Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Climate Change Future Suggested by Looking Back 4 Million Years

The last time the Earth enjoyed greenhouse gas levels like those of today was roughly four million years ago, during an era known as the Pliocene. The extra heat of average temperatures as much as 4 degrees Celsius warmer turned the tropical oceans into a nice warm pool of bathwater, as noted by new research published in Nature on April 5.

By analyzing the ratio of magnesium and calcium in the shells of microscopic animals found in long cores of mud from the deep ocean, the researchers confirmed this massive oceanic warm pool. At about 28 degrees C, the surface sea temperatures were not much warmer than today's tropical oceans, but these warm waters covered much more of the global ocean surface. Although such warm water might sound nice, such warm pools of water have profound weather effects; think of El Nino events in the present and the torrential rains this climate pattern creates in some areas. And a Pliocene-like reduction in temperature differences between polar and mid-latitude regions would have similarly profound effects on everything from the number of tropical cyclones in the Pacific Ocean to which areas are covered by desert in Africa, Australia and North America. The warm water conditions of the Pliocene held steady for more than one million years. In fact, scientists do not understand completely what caused these conditions to change, though a decrease in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of roughly 100 parts-per-million, to around 300 ppm probably helped. In the last few hundred years, that's about how much humanity has raised greenhouse gas concentrations through the burning of fossil fuels, the cutting down of forests and other activities. Today's concentration is about 394 ppm. Although we cannot be sure that a similarly sized decrease in greenhouse gas concentrations ushered in the present era of ice ages singlehandedly, we can be sure that greenhouse gases change climate. And, unless we want to go back to the Pliocene when our distant ancestors split from chimpanzees, we might want to temper climate change by emitting less CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
? 2013 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-future-suggested-looking-back-4-million-173300533.html

the walking dead the walking dead Walking Dead Season 3 smash Richard III Superbowl Commercials 2013 irs

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

What Earth Looks Like from a 100 Million Miles Away

Though we've seen plenty of our beautiful blue marble from space before, here's what Earth looks like from a hundred million miles away. That's roughly the same distance from the Earth to the Sun. More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/B6BcpyVwAxw/what-earth-looks-like-from-a-100-million-miles-away

office max jcp Sports Authority Hollister old navy walmart black friday walmart black friday

Exxon, BHP plan world's largest floating LNG plant off Australia

By Rebekah Kebede

PERTH (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil and BHP Billiton are planning to build the world's largest floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing and export plant off the northwestern shore of Australia, despite growing concerns about the cost competitiveness of the country's LNG projects.

At around half a kilometer (0.3 miles) long, the vessel would be nearly as long as five football fields laid end-to-end and would be the largest floating facility in the world.

The plant would bump up Australia's current LNG production by nearly 30 percent, producing 6 million to 7 million metric tons (6.62 million to 7.71 million tons) per annum (mtpa), enough to fuel the LNG needs of Japan, the world's largest importer of the gas, for about a month.

Exxon and BHP's decision to develop the Scarborough field using floating LNG is another vote of confidence in the as yet untried technology, which energy companies hope will help cut down on the ballooning costs of developing gas.

Exxon, which detailed the plan in a filing with Australia's environment department on Tuesday, did not give a cost estimate for the plant.

Australia currently has $190 billion worth of LNG projects under way and is on track to replace Qatar as the world's largest LNG exporter by the end of the decade.

But the country has been plagued by cost inflation, and of seven LNG plants under construction there that are due to come online in 2014 or later, four have already announced cost blowouts ranging from 15 to 40 percent.

FITCH BEARISH

High costs and competition from other LNG producing regions such as North America and East Africa have led some industry analysts to predict that Australia's growth potential as an LNG producer is increasingly limited.

Fitch Ratings was the latest to forecast lower growth for the Australian LNG sector, saying in a report on Tuesday that increased costs had eroded the country's competitive advantage.

Royal Dutch Shell , considered the industry leader in floating LNG, has touted floating technology as a way to circumvent Australia's rising costs and cut down on construction time.

"Floating (LNG) is actually very good for the federal government in terms of getting the tax revenues out faster and quicker," Ann Pickard, Shell's country chairman in Australia, said earlier this year.

An added advantage of floating LNG vessels is that they can be redeployed to another location once a gas field is depleted.

The Scarborough LNG plant would start production in 2020-2021 and be moored 220 kilometers (137 miles) from the Australian coast, Exxon said in the government filing.

