Israeli scientists have developed a system that allows the Israeli Defense Forces to detect the infiltration tunnels used by the terrorist group Hamas.
A source inside the IDF told the Jerusalem Post the system has proven flawless in laboratory testing and it will now be taken into the field to see if it is as effective in real world situations. If it proves reliable, it would be able to be deployed full-time in about a year.
The IDF also announced on Israel Radio they are working on an upgrade to the Iron Dome system.
The new system is aimed at stopping multiple rockets at the same time or multiple other pieces of debris that are fired into the country. Also, the system will be able to target rockets and other objects much higher in the air than the current system.
The IDF believes that Hamas is being given upgraded weapons by countries like Iran that will help them overwhelm the current Iron Dome system.
The IDF also prised the Trophy tank defense system, saying it successfully stopped dozens of anti-tank missiles in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge.
In the aftermath of Toledo, Ohio and its 400,000 residents having to go without water for almost three days because of toxins created by algae in Lake Erie, officials are now investigating to see what they can do to help keep the water supply safe.
“This is not just one community issue, this is the whole lake,” said state Rep. Dave Hall.
Intensive chemical treatments had to be made to the Toledo water system and in Lake Erie to reduce the level of algae-created toxin in the water level. While the toxin was not completely removed from the water, it was reduced to a level that is safe to drink.
Governor John Kasich, who had declared a state of emergency for three counties around Toledo as many communities had pulled water from the Toledo system, said that he would launch an investigation to see if the problem was really the algae blooms or if there were significant problems within the Toledo water system itself.
Some residents said they’re waiting to use the tap.
“I’m waiting for two or three days,” Aretha Howard, of Toledo, told FoxNews. “I have a pregnant daughter at home. She can’t drink this water.”
Nancy Writebol, the missionary with SIM USA who became infected with Ebola while working in a relief hospital in Liberia, has arrived in Atlanta to be treated at Emory University Hospital.
Doctors at Emory University Hospital have confirmed that Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, who was transported last week, are being given a very experimental vaccine for Ebola that had never been tested in humans.
Officials say that both Writebol and Brantly agreed to be “human guinea pigs” for the vaccine and went into it knowing the side effects of the drug would be unknown.
A spokesman for Samaritan’s Purse said that both patients saw marked improvements in their conditions after undergoing the experimental treatment. Dr. Brantly has even been able to visit with his family although separated by several layers of thick glass.
SIM USA released information that said Writebol became infected while she was working to disinfect the protective suits worn by the doctors and nurses inside the isolation ward.
The Islamic extremist group Boko Haram has killed as many Christians in Nigeria since the start of the 2014 than they did during the entire year of 2013.
The Jubilee Campaign reports that the total number of Christians killed are in proportion to a rising number of overall deaths caused by the Islamic extremist group. The death toll of close to 4,100 is already higher than all the total deaths of last year.
The increase in the death toll is reportedly due to an increase in weapon capability and training because of connections to other al-Qaeda related terror cells in Africa including al-Shabaab in Somalia and the terror groups in Mali fighting French troops for control of the northern regions.
“The pattern therefore is that if you do not do what they demand, even if you are Muslim, you become an ‘apostate’ deserving of death,” Emmanuel Ogebe of Jubilee Campaign said. “Therefore the difference between Boko Haram’s approach to Christian ‘infidels’ and Muslim apostates is you are killed as a Christian ‘just because’ your name is Christian – you go to church, etc. – whereas Muslims are generally killed ‘for cause,’ for example working for the government or refusing to pay extortion taxes to Boko Haram.”
Human Rights Watch reported over 2,000 deaths during the same time period but acknowledged they only covered a part of the country and that their information is likely a very conservative estimate.
The deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) could be more dangerous than scientists had been lead to believe after air samples showed airborne evidence of the virus.
Researchers with King Fahd Medical Research Center in Saudi Arabia released a paper about air samples taken from the barn of a camel that had been infected with the virus. The owner of the camel contracted MERS and died.
The scientists say that a second camel tested positive for the virus after the man’s death and that air samples within the barn showed one strain of MERS RNA.
The virus in the same was identical to the virus in the first camel and the virus in the human victim.
American researchers were quick to say that just because they found the virus in the air it doesn’t mean that it’s automatically transmitted via airborne particle.
