Asteroid

If a big asteroid, like the one whizzing by on Wednesday, slammed into the Earth, ferocious winds of up to 1,000 mph and intense shock waves would kill the most people, according to a study published Wednesday.

Researchers looked at seven effects associated with asteroid impacts — heat, pressure shock waves, flying debris, tsunamis, wind blasts, seismic shaking and cratering — and estimated how deadly each would be. The winds and the shock waves would be the worst.

In fact, these two effects would account for more than 60% of lives lost, said Clemens Rumpf, study lead author and a researcher at the University of Southampton in the U.K. Shock waves from a spike in atmospheric pressure would rupture internal organs, while wind blasts would hurl human bodies and flatten forests.

“This is the first study that looks at all seven impact effects generated by hazardous asteroids and estimates which are, in terms of human loss, most severe,” Rumpf said.

Shoah

Newly released documents provided by the United Nations revealed on Tuesday that the Allied Powers were well aware of the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi regime at least two and a half years earlier than commonly thought, according to The Independent.

A full year before America entered World War II, the West knew that the Third Reich had already massacred two million European Jews and were planning to eliminate five million more in concentration camps spread throughout the continent, the records showed. 

Despite this, the Allied Powers did little to stop the genocide, with one minister in the UK war department, Viscount Cranborne, commenting that Jews were not a special case and that Britain was burdened with too many refugees as it was.

The documents, not seen for more than 70 years, showed at the same time that the Allies, made up of the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, had prepared war crime indictments against Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and his top subordinates.

Kabul

This was never more true than when I looked out at the crowd assembled for the conference,

students and women in business, many of them entrepreneurs.  I told them how many in America thought I was brave to go to Kabul during such a turbulent time.  But the truth is the real courage was within that room.  Those women not only had the tenacity to earn a higher education, but to start businesses and to dream of an Afghanistan that they may one day run themselves.

 It struck me then what it really means to have a “war on women.”  If it exists anywhere, it is certainly there. Both ISIS and the Taliban despise everything that the women I spoke to represent: strong, educated women whose achievements and ambition are not limited to the circumstances in which they were born.

In the Middle East and Southeast Asia, our 16+ year fight against  Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban can be complex and sometimes confusing, and to those of us in the field of counterterrorism it can feel like a game of whack-a-mole. 

Hashtags and platitudes will not stop the enemies of freedom. We’ve seen how ineffective they are. And while the might and power of the American and coalition forces cannot be underestimated, neither should the quiet determination of the women of Afghanistan, who I truly believe will be major contributors to winning the long war.  For these women,  it is not a question of debating foreign policy themes of intervention, realism, globalism, or nation building.  For them it is a very basic question of  their binary fate: defeat the extremists or go back to an Afghanistan where they are faceless and nameless.

Big Red

It’s not every day you see a big red squid alive on a beach in Carteret County. If it were, folks might be a bit alarmed. They are, uh, different-looking when they’re big. Maybe not the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” different. Weird enough, though.

But Winterville resident Carey Walker, who was driving down Portsmouth Island in late March, wasn’t alarmed, just curious, when he saw the unusual specimen. He picked it up, and like any good visitor to Core Banks, cared enough about marine life to put it back in the water, after getting a photo or two, of course.

He never saw the squid come back. But he has wondered what it was. And so have many others who’ve seen the photos.

“It was low tide, and we were coming back to the cabins at about 5:30 p.m., and I just saw this thing out of the corner of my eye down at the edge of the water,” Walker recalled. “I actually went past it. But I wanted to see what it was, so I backed the truck up and got out and saw that it was still alive. So I picked up and we got a couple of pictures, and then I put it back in the water.”

Walker and his companions were there for a few more days, and never saw the squid on the beach again. Nor did anyone else they talked to.

Kavachi

Scientists are using specially constructed underwater robots to study extremely rare sharks that live in one of the harshest environments on planet Earth - inside a submarine volcano.

The incredible sharks were discovered by chance as recently as 2015 in the violent Kavachi volcano in a remote part of the Solomon Islands.

Scientists observing volcanic activity spotted the sharks in the deep sea near the islands in the South Pacific. What first appeared to be an unidentifiable large brown blob was later revealed to be a Pacific sleeper shark. The sighting is the southernmost of the species ever documented.

At first researchers were baffled by what they’d found as they didn’t think anything other than bacteria could live in such extreme conditions.

Komodo

Komodo dragons, fearsome giant lizards found in Indonesia, may be a source of a potent antibiotic. If so, researchers say the agent could be an answer to the growing, global health problem of antibiotic resistance.

Huge, toothy and aggressive, Komodo dragons are surrounded by filth in their daily lives. As a result, Barney Bishop, a biochemist at George Mason University near Washington, said Komodo dragons have developed what he called a "robust" immune system.

Bishop studies molecules produced by the immune system as a front-line defense against infection. That, he said, is the reason for the interest in Komodos.

"They are known to eat carrion; they live in an unsanitary environment; they have been recorded to have up to 57 bacterial strains in their mouths," some of which can cause disease, he said. "Yet the reptiles themselves are not harmed by these bacteria, whether it's in their mouths or wounds inflicted by other lizards."

Stalker

A New York man was detained by the U.S. Secret Service last week for allegedly stalking and harassing former first daughter Malia Obama.

Jair Nilton Cardoso allegedly showed up at Malia Obama's internship in Tribeca and begged her to marry him, according to a new report from New York Daily News. Secret Service agents detained Cardoso, 30, after he stalked the 18-year-old at several locations around New York City.

Agents reportedly recognized him as a longtime stalker of the former first daughters, and revealed he had attempted to get into the White House in the past.