Tsunami Strikes Japan

Houses burn amid flood waters on Friday after a massive magnitude 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a powerful tsunami. Hundreds are dead, thousands are stranded, and a handful of ships and trains remain missing along the country's northeastern coast, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The earthquake—the strongest in Japan in 140 years—struck 81 miles (130 kilometers) off the coast of Sendai at 2:46 p.m. local time, the LA Times reported. A port city of about a million residents, Sendai was hit by tsunami waves up to 33 feet (10 meters) high. Tsunami warnings were quickly issued for many Pacific Coast regions, including Hawaii, the Philippines, and Mexico.

The earthquake and its aftershocks were felt as far away as Tokyo, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) from the epicenter.
"I thought I was going to die when it hit," Megumi Ishii, 26, told the LA Times from Tokyo. "At first it didn't shake that much. But then the shaking got more violent and everyone in my office got under their desks. The ceiling tiles came off and some things fell off shelves."

Supermoon River

On Saturday the moon (pictured over Lisbon, Portugal's Tagus River) made its closest approach to Earth in 18 years—making the so-called supermoon the biggest full moon in years.

The monthly full moon always looks like a big disk, but because its orbit is egg-shaped, there are times when the moon is at perigee—its shortest distance from Earth in the roughly monthlong lunar cycle—or at apogee, its farthest distance from Earth.

Likewise, because the size of the moon's orbit varies slightly, each perigee is not always the same distance away from Earth.

Saturday's supermoon was just 221,566 miles (356,577 kilometers) away from Earth—making the supermoon about 20 percent brighter and 15 percent bigger than a regular full moon, said Anthony Cook, astronomical observer for the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

Before the supermoon, astronomer Geza Gyuk said, "Look for the full moon as it rises above the eastern horizon as the sun sets below the western horizon—it will be a beautiful and inspiring sight."

Source : National Geographic

Anglerfish

Looking like something out of a science fiction movie, the anglerfish uses a natural lure to draw its next meal nearer.

The angry-looking deep sea anglerfish has a right to be cranky. It is quite possibly the ugliest animal on the planet, and it lives in what is easily Earth's most inhospitable habitat: the lonely, lightless bottom of the sea.
There are more than 200 species of anglerfish, most of which live in the murky depths of the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans, up to a mile below the surface, although some live in shallow, tropical environments. Generally dark gray to dark brown in color, they have huge heads and enormous crescent-shaped mouths filled with sharp, translucent teeth. Some angler fish can be quite large, reaching 3.3 feet (1 meter) in length. Most however are significantly smaller, often less than a foot.
Their most distinctive feature, worn only by females, is a piece of dorsal spine that protrudes above their mouths like a fishing pole—hence their name. Tipped with a lure of luminous flesh this built-in rod baits prey close enough to be snatched. Their mouths are so big and their bodies so pliable, they can actually swallow prey up to twice their own size.
The male, which is significantly smaller than the female, has no need for such an adaptation. In lieu of continually seeking the vast abyss for a female, it has evolved into a permanent parasitic mate. When a young, free-swimming male angler encounters a female, he latches onto her with his sharp teeth. Over time, the male physically fuses with the female, connecting to her skin and bloodstream and losing his eyes and all his internal organs except the testes. A female will carry six or more males on her body.

Fast Facts

Type:

Fish

Diet:

Carnivore

Size:

8 in (20 cm) up to 3.3 ft (1 m)

Weight:

Up to 110 lbs (50 kg)

Group name:

School

Did you know?

The anglerfish's lighted lure glows with the help of millions of bioluminescent bacteria.

Size relative to a tea cup:

source:national geographic

mummy

by John Rubin
Producer
In Papua New Guinea, my team hired a number of locals as guards, porters, road repair crews, cooks and drivers, and we paid them all at a significant premium above the prevailing wage. Still, we couldn’t hire all of the locals, and some pursued other methods to get a share of the crew’s wealth. It makes perfect sense. We have come into their country with a pile of technology of enormous value, while the locals have very little cash, typically living off sweet potatoes they grow in small gardens and pigs they raise (if they are well off).
So on a typical morning, we awoke to receive a number of handwritten complaints from locals.
- One letter requested a monetary sum to compensate for our film crew “firing arrows at Koke Mountain” from a helicopter during the filming of an aerial sequence. For the record, we did not fire arrows from the helicopter.

