MLB openers feature Strasburg, rivalries, AL vs NL

The Kansas City Royals have been absent from the playoffs since the day Billy Butler was born. They've barely had a winning season in the last two decades. They've often lost 100 games in a year.

And yet, buoyed by the best record in spring training, hope abounds ? for the Royals, for most everybody putting on a big league uniform.

"There's no reason we shouldn't be better," said Butler, the Royals' All-Star slugger. "How much better that is? I'm not a mind reader. I'm not a projector."

Ah, opening day.

The hot dogs taste better, the boxscores mean more and most every team thinks it's just a break or two away from reaching the World Series.

A dozen games were set for Monday across the majors. Star pitchers Justin Verlander, Stephen Strasburg and Adam Wainwright try to get off to great starts, old rivalries are renewed at Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium, and a quirky interleague schedule unfolds.

No snow is in the forecast for any ballpark on April Fools' Day, but freezing temperatures are expected at Target Field in Minnesota when Verlander and the AL champion Tigers take on the Twins.

"It's going to be cold but I've pitched in that kind of weather before," Verlander said. "I don't think about it. It's always cold in Detroit on opening day."

The season started Sunday night in Houston when the Astros, who shifted from the National League to the American League during the winter, beat the Texas Rangers 8-2. Astros righty Bud Norris threw a called strike to Ian Kinsler to begin the year, and Houston's Jose Altuve singled for the first hit.

Long the site of baseball's traditional opener, Cincinnati was going to have a new look Monday. That's when Josh Hamilton and his new Los Angeles Angels teammates visit Cincinnati in the first interleague matchup this season.

The Astros' move left 15 teams in each league, meaning an AL vs. NL matchup most every day this season.

"It is very strange," Reds manager Dusty Baker said.

On both coasts, there was a very familiar look ? Red Sox-Yankees and Giants-Dodgers.

Mariano Rivera was set for his final opening day when the banged-up Yankees hosted Boston. The New York closer is among several big names who missed most or even all of last year ? Troy Tulowitzki, Victor Martinez and John Lackey are in that group.

Injured stars Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Curtis Granderson and Mark Teixeira won't be in pinstripes for the first pitch.

"It's still the Yankees, it's still going to be a good lineup," Boston starter Jon Lester said Sunday. "They're missing a few of their big guys but anybody that fills in for them, it's like what I said, they're going to put professional at-bats together and still ? it's not going to be a walk in the park."

No easy decisions, either, for Boston manager John Farrell, one of six new skippers in the majors this year.

At Dodger Stadium, Matt Cain starts for the World Series champion San Francisco Giants when they play Los Angeles in the century-old rivalry.

It will mark the 64th season at the microphone for Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. Heck, Tigers manager Jim Leyland seems like a mere pup by comparison, now starting his 50th year in pro ball.

All-Star shortstop Hanley Ramirez is sidelined for the Dodgers. Around the majors, third basemen Chase Headley of San Diego, David Freese of St. Louis and Brett Lawrie of Toronto will begin the season on the disabled list.

Mets third baseman David Wright plans to be in the lineup at Citi Field to take on San Diego. He hurt his ribcage at the World Baseball Classic.

"I feel good physically," Wright said. "It would have been nice to have maybe a few more at-bats toward the end, but I didn't have that luxury."

On Tuesday, there are two more openers ? Baltimore at Tampa Bay, and Cleveland at revamped Toronto.

All 30 teams will pay tribute to the 20 children and six adults killed last December at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Players, managers, coaches and umpires will wear a memorial patch through Tuesday that includes the seal of Newtown, a black ribbon and 26 stars, and there will be a moment of silence at each stadium.

Seven weeks after teams broke out the bats and balls, players seemed ready to get going.

"I'm really prepared. Well, finally spring training is over, it was a long one," Seattle ace Felix Hernandez said Sunday, a day before his start in Oakland.

"It's another season. We're a different team. It's always special, opening day, not for me but for all the guys," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mlb-openers-feature-strasburg-rivalries-al-vs-nl-211358296--mlb.html

planetary resources

Obama attends Syracuse-Marquette basketball game

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama attended one of the weekend's big college basketball games after playing a round of golf Saturday.

