Unusual object in night sky baffles Montrealers

Cleve Ziegler of Montreal took this grainy image of the mysterious lights in the sky over Cote St. Luc early Wednesday morning. (Submitted by Cleve Ziegler)

A mysterious object in the sky over Montreal this week is getting a lot of attention, including from a respected Montreal doctor who believes he saw something “out of this world.”

Several people in the Cote St. Luc neighbourhood called authorities early Wednesday morning about a strange blinking light hovering high in the sky.

Dr. Cleve Ziegler, an obstetrician-gynecologist, spotted the object when he was driving home from work around 12:30 a.m. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

“There were many little sparkly red and blue lights. It had a changing shape, morphing from something that looked triangular to something that looked like a trapezoid. It was not a stable shape,” Ziegler told CBC News.

“It was coming closer and [then moved] farther, it was turning and rotating.”

He then saw other people looking up at the same thing, including a man who told him his wife was so spooked that she scurried home.

“I’m a guy who spends a lot of time in the country in the summer. I have seen satellites. I’ve seen falling stars. I know what a plane looks like. None of those things had the trajectory or motion that this did,” said Ziegler.

Ziegler called police, who had already received several other calls about the mysterious object in the sky. He forwarded a dark, poor-quality video he took on his cellphone to authorities.

He admits the video doesn’t do justice to what he saw.

“What I saw was compelling, unusual and you had this visceral sense looking at it that this is a once-in-a lifetime thing,” he said. “At a risk of sounding Hollywood and shlocky, it was kinda not of this world.”

via Unusual object in night sky baffles Montrealers – Yahoo! Canada News.

… Montreal police received several calls about a mysterious object in the sky after midnight Wednesday morning.

Const. Daniel Lacoursière said Trudeau Airport reported nothing on the radar in that area at the time.

He posed another theory. Around the same time, helicopters were buzzing around the site of a fuel spill at the Port of Montreal in the other end of town.

via  cbc.ca

From the description,  it sounds like a person flying a kite at night with blinking lights on it.  The locations of the other reports would be interesting to see on a map.

X-rays linked to increased childhood leukemia risk

Diagnostic X-rays may increase the risk of developing childhood leukemia, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

Specifically, the researchers found that children with acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL) had almost twice the chance of having been exposed to three or more X-rays compared with children who did not have leukemia. For B-cell ALL, even one X-ray was enough to moderately increase the risk. The results differed slightly by the region of the body imaged, with a modest increase associated with chest X-rays.

The new findings, published in the October 2010 issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology, come from the Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study, a population-based case-control study that includes 35 counties in the northern and central regions of the state. …

“X-rays are a valuable tool, and our findings indicate that their use should continue to be judicious,” said Karen Bartley, doctoral student in epidemiology and first author of the study. “Of greater concern, perhaps, is the use of newer imaging technologies, which are becoming more common and which produce far higher doses of radiation.”

Computed tomography (CT) scans, for instance, produce a 3-D image by compiling together multiple “slices” of 2-D images that were taken as the scanner moved along. A 2009 study from the National Cancer Institute projected that the 72 million CT scans received by Americans in 2007 would lead to 29,000 excess cancers. The number of scans in the United States has increased over recent decades, going from 3 million scans in 1980 to more than 70 million a year today.

“The findings about increased leukemia risk certainly warrant further investigation,” said UC San Francisco radiologist Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, who was not part of the X-ray study. “If even plain film X-rays are associated with an increased risk of leukemia, then one has to wonder about CT scans, some of which can generate 500 times the dose of radiation of an X-ray.” …

via X-rays linked to increased childhood leukemia risk.

One dentist I consulted required a Cone Beam CT scan before he would do any orthodontic work.  No thanks, I’ll take the imperfect teeth.

The risk of cancer associated with popular CT scans appears to be greater than previously believed, according to two new studies published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The findings support caution against the overuse of CT scans and other medical technologies that use radiation. – wsj

To be fair, this particular type of CT scan does involve less radiation exposure according to one University of Washington web page. According to NOAA you would normally get between 0.0374 µSv to 0.0412  µSv per hour,  so getting slammed with 30 to 100 µSv in a few seconds is an incredible surge of energy.

That energy can break a lot of DNA in your head. Most damage to your cells will be repaired, or will be harmless, but getting x-rays is like playing the cancer lottery.

Type of exposure	Radiation Dose
Conventional CT	Maxilla – 250µSv Mandible – 480µSv
Cone Beam CT	Double jaw – 30-100µSv

Actually, you have a better chance of winning the cancer lottery than the real lottery.  Well, let’s see. The chances of winning the 6-from-49 lotto are 1 in about 14 million. (13,983,816). How does that compare to the odds of getting cancer from an X-ray?

X-rays cause 700 cases of cancer every year in the UK, around 5700 in the USA, and a total of 18,500 cases overall in 15 developed countries, a new study has found. – lancet, Volume 363, Issue 9406, P345, 31 January 2004

Looked at another way: Ten dental X-rays ‘raise cancer risk by five times’

Dental X-rays given to millions of Britons every year may dramatically increase the risk of thyroid cancer, scientists warned last night. Researchers found that patients who had been X-rayed by their dentist at least ten times were up to five and a half times more likely to develop the disease. They have now warned that X-rays should not be given at check-ups or when registering new patients  -  despite these practices being common in many dental surgeries.  (DailyMail – unverified, from OnLineNigeria)

I’ve had way too many x-rays. I recall about 8 chest-X rays, tons of dental x-rays, including two different panoramic x-rays of my jaw.

Luckily, you can fight cancer by eating the right foods.

First-of-its-kind study finds alarming increase in flow of water into oceans

Janet Wilson – University of California — Irvine

Freshwater is flowing into Earth’s oceans in greater amounts every year, a team of researchers has found, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms linked to global warming. All told, 18 percent more water fed into the world’s oceans from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994, with an average annual rise of 1.5 percent.

“That might not sound like much – 1.5 percent a year – but after a few decades, it’s huge,” said Jay Famiglietti, UC Irvine Earth system science professor and principal investigator on the study, which will be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He noted that while freshwater is essential to humans and ecosystems, the rain is falling in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons.

“In general, more water is good,” Famiglietti said. “But here’s the problem: Not everybody is getting more rainfall, and those who are may not need it. What we’re seeing is exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted – that precipitation is increasing in the tropics and the Arctic Circle with heavier, more punishing storms. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people live in semiarid regions, and those are drying up.”

In essence, he said, the evaporation and precipitation cycle taught in grade school is accelerating dangerously because of greenhouse gas-fueled higher temperatures, triggering monsoons and hurricanes. Hotter weather above the oceans causes freshwater to evaporate faster, which leads to thicker clouds unleashing more powerful storms over land. The rainfall then travels via rivers to the sea in ever-larger amounts, and the cycle begins again.

The pioneering study, which is ongoing, employs NASA and other world-scale satellite observations rather than computer models to track total water volume each month flowing from the continents into the oceans.

“Many scientists and models have suggested that if the water cycle is intensifying because of climate change, then we should be seeing increasing river flow. Unfortunately, there is no global discharge measurement network, so we have not been able to tell,” wrote Famiglietti and lead author Tajdarul Syed of the Indian School of Mines, formerly of UCI.

“This paper uses satellite records of sea level rise, precipitation and evaporation to put together a unique 13-year record – the longest and first of its kind. The trends were all the same: increased evaporation from the ocean that led to increased precipitation on land and more flow back into the ocean.” …

via First-of-its-kind study finds alarming increase in flow of water into oceans.

Just ignore the planet. It will go away.