Extraordinary

Man-eating elephant in India

Joanna Zelman

A fter a rogue elephant killed 17 people in India, locals knew it had to be stopped. Once the animal was killed, DNA tests on the contents of its stomach revealed something even more terrifying: the elephant had consumed human flesh.

According to zoologist Dave Salmoni, humans are to blame for the herbivore’s shocking behavior. In this clip from his new TV show, he claims this particular man-eating elephant lashed out in an act of revenge after her calf was killed.

Elephants have recently witnessed their homes destroyed to make room for crop fields. Raids have forced elephant herds to split up and the animals can grow exhausted and increasingly stressed and in turn, aggressive.

Elephants aren’t the only ones reacting aggressively to human imposition.

ABC News reports that in one part of India, tigers killed 14 people from just one village last year.

The Bengal species is being threatened by rising sea levels and hunters encroaching on their territory.

But when it comes to the elephants, Salmoni is clear on who is to blame, stating that the animals “are man-made monsters. It’s us, not the elephants, who will decide what happens next.”

The Huffington Post

Solar flare disrupts ground communications

An internationally known space weather expert has said that a powerful solar flare that has triggered one of the largest space weather storms in at least four years has disrupted some ground communications on Earth.

Classified as a Class X flare, the February 15 event also spewed billions of tons of charged particles toward Earth in what are called coronal mass ejections and ignited a geomagnetic storm in Earth’s magnetic field, said University of Colorado Boulder Professor Daniel Baker.

These powerful ejections are likely to disrupt airline navigation systems and power grids to the safety of airline crews and astronauts. “The sun is coming back to life,” said Baker. For the past several years the sun has been in its most quiescent state since early in the 20th Century, said Baker.

From a scientific standpoint a class X event – the most powerful kind of solar flare-is exciting, said Baker. “But as a society, we can’t afford to let our guard down when operating spacecraft in the near-Earth environment,” he said.

And, in the next two-three days more coronal mass ejections are likely to reach Earth’s atmosphere, suggests US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Human dependence on technology makes society more susceptible to the effects of space weather. But scientists and engineers have made great strides in recent decades regarding this phenomenon.

“We understand much more about what is happening and can build more robust systems to withstand the effects. It will be interesting to see how well our technological systems will withstand the rigors of space weather as the sun gets back to higher activity levels,” he added. - Foreign Object Debris Detection News and Independent advice

(FOD Detection.com)

Loch Ness-like sea creature?

Kevin Dolak

Bownessie, the mythical younger and less famous sea monster of Britain’s Lake Windermere, who lives in the shadow of her northern neighbor, the fabled Loch Ness monster, may have been spotted last Sunday.

Many Brits claim that they spotted three or four mysterious humps emerge from the water while they were kayaking on Lake Windermere in Bowness-on-Windermere, near the western coast of northern England. Some claim that each hump was moving in a rippling motion and that it was swimming fast.

People who have sighted this strange creature say that its skin was like a seal’s, but its shape was abnormal, unlike any animal seen before. A couple managed to snap a shot of the baffling figure with a camera phone before it disappeared into the water.

Experts who have examined the fuzzy photograph have said that the image is authentic, but that the file size is too small to tell if it was altered.

Of course there are the sceptics who say the monster, whether in Loch Ness or Windermere, is just a myth.

Ian Winfield, a scientist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology at the Lancaster, England, Environment Centre, says that it is impossible for a monster to exist biologically.

ABC News