Obama's motorcade took him directly from a golf course at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland to Washington's Verizon Center to watch Syracuse and Marquette play for a berth in the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament. He left shortly before the end of the game, which Syracuse won 55-39.

With less than 11 minutes remaining in the first half of the East Regional final, Obama appeared on the Jumbotron suspended above the Verizon Center court. He sat with Reggie Love, his former personal aide at the White House and a member of the Duke team that won the NCAA championship in 2001. At least one other friend, Marty Nesbitt, also sat with the president. Also joining Obama was NCAA President Mark Emmert.

The audience responded with loud applause when Obama was shown on the huge screen, and he smiled and waved.

In the men's tournament, Obama picked Indiana and Louisville to meet in the championship game in Atlanta, with Indiana claiming the title. But it's not meant to be ? Indiana was defeated by Syracuse. Louisville is scheduled to play Duke on Sunday in Indianapolis.

Obama said earlier this week that "my women's (NCAA tournament) bracket is doing much better than my men's bracket."

Earlier Saturday, Obama played golf for the first time since automatic spending cuts known as the sequester went into effect on March 1.

Some conservatives have called on Obama to give up golf since popular public tours of the White House have been canceled because of the budget cuts. The White House has said the tours were canceled to keep Secret Service agents from being furloughed because of the spending reductions.

Obama played golf with Nesbitt and two White House aides.

___

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsuperville

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-attends-syracuse-marquette-basketball-game-214139628--politics.html

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Halle Berry & Nahla Hit the Beach in Hawaii!

Halle Berry and her daughter spend spring break in Hawaii! Plus, see more photos of celebs spending time with their loved ones!

Source: http://www.ivillage.com/star-snapshots-celebrity-kids-and-family-photos-2012/1-b-462723?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Astar-snapshots-celebrity-kids-and-family-photos-2012-462723

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What You Lost In The Fire | Angst in Anxiety

?I know this: fire blooms, blooms again, marking us, dismantling what we believed inviolable. At times we can do nothing but record its stunning recklessness. Later, we sift through the ashes by hand.? ~ Nancy Reisman, House Fires.

Fossil records show that wild fires took place over 420 million years ago. Wild fires are a natural disaster. They are a phenomenon of nature and of man within nature. When our geography is wounded or destroyed a part of us is wounded as well. One plays off the other. Geography affects people and people affect the geography.Pat Conroy in The Prince of Tides wrote, ?My wound is geography?it is also my anchorage, my port of call.? Fire is about destruction, loss, grief, dismantling, decomposing, fragmenting, things falling apart and then somehow putting things back together again, but not in an identical way, because that is not possible.

Fire is about losing your anchor. We feel passionate about our geography. Our sense of place in the world is tied to our geography. One of the most immediate losses for individuals who live in communities affect by fires is the loss of their geography. It changed; it is now charred, disfigured, and barely recognizable. It is no longer the place of solace, nurturance, and interdependence. It has been harmed and cannot now care for you. You have to care for it, while also attending to your other wounds.

There is a link between people and land. The people who live on the land are insiders; it is their land and they have an intimate relationship with the land. People who visit the land from elsewhere are outsiders. They do not have the same relationship with the land. This may, for some, complicate the grief process, as many of the helpers who come to assist are from elsewhere.

Natural disasters include wild fires, but also tornado?s, tsunami?s, earthquakes, flooding, lightening strikes, and just about anything else that originates at the hands of nature or combined with man and nature. Man made disasters are made by man and include things, like torture, rape, terrorism, assault, mass murder, school shootings, genocide, and any number of other human rights violations.

Wild fires, along with other natural and man-made disasters are life events. All disasters are life events. Life events include all of our combined experiences that lead us from birth through death. Life events carry a responsibility known as loss. Every event, every situation has a marker of either a significant or less significant loss attached to it.

Birth is a life event, attending kindergarten, graduation from elementary school, graduation from high school, the best friend who moved, the sibling who died, the grad mother who just had her 97th birthday, the dog who ran away, the cat who got sick, the time you had the flu for three weeks, and the terrorist attacks are all life events. All event are life events whether they are good events or extremely bad ones. All life events are characterized by loss, because unless we are suspended somehow in time, we must move from an event to the next event waiting our attention. Loss requires change. Loss involves grieving.