If the Scarborough gas field were developed using floating LNG, the plant would be about double the capacity of Shell's Prelude LNG, also off the cost of Australia, which will have a capacity of 3.6 mtpa when it comes online in 2017 and be the world's first floating LNG plant.

Shell indicated that its Prelude LNG project was expected to cost in the range of $10.8 to $12.6 billion. With a similar cost structure, Scarborough LNG would cost $18 billion to $24.5 billion, according to Reuters' calculations.

The Scarborough floating LNG plant would be built offshore, likely in South Korea, which is already in talks to build similar facilities.

Exxon and BHP, which are 50-50 joint venture partners in the Scarborough development, expect to make a final investment decision on the plant in 2014-2015, Exxon said.

(Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/exxon-bhp-plan-worlds-largest-floating-lng-plant-110657144--finance.html

bill clinton andy roddick Costa Rica Earthquake sandra fluke costa rica living social Earthquake Costa Rica

Telerobotic system designed to treat bladder cancer better

Telerobotic system designed to treat bladder cancer better [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 2-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: David Salisbury
david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu
615-343-6803
Vanderbilt University

Although bladder cancer is the sixth most common form of cancer in the U.S. and the most expensive to treat, the basic method that doctors use to treat it hasn't changed much in more than 70 years.

An interdisciplinary collaboration of engineers and doctors at Vanderbilt and Columbia Universities intends to change that situation dramatically. Headed by Nabil Simaan, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt, the team has developed a prototype telerobotic platform designed to be inserted through natural orifices in this case the urethra that can provide surgeons with a much better view of bladder tumors so they can diagnose them more accurately. It is also designed to make it easier to remove tumors from the lining of the bladder regardless of their location: an operation called transurethral recession.

"When I observed my first transurethral resection, I was amazed at how crude the instruments are and how much pushing and stretching of the patient's body is required," Simaan said.

That experience inspired the engineer to develop a system that uses micro-robotics to perform this difficult type of surgery. Its features and capabilities are described in an article titled "Design and Performance Evaluation of a Minimally Invasive Telerobotic Platform for Transurethral Surveillance and Intervention" published in the April issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

The specialized telerobotic system "doesn't take the judgment out of surgeons' hands, it enhances their capabilities and hopefully gives them surgical superpowers," commented S. Duke Herrell, an associate professor of urologic surgery and biomedical engineering, who specializes in minimally invasive oncology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and is collaborating on the project.

The traditional method, which Simaan observed, involves inserting a rigid tube called a resectoscope through the urethra and into the bladder. The instrument contains several channels that allow the circulation of fluid, provide access for an endoscope for observation and interchangeable cauterizing tools used to obtain biopsy tissue for evaluating the malignancy of the tumor and to resect small tumors. In some operations, surgeons replace the cauterizing tool with an optical-fiber laser to destroy tumor cells.

Although the endoscope can give a good view of the bladder lining directly across from the opening of the urethra, inspecting the other areas is more difficult. The medical team must press and twist the scope or push on the patient's body to bring other areas into view. These contortions are also necessary when removing tumors in less accessible areas.

If the surgeon, using endoscopic observation or biopsy, determines that a tumor is invasive and has penetrated the muscle layer, then he later performs a cystectomy that removes the entire bladder through an incision in the abdomen. Frequently this is done using a normal surgical robot. But, when the surgeon judges that the tumor is superficialrestricted to the bladder liningthen he attempts to remove it using the resectoscope.

Bladder cancer is so expensive to treat in part because the tumors in the bladder lining are exceptionally persistent and so require continuing surveillance and repeated surgeries. Among the factors that contribute to this persistence is the difficulty of accurately identifying tumor margins and failure to remove all the cancerous cells.

"Because you are working through a long, rigid tube, this can be a difficult procedure, especially in some areas of the bladder," said Herrell.

The telerobotic system is designed specifically to operate in this challenging environment. The machine itself is the size and shape of a large thermos bottle but its business end is only 5.5 millimeters in diameter about one fifth of an inch and consists of a segmented robotic arm. The tiny arm can curve through 180 degrees, allowing it to point in every direction including directly back at its entry point. At the tip of the arm is a white light source, an optical fiber laser for cauterization, a fiberscope for observation and a tiny forceps for gripping tissue.

