent design, would—and I exaggerate—leapfrog past the idea of stationary, permanent construction altogether and instead go for something like an on-demand spatial robotics, such as the “artificial clouds” seen here.

Are instantly deployable, remote-controlled sun shielding surfaces—unmanned aerial architecture, perhaps—a kind of unexpected next step in the evolution of tent design? Nomad caravans wander through the desert with strange, helium-filled wireless air pillows whirring quietly overhead. Perhaps they could even be Wifi hotspots.

A PE class had to run for cover as it started raining worms.
Teacher David Crichton was leading a group of pupils playing football at Galashiels Academy when dozens of the invertebrates began plummeting from the sky. The 22 second-year boys had to abandon their lesson.

Mr. Crichton said the children had just completed their warm-up when they began to hear “soft thudding” on the ground. The class then looked to the cloudless sky – and saw worms falling on to them.

The teacher scooped up handfuls of the worms that had fallen from the sky as proof they had landed on his class. Mr. Crichton said he and his colleagues eventually found about 120 worms after checking the artificial football pitch and tennis courts.

Showers of worms falling from the heavens have been reported in the past. Similar events were recorded in 1872 in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1877 in Christiana, Norway, and in 1924 in Halmstad, Sweden. In July 2007 a woman was crossing a road in Louisiana when large clumps of tangled worms dropped from above.

The incident in Galashiels is believed to have been caused by freak weather over a nearby river lifting water and worms and dumping it over the road.

Geologists have known for years that tectonic plates affect climate patterns. Now they say that the opposite is also true, finding that intensifying climate events can move tectonic plates. Using models based on known monsoonal and plate movement patterns, geologists say that the Indian Plate has accelerated by about 20% over the past 10 million years. “The significance of this finding lies in recognising for the first time that long-term climate changes have the potential to act as a force and influence the motion of tectonic plates,” Australian National University researcher Giampiero Iaffaldano told COSMOS.

The researchers plugged information from research on monsoonal patterns and the Indian Plate’s movement into a model, which indicated that the monsoonal erosion that has battered the eastern Himalaya Mountains for the past 10 million years erodes enough material to account for the plate’s counter-clockwise rotation. By gradually shaving off rocks from the eastern flank and decreasing crustal thickness, the monsoonal rains essentially lighten the load on the eastern part of the Indian Plate, causing the plate to actually turn (at geological speed).

The scientists ruled out the traditional powerhouse behind tectonic movement — mantle convection — because the mantle’s influence works on longer time frames than 10 million years. It doesn’t account, for example, for the Indian Plate’s geologically rapid velocity increase of more than 5 millimeters per year since 3.6 million years ago.

Read More: Discover

The world has gotten stormier over the past two decades — and the reason is a mystery, a new study says.

In the past 20 years, winds have picked up around 5 percent on average.

Extremely strong winds caused by storms have increased even faster, jumping 10 percent over 20 years, according to the new analysis of global satellite data.

The study, the first to look at wind speeds across such a large swath of the planet, bolsters some earlier findings, according to study leader Ian Young, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

“Some regional studies had found similar results, so we suspected there may be an increasing trend,” Young said.

Read More: National Geographic

“As for America, experts say for now we are in the clear. ‘It is true that radiation emanating from Japan is moving across the Pacific and it’s feasible that one could detect those radiation levels in California,’ says [Dr. Cham] Dallas. ‘But it’s certain that it wouldn’t be dangerous.’”

Do any disinformation readers have expertise in radiation safety issues? Can we be so certain that there is no danger as Dr. Dallas suggests? Please post your thoughts in the comments.

Here’s some more of Katz’s story:

As conditions worsen at four nuclear reactors in Japan, many here and abroad are worried about the health risks of radiation.

What are they?

There are two main fears: first the release of radioactive iodine which can cause thyroid cancer. Some has already been released into the atmosphere, but Japanese health officials hope to stay ahead of it.

The government plans to distribute potassium iodide pills that can keep radioactive iodine from being taken up by the thyroid gland and causing cancer.

“Those are all preventable cancers” if the protective pills are taken right after exposure, said University of New Mexico radiologist Dr. Fred Mettler.

The government has also asked about 180,000 people to leave a 19-mile area around the leaking plants at Fukushima on Japan’s east coast. Those who remain have been asked to wear face masks and stay indoors.

But wind and rain could complicate matters.

Officials in Ibaraki, a neighboring prefecture just south of the Fukushima plant which was severely damaged during the 9.0 earthquake which rocked Japan on March 11, said up to 100 times the normal levels of radiation were detected Tuesday. While those figures are worrying if there is prolonged exposure, they are far from fatal.

Tokyo reported slightly elevated radiation levels, but officials said the increase was too small to threaten the 39 million people in and around the capital, about 170 miles away.

So far, the broad radiation danger has been very small, according to Dr. Cham Dallas, University of Georgia professor of public health who studied the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine…

A secret £7 million weather project in Abu Dhabi has resulted in dozens of man-made rainstorms, according to reports.

Scientists employed by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE and leader of Abu Dhabi, successfully created more than 50 rainstorms in the state’s Al Ain region last year, mostly in July and August when there is virtually no rain at all. It is believed to be the first time the system has produced rain from clear skies.

They have been using giant ionizers, shaped like giant lampshades, to generate fields of negatively charged particles, which create cloud formation.

In a company video, seen by The Sunday Times, Helmut Fluhrer, the founder of Metro Systems International, the Swiss company in charge of the project, said: “We are currently operating our innovative rainfall enhancement technology, Weathertec, in the region of Al Ain in Abu Dhabid. We started in June 2010 and have achieved a number of rainfalls.”