We are accustomed to loss and we know how to grieve the losses that move us through a lifetime. Judith Viorst talks about loss in her book, Necessary Losses. She says,

?For we lose not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. and our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusion of freedom and power, illusions of safety?and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it always would be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal.?

Whether it be a wild fire, other natural disaster, or a disaster given you by another human being there are things we lose in all fires. Let?s look at what can be lost in a fire.

Physical Impact

You may have lost your health or physical well being.

Were you hurt, harmed, injured? Was someone close to you injured? There are many physical repercussions including blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory issues, and the release of adrenaline and norepinephrine. Adrenaline and norepinephrine allow us to cope with overwhelming stress. What was your physical health before the disaster, before the fires?

Psychological Impact

You may have lost your psychological balance

What pre-existing mental health issues existed before this event? Did you have depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or another mental health concern?

Intellectual Impact

You may be challenged by what the fires have brought to bear in terms of decision-making.

Did you suffer from smoke inhalation(or its counterpart in other disasters)? Have your cognitive abilities been affected? Is decision-making more difficult? Are you having trouble remembering things? How is your short-term memory?

Emotional Impact

You may have lost your emotional equilibrium.

Are you more emotional or less emotional? Have your emotions fled? Are you feeling too much or not enough? Do you feel you could explode? Are you angry?

Social Support Issues

You may have lost your social safety net.

We all need a social net to catch us if we start to fall. Who is there for you? Family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, your pastor, priest, and rabbi, your therapist? There is community loss. With everyone struggling to pull their life together, the sense of community is loss, at least temporarily.

Occupational Impact

You may have lost your job or had to leave your job or your job was destroyed in the fire (or its counterpart in other disasters).

One of the dimensions of wellness addresses our occupational wellness. When we lose our connection to how we interface with the world through our employment there is unsteadiness.

Financial Impact

You may have lost your ability to produce income or your losses are more than your finances can handle. You may have repair bills, health bills, and additional things the fire (or other disaster) brought to you that require financial expenditure.

Spiritual Impact

You may have lost your spiritual or religious bearings. You may ask why me? You may feel forsaken by God.

When life is more or less predictable people take comfort in feeling they must be doing the right things, because all is well. When things don?t go well or when disaster strikes it is not unusual for people to question themselves and wonder if they are being punished. Everyone is impacted spiritually following a disaster.

Environmental Impact

You lost your land, your physical surrounding, and your geography.

We depend on our physical surroundings to reflect back something beautiful about who we are.? If the reflection we see is disfigured and blackened we are reminded about the loss, death, destruction, and we can do nothing but grieve. The environment gives to us and we are stewards of the land. Some people may feel they failed their land.

It is important to take an inventory where loss is concerned. It is important to allow for your personal narrative of the grief process. Fires engulf and take away everything known. Much can be lost in a fire. Rebuilding following a fire is possible. It takes time and it will not be the same as before. This is OK.

Be well and take care,

Nanette Burton Mongelluzzo, PhD

Photo Credit: David McNew, Getty Images

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????Last reviewed: 27 Mar 2013

APA Reference
Burton Mongelluzzo, N. (2013). What You Lost In The Fire. Psych Central. Retrieved on March 28, 2013, from http://blogs.psychcentral.com/angst-anxiety/2013/03/what-you-lost-in-the-fire/

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Source: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/angst-anxiety/2013/03/what-you-lost-in-the-fire/

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Wastewater injection spurred biggest earthquake yet, says study

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection. Felt as far off as Milwaukee, more than 800 miles away, the quake?the biggest ever recorded in Oklahoma--destroyed 14 homes, buckled a federal highway and left two people injured. Small earthquakes continue to be recorded in the area. The study appeared today in the journal's early online edition.

The recent boom in U.S. energy production has produced massive amounts of wastewater. The water is used both in hydrofracking, which cracks open rocks to release natural gas, and in coaxing petroleum out of conventional oil wells. In both cases, the brine and chemical-laced water has to be disposed of, often by injecting it back underground elsewhere, where it has the potential to trigger earthquakes. The water linked to the Prague quakes was a byproduct of oil extraction at one set of oil wells, and was pumped into another set of depleted oil wells targeted for waste storage.