The engineers report that they can control the position of the snake-like arm with sub-millimeter precision: a level adequate for operating in clinical conditions. They have also demonstrated that the device can remove tissue for biopsies by gripping target tissue with the forceps and then cutting it off with the laser.

The fiberscope produced a 10,000-pixel image that was directed to a digital video camera system. Because it is steerable, the instrument was able to provide close-up views of the bladder walls at favorable viewing angles. However, the testing revealed the camera system's effectiveness was limited by poor distance resolution. According to the researchers, this can be corrected by re-designing the fiberscope or by replacing it with a miniature camera tip.

In the future, the researchers intend to incorporate additional imaging methods for improving the ability to identify tumor boundaries. These include a fluorescence endoscope, optical coherence tomography that uses infrared radiation to obtain micrometer-resolution images of tissue and ultrasound to augment the surgeon's natural vision.

In addition to these observational methods, the researchers have given their robot arm a sense of touch. Using a technique called force-feedback, they can measure the force acting on the tip when it comes into contact with tissue. Normally, tumors protrude from the surrounding tissue. Vanderbilt Ph.D. candidate Andrea Bajo used this fact to successfully design new algorithms that allow the robot arm in the device to accurately trace a tumor's edge. He did so by positioning the tip on the edge of a tumor and instructing it to move in the direction that maintains the same pressure.

"Surgeons can typically identify the gross visual margin of a tumor within a millimeter, but a robot like this have the potential of doing so with sub-millimetric precision and additional technologies may actually be able to distinguish margins at the cellular level," said Herrell.

The team plans to make use of this level of precision to program the robot to perform what surgeons call an "en-block resection:" the removal of an entire tumor plus a small margin of normal tissue in one operation, a procedure designed to ensure that no cancerous cells are left behind that can reseed the tumor.

The engineers are also using the system's capabilities to design a number of safety measures into the telerobotic system. For example, the operator can set a maximum depth that the laser will cut and then, even if the operator's hand slips, the robot will not cut any deeper.

These safety measures are an example of Simaan's primary research goal: develop surgical robotic systems that can be inserted into the human body and interact safely with it.

###

Work on this system began with Simaan's former Ph.D. student Roger Goldman and Lara Suh-MacLachlan at Columbia University. Ryan Pickens, a fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is also a team member. Simaan and Bajo received partial support from NSF Career grant #IIS-1063750.

Visit Research News @ Vanderbilt for more research news from Vanderbilt. [Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 TV and radio studio with a dedicated fiber optic line and ISDN line. Use of the TV studio with Vanderbilt experts is free, except for reserving fiber time.]


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Telerobotic system designed to treat bladder cancer better [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 2-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: David Salisbury
david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu
615-343-6803
Vanderbilt University

Although bladder cancer is the sixth most common form of cancer in the U.S. and the most expensive to treat, the basic method that doctors use to treat it hasn't changed much in more than 70 years.

An interdisciplinary collaboration of engineers and doctors at Vanderbilt and Columbia Universities intends to change that situation dramatically. Headed by Nabil Simaan, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt, the team has developed a prototype telerobotic platform designed to be inserted through natural orifices in this case the urethra that can provide surgeons with a much better view of bladder tumors so they can diagnose them more accurately. It is also designed to make it easier to remove tumors from the lining of the bladder regardless of their location: an operation called transurethral recession.

"When I observed my first transurethral resection, I was amazed at how crude the instruments are and how much pushing and stretching of the patient's body is required," Simaan said.

That experience inspired the engineer to develop a system that uses micro-robotics to perform this difficult type of surgery. Its features and capabilities are described in an article titled "Design and Performance Evaluation of a Minimally Invasive Telerobotic Platform for Transurethral Surveillance and Intervention" published in the April issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

The specialized telerobotic system "doesn't take the judgment out of surgeons' hands, it enhances their capabilities and hopefully gives them surgical superpowers," commented S. Duke Herrell, an associate professor of urologic surgery and biomedical engineering, who specializes in minimally invasive oncology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and is collaborating on the project.

The traditional method, which Simaan observed, involves inserting a rigid tube called a resectoscope through the urethra and into the bladder. The instrument contains several channels that allow the circulation of fluid, provide access for an endoscope for observation and interchangeable cauterizing tools used to obtain biopsy tissue for evaluating the malignancy of the tumor and to resect small tumors. In some operations, surgeons replace the cauterizing tool with an optical-fiber laser to destroy tumor cells.