- Another letter requested recompense for urinating on plant life. A crew member responded: please build a toilet!

- One of our own guards complained, falsely, that we had trespassed on his land, and asked for a large cash payment. He was relieved of his duties.
Litigious letters were not the norm but the exception during our time in Papua New Guinea. Children followed our crew wherever they went, even going so far as to hang off of our vehicles’ rear-view mirrors. (We learned, at great expense, that these mirrors are not engineered to support a child.)
They enjoyed being filmed, and enjoyed even more the experience of watching themselves in playback. They were particularly delighted to hear their own voices played back through headphones by our sound recordist, Christopher Brown. Overall, their easy smiles and laughter cheered up the crew even when we were exhausted, drenched, and covered in mud.
National Geographic has provided to the children of Wingia, Koke, and Aseki a two-year subscription to National Geographic Magazine. Issues will be sent to the city of Lae and then driven almost two days to their small school. Most of these children have never traveled far from their villages, but now their minds will be able to wander the earth.

Video Blog: Shooting Lost Mummies of New Guinea was a lot harder than it looked — the crew explains why.

This is supposed to be the dry season in Papua New Guinea.
The rainy season extends from December through March. Taking this into account, the crew has chosen April for their trek in Papua New Guinea. It’s supposed to be drier now, or at least transitioning to dry.
But it is not dry. It is anything but.
On a typical day, the rains started around 3:00 P.M. and went through into the night. They are monsoon-like rains, dumping up to inches per hour, pounding and relentless. Lightning and thunder are commonplace. Unpaved roads turn into streams and pieces of it are washed away revealing chasms big enough to swallow a car.
On one especially stormy evening, the road between Koke and Aseki became impassable after a river rose a few feet.

Even on a clear day crossing this river required driving through water two or three feet deep. This evening there was no safe way to cross.
So our crew ditched their vehicles and walked back to camp on foot, crossing the river on a slippery log. We then had to walk the first part of our commute back to our abandoned vehicle. It took days to get the 4WD back to our camp.
This same storm had washed out the one road leading back to civilization (the city of Lae), so our crew had no way out. Even chartering a flight to collect the crew in Aseki (our base) was dubious because the airstrip was sodden and dangerous from weeks of rain. Fortunately, by the time filming had been completed, the road back to Lae had been repaired enough to get out with our vehicles.
Heavy rains means lots of moisture in the air. The humidity sits consistently at 90%—a bane to our filming gear. Our most precious tool in the camera kit was a hair dryer (and accompanying generator) for defogging lenses and filters.
Throughout all of this rainfall, the mummies in the gallery were sheltered by a cliff as they looked out over their relatives in Koke village. These smoked bodies may look ghoulish, but for the villagers they are a vital way to remember their loved ones
.

source:national geographic

wind turbines

Wind turbines on a cloudy day

Wind is the movement of air from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. In fact, wind exists because the sun unevenly heats the surface of the Earth. As hot air rises, cooler air moves in to fill the void. As long as the sun shines, the wind will blow. And as long as the wind blows, people will harness it to power their lives.

Ancient mariners used sails to capture the wind and explore the world. Farmers once used windmills to grind their grains and pump water. Today, more and more people are using wind turbines to wring electricity from the breeze. Over the past decade, wind turbine use has increased at more than 25 percent a year. Still, it only provides a small fraction of the world's energy.

Most wind energy comes from turbines that can be as tall as a 20-story building and have three 200-foot-long (60-meter-long) blades. These contraptions look like giant airplane propellers on a stick. The wind spins the blades, which turn a shaft connected to a generator that produces electricity. Other turbines work the same way, but the turbine is on a vertical axis and the blades look like a giant egg beater.

The biggest wind turbines generate enough electricity to supply about 600 U.S. homes. Wind farms have tens and sometimes hundreds of these turbines lined up together in particularly windy spots, like along a ridge. Smaller turbines erected in a backyard can produce enough electricity for a single home or small business.

Wind is a clean source of renewable energy that produces no air or water pollution. And since the wind is free, operational costs are nearly zero once a turbine is erected. Mass production and technology advances are making turbines cheaper, and many governments offer tax incentives to spur wind-energy development.