Scientists have linked a rising number of quakes in normally calm parts of Arkansas, Texas, Ohio and Colorado to below-ground injection. In the last four years, the number of quakes in the middle of the United States jumped 11-fold from the three decades prior, the authors of the Geology study estimate. Last year, a group at the U.S. Geological Survey also attributed a remarkable rise in small- to mid-size quakes in the region to humans. The risk is serious enough that the National Academy of Sciences, in a report last year called for further research to "understand, limit and respond" to induced seismic events. Despite these studies, wastewater injection continues near the Oklahoma earthquakes.

The magnitude 5.7 quake near Prague was preceded by a 5.0 shock and followed by thousands of aftershocks. What made the swarm unusual is that wastewater had been pumped into abandoned oil wells nearby for 17 years without incident. In the study, researchers hypothesize that as wastewater replenished compartments once filled with oil, the pressure to keep the fluid going down had to be ratcheted up. As pressure built up, a known fault?known to geologists as the Wilzetta fault--jumped. "When you overpressure the fault, you reduce the stress that's pinning the fault into place and that's when earthquakes happen," said study coauthor Heather Savage, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The amount of wastewater injected into the well was relatively small, yet it triggered a cascading series of tremors that led to the main shock, said study co-author Geoffrey Abers, also a seismologist at Lamont-Doherty. "There's something important about getting unexpectedly large earthquakes out of small systems that we have discovered here," he said. The observations mean that "the risk of humans inducing large earthquakes from even small injection activities is probably higher" than previously thought, he said.

Hours after the first magnitude 5.0 quake on Nov. 5, 2011, University of Oklahoma seismologist Katie Keranen rushed to install the first three of several dozen seismographs to record aftershocks. That night, on Nov. 6, the magnitude 5.7 main shock hit and Keranen watched as her house began to shake for what she said felt like 20 seconds. "It was clearly a significant event," said Keranen, the Geology study's lead author. "I gathered more equipment, more students, and headed to the field the next morning to deploy more stations."

Keranen's recordings of the magnitude 5.7 quake, and the aftershocks that followed, showed that the first Wilzetta fault rupture was no more than 650 feet from active injection wells and perhaps much closer, in the same sedimentary rocks, the study says. Further, wellhead records showed that after 13 years of pumping at zero to low pressure, injection pressure rose more than 10-fold from 2001 to 2006, the study says.

The Oklahoma Geological Survey has yet to issue an official account of the sequence, and wastewater injection at the site continues. In a statement responding to the paper, Survey seismologist Austin Holland said the study showed the earthquake sequence could have been triggered by the injections. But, he said, "it is still the opinion of those at the Oklahoma Geological Survey that these earthquakes could be naturally occurring. There remain many open questions, and more scientific investigations are underway on this sequence of earthquakes and many others within the state of Oklahoma."

The risk of setting off earthquakes by injecting fluid underground has been known since at least the 1960s, when injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver was suspended after a quake estimated at magnitude 4.8 or greater struck nearby?the largest tied to wastewater disposal until the one near Prague, Okla. A series of similar incidents have emerged recently. University of Memphis seismologist Stephen Horton in a study last year linked a rise in earthquakes in north-central Arkansas to nearby injection wells. University of Texas, Austin, seismologist Cliff Frohlich in a 2011 study tied earthquake swarms at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to a brine disposal well a third of a mile away. In Ohio, Lamont-Doherty seismologists Won-Young Kim and John Armbruster traced a series of 2011 earthquakes near Youngstown to a nearby disposal well. That well has since been shut down, and Ohio has tightened its waste-injection rules.

