Earth's Atmosphere Falls 5 Miles
UK - The greenhouse effect not only traps heat close to the ground, it keeps that heat from radiating back into space. The British Antarctic Survey reports that this cooling has caused the upper atmosphere (the thermosphere) to shrink - from 62 miles high in 1958 to 57 miles in 1995. If CO2 levels double in the next century, as predicted, the thermosphere will cool by 50°C, causing the upper atmosphere to fall by another 12 miles. Meteorites, which usually begin to burn up 60 miles above the Earth, may now not begin to self-destruct until they are within 45 miles of the Earth's surface.

240 Million Victims of Progress
CHINA - The Chinese government has admitted that the El Niņo floods that pushed the Yangtze River over its banks were aggravated by the commercial destruction of China's forests and wetlands. The floods claimed 3,000 lives, 5 million homes and disrupted the lives of 240 million Chinese. Stunned by the damage, Chinese officials have reversed development policy and banned logging in Chuamxi, one of China's largest forests.

Birds of a Feather
ISRAEL - Aaron Schulow's "Biblical Zoo" near Jerusalem is famous for its unique Old Testament menagerie (featuring two pairs of every animal species on Noah's Ark), but to the shock of some and the amusement of many, the zoo's two male vultures, Daschik and Jehuda, spurned their female mates and took up nest-building together. The two males adopted a fertilized vulture egg and dutifully incubated it until it hatched. The chick, Diva, was named in honor of Dana International, an Israeli transsexual who won the 1998 European song competition.

Mine Your Own Business
LITHUANIA - During WW II, the Baltic Sea was saturated with as many as 85,000 floating mines. Today, an estimate 30,000 of these submerged weapons remain submerged off the shores of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Last summer, the US Navy (USN) brought five trained dolphins to the Baltic to search for mines. "The dolphins surely enjoy their job," volunteered Annuli von Rutenhjelm, a dolphin trainer at the Sarkanniemi Dolphinarium. The dolphins apparently disagreed: Unaccustomed to the frigid waters, they turned up nary a mine. In July, the USN had better luck using 10 dolphins as minesweepers in a joint US-Australia-Canada exercise off the Hawai'i. The dolphins found the hidden mines and alerted Navy vessels via satellite-linked global positioning systems strapped on their backs. The Wall Street Journal reports that Navy scientists now hope to use bats (whose sonar locator is sharper than a dolphins) to detect hidden mines. (A bat-sized scuba-suit may take some time to design.)

Dining Al Fresco
US - A new restaurant on Los Angeles' famed Sunset Boulevard offers some real atmosphere. In addition to "liquid libations" and a "herbar" offering pina coladas spiked with ginseng, catabua and muira puama, the eatery also has "oxygen enriched air" on tap for $13 per sitting. Add $2 for your choice of scents ("clarity," "confidence" or "energy"). Oxygen entrees are also available in several flavors (lemon, lime, cinnamon, orange). The name of the restaurant? O₂.

Cap, Gown, Radiation Suit
BELARUS - Finding volunteers to clean up the damaged Chernobyl nuclear plant has proved impossible. Not even offers of special benefits have worked. In desperation, the government has directed the Department of Education to give highschool and university students a grim choice: Either they must volunteer to work in Chernobyl or they must immediately pay off their education loans. The average loan is $12,500 - nearly five times the country's average annual salary.

All Systems Gone
US - CIO Magazine, a niche publication for chief information officers and executives of the world's biggest corporations, recently surveyed 330 corporate chieftains on the approaching Y2K computer-system glitch. A majority (56 percent) said that they feared the problem would not be fixed in time. Ten percent were planning to hoard canned food; 11 percent were acquiring wood stoves and electric generators; 13 percent were shopping for "alarm systems, fencing and firearms."

Clean the Air as You Drive?
US - Low-emission engines and zero-emission vehicles are all well and good, but the American Hydrogen Association [AHA, 1739 W. 7th Ave., Mesa, AZ 85202, (602) 827-7915] has gone these technologies one better by building and testing the first "minus-emissions" engines. A gas lawnmower that produced 25,000 parts-per-million (ppm) of carbon monoxide (CO) and 190 ppm of hydrocarbons (HC) was converted to run on hydrogen. Burning hydrogen, the lawnmower produced no CO and only 19 ppm. AHA researchers were startled to discover that the atmospheric level of HC on the day of the test was 27 ppm: The exhaust from the hydrogen lawnmover was actually cleaner than the surrounding air! The engine subsequently won an international engineering/design contest. AHA now offers kits to convert automobiles to run on hydrogen so "you can drive your car and clean the air."

Bottled Water: Embattled Waters
JAPAN - Plastic bottles were anathema in Japan until two years ago, when the government buckled under pressure from Japan's PET Bottle Association. In 1996, the soft drink market sold 640 million PET (polyethylene terephathalate) bottles. The number jumped to 2.2 billion by 1997 and topped 4 billion bottles by the end of 1998. Tokyo already dumps 4 million tons of household trash into Tokyo Bay each year - creating nearly 230 hectares of artificial landfill. With the increased use of PET bottles for mineral water, tea and soy sauce, Tokyo Bay could fill up totally within the next few decades.

Environmental Pollution Agency?
US - The EPA is working with corporations and state officials to pipe the wastewater from Colorado's Lowry Landfill into public sewer lines, where it will be mixed with Denver's municipal sludge and dumped onto wheatfields as "fertilizer." The wheat, in turn, would be used to produce "specialty baked goods." In addition to the usual list of toxic wastes, the landfill also contains plutonium-laced waste dumped by the Rocky Flats nuclear arsenal in the 1970s.

A Titanic Protest
MEXICO - When 20th Century Fox and director James Cameron came to Mexico to film scenes for the $200 million film Titanic, they built a huge outdoor tank and erected a monumental cement wall to close the set off from the residents of the small fishing village of Popotla. The Popotlans reacted angrily to the "movie maquiladora" by decorating the massive wall with a mural fashioned from locally scavenged trash. In September, the Popotlans' mural was awarded the Ars Electronica InfoWeapon cash prize at a ceremony in Linz, Austria. Ironically, Titanic went on to win the Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for best computer animation.

Getting the Lead Out
US - Following passage of the Clean Air Act, lead concentrations in the Atlantic Ocean fell significantly as a result of the phase-out of lead pipes, lead paint and leaded gasoline. Unfortunately, not enough. MIT Professor of Chemical Oceanography Edward A. Boyle reports that lead concentrations have been growing since the 1980s and "we suspect a lot of the lead that is in the Atlantic Ocean now comes from high-temperature industrial activities." According to Boyle, "smelting, coal combustion and cement production may be the most recent culprits behind the residual lead in ocean surface water."