“What they say is that virus particles can be airborne, but it’s premature to conclude that MERS is transmitted through aerosols,” Dr. Mark Denison, a professor of pathology, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine told CNN. “I could take billions of particles of dead viruses and could still find the RNA. That doesn’t mean that there are infectious aerosols,” Denison said.
A new map released by the federal government is showing that over half the U.S. is at greater risk for experiencing earthquakes.
The U.S. Geological Survey has updated the national seismic hazard maps for the first time since 2008. The new maps use research from the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the Japanese coast along with the 2011 earthquake that shook Virginia and caused significant damage to national monuments in Washington, D.C.
Parts of Washington, Oregon, Utah, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming and Tennessee have moved into the top two hazard zones in the new map according to project chief Mark Petersen.
Sixteen states have all or part of their territory in the highest risk category: Alaska, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky and South Carolina.
Most of the major regions are in the western part of the country, however, there is a major hazard area comprising of southeast Missouri, western Kentucky & Tennessee and eastern Arkansas.
Scientists in Britain have developed a test that can detect as much as a year in advance if a patient will develop Alzheimer’s disease.
The test comes after a decade of research by Oxford University and King’s College London. A study showed that the brain develops 10 proteins just before the disease takes hold in the brain.
The doctors hailed the test as groundbreaking because once someone develops Alzheimer’s, there’s no real way to treat it. With the development of an early warning test, doctors hope to find a way to treat a patient to stop the development of Alzheimer’s.
“Although we are making drugs [to treat Alzheimer’s] they are all failing. But if we could treat people earlier it may be that the drugs are effective,” said Simon Lovestone, professor of translational neuroscience at Oxford. “Alzheimer’s begins to affect the brain many years before patients are diagnosed with the disease. If we could treat the disease in that phase we would in effect have a preventative strategy.”
The test has been proven to have 87 percent accuracy in predicting the onset of Alzheimer’s.
The Big Bang theory for the creation of the universe has taken a big blow.
A new study conducted by secular scientists based on the discovery of the Higgs Boson, called the “God particle”, shows that the Big Bang would not have been possible for the creation of the universe because of shaking of particles.
“During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang,” study co-author Robert Hogan, a doctoral candidate in physics at King’s College in London, said to Christian News Network. “This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse.”
The intense shaking in the energy field, known as quantum fluctuation, should have collapsed the entire universe shortly after creation according to the model based on Higgs physics.
The scientists explained the lack of answers and holes in the Big Bang theory by saying their must be some kind of new physics that man hasn’t been able to discover yet.
Scientists investigating the rapid increase in movement of Antarctic glaciers have found that underwater volcanoes are heating water and increasing ice melt.
The segment of ice in danger has six major glaciers that are facing major collapse. If the area completely melts, the entire global sea level will rise at least four feet. (A collapse is considered the point when a glacier starts an unstoppable retreat that would drop millions of tons of ice into the sea.)
Dustin Schroeder of the University of Texas at Austin says that volcanoes and “other geothermal hotspots” are driving the melting of the glaciers and recent studies are showing there is no way to stop the eventual collapse of the glaciers. The challenge to scientists is to accurately estimate if it will take hundreds of years or thousands for the glaciers to be completely destroyed.
The problem with predicting the outcome is that computer models cannot accurate anticipate the volcanic activity taking place under the ice sheet. Much of the area is unexplored and unmapped, as a new under-ice volcano was discovered in 2013.
One of the hottest points is around Mount Takahe, a volcano that actually has broken through the ice sheet. There are smaller volcanoes and vents that increase the temperature of the water as much as three times the level of sea water under other parts of the continent.
Schroeder said the scientists believe the extra melt from the volcanoes lubricates the ice sheets from beneath and accelerates their slide toward the open water.
A new study from the University of Southern California shows fasting for as little as two days can regenerate the body’s immune system.
The study showed that fasting worked not only for normal, “healthy” people but also the elderly and people whose immune systems have been compromised because of chemotherapy treatments.
The periods without eating would lower the amount of white blood cells in the body, which would trigger stem cells to begin regeneration of the white blood cells, rushing them into the body. However, the scientists also found that the rush of white blood cells also repaired damage.
“[Fasting] gives the OK for stem cells to go ahead and being proliferating and rebuild the entire system,” Professor Valter Longo said. “And the good news is that the body got rid of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting.”
A pilot clinical trial found that fasting for 72 hours prior to chemotherapy protected the patients against toxicity.