Although the endoscope can give a good view of the bladder lining directly across from the opening of the urethra, inspecting the other areas is more difficult. The medical team must press and twist the scope or push on the patient's body to bring other areas into view. These contortions are also necessary when removing tumors in less accessible areas.

If the surgeon, using endoscopic observation or biopsy, determines that a tumor is invasive and has penetrated the muscle layer, then he later performs a cystectomy that removes the entire bladder through an incision in the abdomen. Frequently this is done using a normal surgical robot. But, when the surgeon judges that the tumor is superficialrestricted to the bladder liningthen he attempts to remove it using the resectoscope.

Bladder cancer is so expensive to treat in part because the tumors in the bladder lining are exceptionally persistent and so require continuing surveillance and repeated surgeries. Among the factors that contribute to this persistence is the difficulty of accurately identifying tumor margins and failure to remove all the cancerous cells.

"Because you are working through a long, rigid tube, this can be a difficult procedure, especially in some areas of the bladder," said Herrell.

The telerobotic system is designed specifically to operate in this challenging environment. The machine itself is the size and shape of a large thermos bottle but its business end is only 5.5 millimeters in diameter about one fifth of an inch and consists of a segmented robotic arm. The tiny arm can curve through 180 degrees, allowing it to point in every direction including directly back at its entry point. At the tip of the arm is a white light source, an optical fiber laser for cauterization, a fiberscope for observation and a tiny forceps for gripping tissue.

The engineers report that they can control the position of the snake-like arm with sub-millimeter precision: a level adequate for operating in clinical conditions. They have also demonstrated that the device can remove tissue for biopsies by gripping target tissue with the forceps and then cutting it off with the laser.

The fiberscope produced a 10,000-pixel image that was directed to a digital video camera system. Because it is steerable, the instrument was able to provide close-up views of the bladder walls at favorable viewing angles. However, the testing revealed the camera system's effectiveness was limited by poor distance resolution. According to the researchers, this can be corrected by re-designing the fiberscope or by replacing it with a miniature camera tip.

In the future, the researchers intend to incorporate additional imaging methods for improving the ability to identify tumor boundaries. These include a fluorescence endoscope, optical coherence tomography that uses infrared radiation to obtain micrometer-resolution images of tissue and ultrasound to augment the surgeon's natural vision.

In addition to these observational methods, the researchers have given their robot arm a sense of touch. Using a technique called force-feedback, they can measure the force acting on the tip when it comes into contact with tissue. Normally, tumors protrude from the surrounding tissue. Vanderbilt Ph.D. candidate Andrea Bajo used this fact to successfully design new algorithms that allow the robot arm in the device to accurately trace a tumor's edge. He did so by positioning the tip on the edge of a tumor and instructing it to move in the direction that maintains the same pressure.

"Surgeons can typically identify the gross visual margin of a tumor within a millimeter, but a robot like this have the potential of doing so with sub-millimetric precision and additional technologies may actually be able to distinguish margins at the cellular level," said Herrell.

The team plans to make use of this level of precision to program the robot to perform what surgeons call an "en-block resection:" the removal of an entire tumor plus a small margin of normal tissue in one operation, a procedure designed to ensure that no cancerous cells are left behind that can reseed the tumor.

The engineers are also using the system's capabilities to design a number of safety measures into the telerobotic system. For example, the operator can set a maximum depth that the laser will cut and then, even if the operator's hand slips, the robot will not cut any deeper.

These safety measures are an example of Simaan's primary research goal: develop surgical robotic systems that can be inserted into the human body and interact safely with it.

###

Work on this system began with Simaan's former Ph.D. student Roger Goldman and Lara Suh-MacLachlan at Columbia University. Ryan Pickens, a fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is also a team member. Simaan and Bajo received partial support from NSF Career grant #IIS-1063750.

Visit Research News @ Vanderbilt for more research news from Vanderbilt. [Media Note: Vanderbilt has a 24/7 TV and radio studio with a dedicated fiber optic line and ISDN line. Use of the TV studio with Vanderbilt experts is free, except for reserving fiber time.]


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/vu-tsd040213.php

gunner kiel groundhog soulja boy punxsutawney phil ground hog groundhog day 2012 serrano

Monday, April 1, 2013

Exxon continues cleanup of Arkansas oil pipeline spill

(Reuters) - Exxon Mobil on Sunday continued cleanup of a pipeline oil spill in Arkansas that loosed thousands of barrels of heavy Canadian crude and forced the evacuation of 22 homes.