Antimatter Cloud (NASA)

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but scientists are reporting that they have seen antimatter beams emitted from thunderstorms. Jonathan Palmer has the story at BBC News:

A space telescope has accidentally spotted thunderstorms on Earth producing beams of antimatter.

Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

The surprise result was presented by researchers at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.

It deepens a mystery about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs — sparks of light that are estimated to occur 500 times a day in thunderstorms on Earth. They are a complex interplay of light and matter whose origin is poorly understood.

Thunderstorms are known to create tremendously high electric fields — evidenced by lightning strikes. Electrons in storm regions are accelerated by the fields, reaching speeds near that of light and emitting high-energy light rays — gamma rays — as they are deflected by atoms and molecules they encounter.

These flashes are intense — for a thousandth of a second, they can produce as many charged particles from one flash as are passing through the entire Earth’s atmosphere from all other processes…

[continues at BBC News]

I can believe it’s real but can’t believe it’s stable. C’mon Russian town, where’s your Dept. of Public Works to take care of this stuff? From English Russia via Gizmodo, Jesus Diaz, writes:

This is not a Photoshop. It’s not an optical trick. And it’s not an illustration. It’s just a simply great photo taken near the Linevo village, in the Volgograd region of Russia. A wild firestorm went through the village and its surroundings, destroying 80 houses. Nobody knows what was the origin, but at least the phone lines are still working.

It looks like a narrow escape for one of mankind’s most ancient symbols.

A bolt of lightning illuminates the sky around the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple, high on the Acropolis during a heavy rainfall in Athens early this morning.

Fortunately, the temple is believed to have escaped any damage.

[story continues in the Daily Mail/AP]

Beware City of Chicago! The end is near. From Craig Shimala on Vimeo:

People in drought-stricken countries could one day create rain clouds on demand thanks to laser technology. Physicists have discovered that firing short laser bursts into the air can trigger the formation of water droplets. The breakthrough technique could help stimulate rainfall in the future.

Scientist Jerome Kasparian and his team from the University of Geneva wanted to find a more environmentally friendly alternative to cloud seeding. This 50-year-old process attempts to artificially induce showers. A red laser pulse ionises the air and triggers the condensation of water droplets to create a cloud, which is illuminated by a green laser

Rockets carrying silver iodide particles are scattered in the sky. The particles act as ‘condensation nuclei’ around which water drops can form. Dr Kasparian said cloud seeding is not an efficient method despite decades of development. He added: ‘There are also worries about how safe adding silver iodide particles into the air is for the environment.’

The researchers realised laser technology could be used to create an alternative technique. They found firing an energy beam through an atmospheric cloud chamber created a channel of ionised nitrogen and oxygen molecules. These acted as condensation anchors in much the same way as silver iodide molecules.

The water drops along the damp channel nearly doubled in size from 50micrometres to 80 micrometres as they fused to the ions…

[continues in the Daily Mail]

For residents of a small Australian town, their usually mundane conversations about the weather have just become a whole lot more interesting.

That’s because in the outback town of Lajamanu it’s started raining fish. Yes, fish. Hundreds of them, falling from the sky. Over the past two days the town’s 660 residents have been bombarded with small white fish which have been falling like rain.

Locals say the fish, mostly spangled perch, have even been alive as they hit the floor. Lucky it wasn’t crocodiles then. Meteorologists believe the fish where sucked up by a tornado — which passed over a river some 300 miles away — before being carried through the sky at 40,000 to 50,000 feet.

Image: 1555 Engraving by Olaus Magnus (via Wikipedia)

Read More in Asylum

On Wednesday, Nye got tough when he appeared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, stating twice that climate change deniers are “unpatriotic.”

For young adult climate skeptics, it must hurt to have a childhood icon emerge ghostlike from the past to call you an anti-American.

The term “environmental modification techniques” refers to any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva: 18 May 1977)

“Environmental warfare is defined as the intentional modification or manipulation of the natural ecology, such as climate and weather, earth systems such as the ionosphere, magnetosphere, tectonic plate system, and/or the triggering of seismic events (earthquakes) to cause intentional physical, economic, and psycho-social, and physical destruction to an intended target geophysical or population location, as part of strategic or tactical war.” (Eco News)

“[Weather modification] offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary… Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.” (US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report)

World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 with a view to reaching an agreement on Global Warming. The debate on Climate Change focuses on the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and measures to reduce manmade CO2 emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

The underlying consensus is that greenhouse gas emissions constitute the sole cause of climate instability. Neither the governments nor the environmental action groups, have raised the issue of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques (ENMOD).” for military use. Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of climatic manipulations for military use has been excluded from the UN agenda on climate change.

John von Neumann noted at the height of the Cold War (1955), with tremendous foresight that:

“Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters ….will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present… [T]his will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done.” (Quoted in Spencer Weart, Environmental Warfare: Climate Modification Schemes, Global Research, December 5, 20090

In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned “military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.” (AP, 18 May 1977). Both the US and the Soviet Union were signatories to the Convention…

[continues at the Centre for Research on Globalisation site]

Recently both Russia and China have claimed to be able to use cloud seeding to increase rainfall and snowfall, or change the location of where it falls. In the past, snow-making experiments have been carried out in North American ski resorts in the past with little evidence of success. So how have the Russian and Chinese scientists achieved this feat and what evidence is there that it is in fact due to cloud seeding?

The seeding method used is to add tiny particles of silver iodide to the clouds and there is solid science behind this method. At temperatures a few degrees below zero degrees centigrade, clouds consist mainly of supercooled water droplets. These clouds can be quite stable, but silver iodide has an ice-like structure and it will cause a few of these water droplets to freeze. Once you have ice particles mixed in with the supercooled droplets, these crystals grow rapidly to form snowflakes, causing the cloud to precipitate. The effect is that the water is released from the cloud.

[Read more at The Independent]