The Midwest and the South of the U.S. faced severe storms, damaging winds, heavy rains and flash floods

Three people died due to severe storms accompanied by damaging winds, heavy rains and flash floods in parts of the Midwest and the South. The dead included a couple of two children in Michigan and Arkansas apart of a woman in Ohio. Loss of power led to cancellation of classes in many schools as well as problems to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in Indiana and Michigan. One of the girls killed in the Michigan City was a 14-year-old who was electrocuted in the backyard of her home. She had come into contact with an electrical line knocked down by a thunderstorm. In the Detroit-area community of Warren, two boys were hospitalized. One of them touched a power line that was down. Moreover, in Arkansas, an 11-year-old boy lost his life after being swept into a storm drain during heavy rainfall. A woman who tried to help the child was also pulled from the drain and had to be moved to a hospital for treatment. 3 killed, including 2 children, after severe storms hit the Midwest and South.

The National Weather Service revealed that slow-moving thunderstorms brought heavy rainfall to the area and caused localized flash floods. An official of the weather service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said – “Those heavy rains, when they fell, a lot of them fell really quickly and in a short time." In Ohio, a woman lost her life after a tree fell on her behind her home in Toledo. At that time, a strong storm had passed through the area. Threw were widespread storms in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. High speed winds downed branches of trees and power lines at different locations. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency after excessive rainfall added to the problems in one of the water-treatment plants. It caused to low water pressure through much of the capital city. Incidentally, a swollen Pearl River led to floods in Jackson. It happened after storms dumped heavy rain. The flooding in Mississippi was less severe than flooding that caused death and destruction recently in Kentucky. At the time, the floods left at least 39 dead and robbed thousands of families of all of their possessions.

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Michigan's Traverse City Airport uses a border collie to shoo away birds

Michigan's Traverse City Airport uses a border collie to shoo away birds Birds are a menace in airports and in Michigan's Traverse City Airport (Cherry Capital Airport) and it has witnessed 37 bird strikes and even one skunk strike between 2010 and 2015. Hence, in order to shoo away the birds, the airport has roped in a border collie whose job is to drive away the birds. As indicated by his trainer, Piper the border collie has chased off 2430 birds that year. This has been reported in nzherald.co.nz dated 23 February 2016

He wears a ski mask to protect his eyes from wind, and also boots to protect his paws from the hot tarmac and, needless to say, has attracted lot of attention in his hometown and abroad. This bred of dogs are natural herders and Piper was imparted special training to be able to tolerate aircraft noise. He dons custom-made "MuffMutts" to protect his hearing.
His duty is four 10-hour shifts a week, on a rotating basis, with plenty of dog biscuit breaks. He had first been trialed as a Wildlife Control K-9 in 2014 and now looks after aircraft safety by shooing away birds.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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Be careful of six things that can reduce your lifespan

#health #cancer #lifestyle At any point of time experts are conducting research on a variety of subjects and the University of Sydney researchers have carried out a research over a six-year period on 230,000 people aged 45 and above to establish which factors affect one’s lifespan. This study reaffirms the importance of healthy lifestyles.
The study has identified six factors that can be blamed for a short lifespan. These are alcohol consumption, poor diet, inactivity, and smoking, spending more than seven hours a day sitting down and sleeping for more than nine hours. Anyone who has all these six bad habits is more than five times as likely to die during a six-year period as compared to one who is very clean-living.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 8 December 2015.

Previous research had identified important risk factors such as alcohol consumption, poor diet, inactivity and smoking which reduce lifespan. But, due to modern living styles, new factors have been identified that contribute to short lifespan. These are sedentary behavior - the amount of time spent sitting - and getting too much or too little sleep. In the opinion of researchers, unhealthy habits lead to nearly a third of deaths.
Researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Michigan have discovered that TV addicts (those who watch more than 3.5 hours of TV a day) are at risk of cancer and heart disease which are illnesses commonly associated with long term laziness. Moreover, they suffer from diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, Parkinson's and liver disease.

(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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Pelvic bone of a 15,000-year-old wooly mammoth found in a soybean field in Michigan

Farmers in Michigan have come across what appears to be the pelvic bone of a wooly mammoth that roamed some 15,000 years ago – they were digging in the soybean field when they unearthed an item that looked like a bent fence post, caked with mud. It turned out to be part of a pelvis from an ancient woolly mammoth.
This has been reported in nzherald.co.nz dated 4 October 2015.

A team of paleontologists from the University of Michigan and an excavator have managed to recover nearly 20 percent of the animal's skeleton. Apart from the pelvis, the team has found the skull and two tusks, along with numerous vertebrae, ribs and both shoulder blades.
Study of the bones could provide a clue of when humans arrived in the Americas. As indicated by Daniel Fisher, the scientist who led the dig, it is possible that the animal was killed by humans who were here. They could have killed it and stashed the meat so that they could come back later for it. Three boulders the size of basketballs found next to the remains could be evidence that these might have been used to anchor the carcass in a pond.
In the opinion of experts, mammoths and mastodons, another elephant-like creature, were common in North America before they disappeared around 11,700 years ago. So far, remains of about 300 mastodons and 30 mammoths have been discovered in Michigan but the latest find is more complete.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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#NASA #MarsMission #marsexploration With the intention of generating an interest in the Red Planet Mars among the commoners, NASA had announced a competition in September 2014 and its results have come out now as reported in zeenews.india.com dated 21February 2014.
The competition was the Mars Balance Mass Challenge in which NASA had asked for design ideas for small science and technology payloads that could provide dual purpose as ejectable balance masses on spacecraft that would be entering the Martian atmosphere.
There were a total of 219 submissions from 43 countries as revealed by NASA chief technologist David Miller and the first prize of $20,000 has been awarded to Texas-based Ted Ground. His idea was to study the Martian atmosphere by releasing material that could be seen and studied by other Martian spacecraft in orbit and on the ground.
Moreover, an honorable mention and a prize of $5,000 went to a team of engineers from Grand Rapids, Michigan – their idea was to study Martian weather by looking at wind patterns near the planet's surface.
NASA feels that the two winning ideas would pave the way for bringing to the forefront more such innovative ideas into Mars missions.
As George Tahu, program executive for Mars Exploration at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC has remarked – ‘we want citizens to join us on the journey to Mars’.
Incidentally, the submissions ranged from analyzing Martian weather or the Martian surface, to demonstrating new technologies such as 3D printing or parachutes, apart from pre-positioning supplies for future human missions on the planet's surface.