Exxon's Pegagus pipeline, which can carry more than 90,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude from Pakota, Illinois to Nederland, Texas, was shut after the leak was discovered late Friday afternoon in a subdivision near the town of Mayflower.

The company did not have an estimate for the restarting of the pipeline, which was carrying Canadian Wabasca Heavy crude at the time of the leak. The spill comes as environmentalists are pressing the State Department to reject plan to build the 800,000 bpd Keystone pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada's oil sands to the Gulf Coast.

Exxon said that by 3 a.m. Saturday there was no additional oil spilling from the pipeline. Images from local media showed crude oil snaking along the road in a neighbourhood.

"Cleanup efforts are progressing 24 hours a day," said Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers, who added the oil had not leaked into nearby Lake Conway.

"We were very fortunate that the local responders made sure the oil did not enter the water."

(Reporting by Matthew Robinson in New York; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/exxon-shuts-oil-pipeline-major-005905765.html

the cutting edge fox 8 news indy 500 angelina jolie leg daytona artie lange nascar daytona 2012

Pope makes Easter plea for Mideast peace

VATICAN CITY (AP) ? Pope Francis delivered a plea for peace in his first Easter Sunday message to the world, decrying seemingly endless conflicts in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula after celebrating Mass along with more than 250,000 people in flower-bedecked St. Peter's Square.

Francis shared in his flock's exuberance as they celebrated Christianity's core belief that Jesus Christ rose from the dead following crucifixion. After Mass, he stepped aboard an open-topped white popemobile for a cheerful spin through the joyous crowd, kissing babies and patting children on the head.

One admirer of both the pope and of the pope's favorite soccer team, Argentina's Saints of San Lorenzo, insisted that Francis take a team jersey he was waving at the pontiff. A delighted Francis obliged, briefly holding up the shirt, and the crowd roared in approval.

Francis has repeatedly put concern for the poor and suffering at the center of his messages, and he pursued his promotion of the causes of peace and social justice in the Easter speech delivered from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, the same place from where he was introduced to the world as the first Latin American pope on March 13, shortly after his election.

He said he was joyfully aiming his Easter greetings, at "every house and every family, especially where the suffering is greatest, in hospitals, in prisons." Francis prayed that Jesus would inspire people to "change hatred into love, vengeance into forgiveness, war into peace."

In his softly and slowly pronounced speech, Francis defined Easter as an "exodus, the passage of human beings from slavery to sin and evil to the freedom of love and goodness."

As popes before him have, he urged Israelis and Palestinians, who "struggle to find the road of agreement" to find the courage to resume peace talks and end a conflict that "has lasted all too long." And, in reflecting on the two-year-old Syrian crisis, Francis asked, "How much suffering must there still be before a political solution" can be found?

The pope also expressed desire for a "spirit of reconciliation" on the Korean peninsula, where North Korea says it has entered "a state of war" with South Korea. He also decried violence in Africa, where he singled out for condemnation terrorists' hostage-taking, as well as strife in Mali and warfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Central African Republican, which has driven people from their homes.

The first pontiff to come from the Jesuits, an order with special concern for the poor, and the first pope to name himself after St. Francis, a medieval figure who renounced wealth to preach to the down-and-out, Francis lamented that the world is "still divided by greed looking for easy gain, wounded by the selfishness which threats human life and the family, selfishness that continues in human trafficking, the most extensive form of slavery in this 21st century."

Earlier, wearing cream-colored vestments, Francis celebrated Mass on the esplanade in front of the basilica at an altar set up under a white canopy. He frequently bowed his head as if in silent reflection.

The sun competed with clouds in the sky Sunday, but the square was a riot of floral color in Rome, where chilly winter has postponed the blossoming of many flowers. Wind sent fluttering yellow forsythia and white lilies shone, along with bursts of lavender and pink, from potted azalea, rhododendron, wisteria and other plants. Francis thanked florists from the Netherlands for donating the flowers.

He also advised people to let love transform their lives, or as he put it, "let those desert places in our hearts bloom."

The Vatican had prepared a list of brief, Easter greetings in 65 languages, but Francis didn't read them. The Vatican didn't say why, but has said that the new pope, at least for now, is growing comfortable in his new role using Italian, the everyday language of the Holy See.