Some people think wind turbines are ugly and complain about the noise the machines make. The slowly rotating blades can also kill birds and bats, but not nearly as many as cars, power lines, and high-rise buildings do. The wind is also variable: If it's not blowing, there's no electricity generated.

Nevertheless, the wind energy industry is booming. Globally, generation more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2006. At the end of last year, global capacity was more than 70,000 megawatts. In the energy-hungry United States, a single megawatt is enough electricity to power about 250 homes. Germany has the most installed wind energy capacity, followed by Spain, the United States, India, and Denmark. Development is also fast growing in France and China.

Industry experts predict that if this pace of growth continues, by 2050 the answer to one third of the world's electricity needs will be found blowing in the wind.

source:national geographic

solar energy

Every hour the sun beams onto Earth more than enough energy to satisfy global energy needs for an entire year. Solar energy is the technology used to harness the sun's energy and make it useable. Today, the technology produces less than one tenth of one percent of global energy demand.

Many people are familiar with so-called photovoltaic cells, or solar panels, found on things like spacecraft, rooftops, and handheld calculators. The cells are made of semiconductor materials like those found in computer chips. When sunlight hits the cells, it knocks electrons loose from their atoms. As the electrons flow through the cell, they generate electricity.

On a much larger scale, solar thermal power plants employ various techniques to concentrate the sun's energy as a heat source. The heat is then used to boil water to drive a steam turbine that generates electricity in much the same fashion as coal and nuclear power plants, supplying electricity for thousands of people.

In one technique, long troughs of U-shaped mirrors focus sunlight on a pipe of oil that runs through the middle. The hot oil then boils water for electricity generation. Another technique uses moveable mirrors to focus the sun's rays on a collector tower, where a receiver sits. Molten salt flowing through the receiver is heated to run a generator.

Other solar technologies are passive. For example, big windows placed on the sunny side of a building allow sunlight to heat-absorbent materials on the floor and walls. These surfaces then release the heat at night to keep the building warm. Similarly, absorbent plates on a roof can heat liquid in tubes that supply a house with hot water.

Solar energy is lauded as an inexhaustible fuel source that is pollution and often noise free. The technology is also versatile. For example, solar cells generate energy for far-out places like satellites in Earth orbit and cabins deep in the Rocky Mountains as easily as they can power downtown buildings and futuristic cars.

But solar energy doesn't work at night without a storage device such as a battery, and cloudy weather can make the technology unreliable during the day. Solar technologies are also very expensive and require a lot of land area to collect the sun's energy at rates useful to lots of people.

Despite the drawbacks, solar energy use has surged at about 20 percent a year over the past 15 years, thanks to rapidly falling prices and gains in efficiency. Japan, Germany, and the United States are major markets for solar cells. With tax incentives, solar electricity can often pay for itself in five to ten years.

source:national geographic

Koala bears

   Though often called the koala "bear," this cuddly animal is not a bear at all; it is a marsupial, or pouched mammal. After giving birth, a female koala carries her baby in her pouch for about six months. When the infant emerges, it rides on its mother's back or clings to her belly, accompanying her everywhere until it is about a year old.


   Koalas live in eastern Australia, where the eucalyptus trees they love are most plentiful. In fact, they rarely leave these trees, and their sharp claws and opposable digits easily keep them aloft. During the day they doze, tucked into forks or nooks in the trees, sleeping for up to 18 hours.


   When not asleep a koala feeds on eucalyptus leaves, especially at night. Koalas do not drink much water and they get most of their moisture from these leaves. Each animal eats a tremendous amount for its size—about two and a half pounds (one kilogram) of leaves a day. Koalas even store snacks of leaves in pouches in their cheeks.


   A special digestive system—a long gut—allows koalas to break down the tough eucalyptus leaves and remain unharmed by their poison. Koalas eat so many of these leaves that they take on a distinctive odor from their oil, reminiscent of cough drops.


   These plump, fuzzy mammals were widely hunted during the 1920s and 1930s, and their populations plunged. Helped by reintroduction, they have reappeared over much of their former range, but their populations are smaller and scattered. Koalas need a lot of space—about a hundred trees per animal—a pressing problem as Australia's woodlands continue to shrink.