Wastewater injection is not the only way that people can touch off quakes. Evidence suggests that geothermal drilling, impoundment of water behind dams, enhanced oil recovery, solution salt mining and rock quarrying also can trigger seismic events. (Hydrofracking itself is not implicated in significant earthquakes; the amount of water used is usually not enough to produce substantial shaking.) The largest known earthquakes attributed to humans may be the two magnitude 7.0 events that shook the Gazli gas fields of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1976, followed by a third magnitude 7.0 quake eight years later. In a 1985 study in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Lamont-Doherty researchers David Simpson and William Leith hypothesized that the quakes were human-induced but noted that a lack of information prevented them from linking the events to gas production or other triggers. In 2009, a geothermal energy project in Basel, Switzerland, was canceled after development activities apparently led to a series of quakes of up to magnitude 3.4 that caused some $8 million in damage to surrounding properties.

In many of the wastewater injection cases documented so far, earthquakes followed within days or months of fluid injection starting. In contrast, the Oklahoma swarm happened years after injection began, similar to swarms at the Cogdell oil field in West Texas and the Fort St. John area of British Columbia.

The Wilzetta fault system remains under stress, the study's authors say, yet regulators continue to allow injection into nearby wells. Ideally, injection should be kept away from known faults and companies should be required to provide detailed records of how much fluid they are pumping underground and at what pressure, said Keranen. The study authors also recommend sub-surface monitoring of fluid pressure for earthquake warning signs. Further research is needed but at a minimum, "there should be careful monitoring in regions where you have injection wells and protocols for stopping pumping even when small earthquakes are detected," said Abers. In a recent op-ed in the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, Abers argued that New York should consider the risk of induced earthquakes from fluid injection in weighing whether to allow hydraulic fracturing to extract the state's shale gas reserves.

###

The Earth Institute at Columbia University: http://www.earth.columbia.edu

Thanks to The Earth Institute at Columbia University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127474/Wastewater_injection_spurred_biggest_earthquake_yet__says_study

Super Bowl Halftime Show 2013

Facebook Has A New CTO - Business Insider

Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering at Facebook

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Facebook has named Mike Schroepfer its chief technology officer, AllThingsD reports.

On paper, Schroepfer is assuming the position Bret Taylor held until he left Facebook last year?to found a startup.

But it sounds like this title bump is more about recognizing Schroepfer's importance to the company than changing his job.

"Mike Schroepfer?s new designation as Facebook?s CTO reflects the unique and important role he plays across the company," a spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Taylor was a much more product-focused CTO, playing a key role in the launch of Facebook's Open Graph technology for app developers. That role is largely filled by product chief Chris Cox, who helped unveil Facebook's new News Feed earlier this month.

Schroepfer, who joined Facebook in 2008 and was previously its vice president of engineering, has been more concerned with the site's infrastructure and reliability and its shift to mobile. That's a critical role, and Facebook is smart to give him a bigger title.

Schroepfer previously founded a company, CenterRun, which he sold to Sun Microsystems, and served as vice president of engineering for Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-names-mike-schroepfer-cto-2013-3

Early voting results BBC

Baseball-sized snail destroyed in Australia to protect crops

By Michael Sin

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A baseball-sized snail with an insatiable appetite for hundreds of plants including cocoa and papaya has been seized and destroyed by Australian officials, who said it posed a huge threat to local agriculture.

The animal was found creeping across a Brisbane shipping container yard and identified as a giant African snail, an East African pest capable of growing up to 30 cm (12 inches) long and one kg (2.2 lb) in weight.

It is known to eat 500 different species of crops, fruits, native Australian plants and even other giant African snails, according to an Australian government website.

"Giant African snails are one of the world's largest and most damaging land snails," said Paul Nixon, acting regional manager at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, in a statement.

The snail can lay 1,200 eggs a year, tolerates extreme temperatures and has few natural enemies in Australia. It also carries parasites that can infect humans with the disease meningitis, which can in some cases be fatal.

The last major Australian outbreak of the snail was in 1977, when 300 giant snails were exterminated in Queensland in an intensive eight-month campaign of community education, baiting and snail collection.

The snail was destroyed and officials inspected the container yard and found no evidence of additional snails, eggs or snail trails. They will continue surveillance into next week.

"Australia's strict biosecurity requirements and responsive system has so far kept these pests out of Australia, and we want to keep it that way," Nixon said.

(Editing by Elaine Lies)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/baseball-sized-snail-destroyed-australia-protect-crops-053817240.html

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