Francis also has stressed his role as a pastor to his flock, and, as bishop of Rome, Italian would be his language.

In another departure from Easter tradition, Francis won't be heading for a few days of post-holiday relaxation at the Vatican's summer palace in Castel Gandolfo, in the hills southeast of Rome. That retreat place is already occupied by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who took up residence there in the last hours of his papacy on Feb. 28. Benedict became the first pope in 600 years to resign, and eventually is to move back to the Vatican, after a convent there is readied for him.

Francis so far has declined to move into Benedict's former apartment in the Apostlolic Palace, into the rooms whose studio overlooks St. Peter's Square. He is still in the Vatican hotel where he and fellow voting cardinals checked in on March 12, the day before they chose him in a secret conclave in the Sistine Chapel to lead the Roman Catholic church.

While Francis has just begun to make his mark on the church, he quickly made plain he has little desire to embrace much of the pomp customarily associated with the office. When he appeared on the central balcony of the basilica both times, he chose to wear the simple white cassock of pontiffs, declining ornate outfits and only accepting a red stole to be draped on him when it was time to give the crowd his solemn blessing.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-makes-easter-pleas-mideast-peace-101523086.html

Helen Gurley Brown Kathi Goertzen Johnny Pesky spice girls justin theroux Bumbo recall USA Basketball

Bible comes to life as locusts swarm Israel

Israeli Jews celebrating Passover will easily relate to their ancestors this year ? the country has been swarmed by millions of locusts, one of the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians.

By Christa Case Bryant,?Staff writer / March 27, 2013

Locusts make their way from Egypt just before they land in Kerem Shalom near the border with Egypt, in southern Israel's Negev Desert, March 11.

Ariel Schalit/AP

Enlarge

Locusts have descended on Israel this week, just in time for Passover. As millions of Jews commemorate the story of the children of Israel?s exodus from Egypt, including the 10 plagues that afflicted Pharaoh and his people, millions of the crunchy buggers are creeping all over Israel?s southern deserts.

Skip to next paragraph Christa Case Bryant

Jerusalem bureau chief

Christa Case Bryant is The Christian Science Monitor's Jerusalem bureau chief, providing coverage on Israel and the Palestinian territories as well as regional issues.

Recent posts

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

This is nothing like the eighth plague of biblical times, in which locusts covered ?the whole face of the earth? in a kind of collective punishment for the Egyptians whose leader refused to let his Hebrew slaves go free.

But this year is the first time since 2005 that modern Israel has had to combat locusts, which can swarm so thickly that drivers can?t see beyond their windshield. Potato farmers bemoaned the detrimental effect of a previous wave of the grasshopper-like insects several weeks ago. The Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, which was on ?locust alert,? has responded quickly to the latest wave with pesticides.?

But it?s not just Israel. Today the Palestinian Authority?s Ministry of Agriculture sprayed pesticides in Hebron, in the southern West Bank. And Egyptian farmers have suffered millions of dollars in damage after a swarm of about 30 million locusts hit Cairo earlier this month.

The most serious situation, however, appears to be in Sudan, where the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) head has warned that immature ?hoppers? are lining up along a 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) stretch of the Nile and could pose a serious threat to Nile Valley crops in May.

OK, so locusts are not your average grasshopper. But still, how can they cause such massive damage?

Consider these arresting facts: They can eat their weight in crops every day; they can fly more than 80 miles a day ? in swarms as dense as 200 million per square mile; and females can lay as many as 1,000 egg pods in roughly 10 square feet, according to an FAO fact sheet.?

To put the threat in practical terms, one ton of locusts (just a fraction of your average swarm) can eat about as much food as 2,500 people can in a day, says FAO.

The Israelis have sought to reverse the food chain this Passover, however, by grilling the kosher insects for a crunchy, high-protein delicacy. And they?re not alone. Locust recipes abound.?

A Mexican version from ?Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects,? by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, calls for roasting locust torsos and sprinkling them on homemade guacamole in a taco shell. Scrap that. Sprinkle and?enjoy, the cookbook says.?

B?tayavon, as the Israelis would say.?Bon app?tit.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/G0pZQ4Y1GOg/Bible-comes-to-life-as-locusts-swarm-Israel

mike adams janoris jenkins john edwards trial brandon weeden felicia day nfl 2012 draft st louis rams