One of the major drivers is closer human contact with wildlife, primarily caused by human encroachment into, and modification of, wildlife habitat. For example, Ebola virus outbreaks often are linked to hunting for "bushmeat" or to mining development, and the AIDS pandemic originated from human encroachment into African forests for food.

The rise in international trade and travel is also important. The emergence of West Nile virus in North America, and AIDS and SARS globally, for example, arose from such travel and trade.

This globalisation of people and products is difficult to control and is largely related to increasing air transportation. With world air travel expected to grow at about 5% a year for at least the next 20 years, the problem of emerging infectious diseases will continue to grow, he warns.

The death toll rose after strong winds blew a man off his roof, which he was apparently trying to repair on the island of Fuerteventura as the storm approached, emergency officials said.

Storm Delta also claimed the lives of six African migrants who drowned off the Canary Islands on Monday as waves swept their makeshift boat.

The islands of Tenerife and La Palma were worst hit by the storm, which had passed over by mid-morning. Uprooted trees and landslides forced the closure of roads on the picturesque islands.

About 223,000 customers had no electricity, and the lack of power was also affecting some telephone services.

These are not the victims of "random violence", says Arthur A Demarest, the US archaeologist who has spent the best part of a decade fending off drug lords and looters as he excavated the 1,200-year-old site.

He says most of the dead, who include men, women and children, have been killed by "pulling the head back and shoving a large spear through the chest into the spine".

"You find war captives decapitated but not mass executions like this," he told the BBC News website.

Beijing, 25 November: Commenting on a recent Internet report that alleges that "a Japanese virus expert has claimed that hundreds of Chinese people have died from avian influenza," Mao Qunan, spokesman for China's Ministry of Health, said to Xinhua during an interview that the allegation was strictly a rumour.

Mao Qunan said: "The Ministry of Health and the WHO have confirmed that none of the experts whom WHO commissioned to investigate avian influenza in Hunan was a Japanese virus expert. The report that says that this expert has claimed that hundreds of Chinese have died because of avian influenza infection is untrue."

Tashiro has now told New Scientist that the figures were examples of the "unauthorised information" circulating in China, where he was recently helping investigate the outbreak in Hunan for the WHO.

Earlier reports suggested that Tashiro believed 300 to be the true death toll from bird flu in China. "I do not know whether the numbers were based on any evidence," he says.

But the message is that "we do not know how many cases actually occurred in China", due to poor disease surveillance. "If surveillance is done more extensively, more cases may be detected." He says the international community should assist China with monitoring. He describes the situation as an "iceberg phenomenon" -- with most cases unreported.

"We've been working on this for almost two years. We have 125,000 fish here to give us an opportunity to do something that nobody in this industry has ever done before," Marcus told a press conference.

The facility hosts five viewing galleries along with a 4-D movie theater that explores the sea creatures that inhabit both fresh- and saltwater around the globe.

The aquarium expects 2.4 million visitors in the first year and to bring $1 billion into the city over the next five years. (Full story)

So where did a landlocked city get all that saltwater? It's city water chemically treated with a product that's available at most pet stores.

A STRONG AND LARGE NON-TROPICAL LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM OVER THE CENTRAL ATLANTIC CENTERED ABOUT 1050 MILES SOUTHWEST OF THE AZORES ISLANDS IS MOVING SLOWLY SOUTH-SOUTHWESTWARD. THIS SYSTEM IS GRADUALLY ACQUIRING TROPICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND COULD BECOME A TROPICAL STORM ON WEDNESDAY. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS SYSTEM CAN BE FOUND IN HIGH SEAS FORECASTS ISSUED BY THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE...UNDER AWIPS HEADER NFDHSFAT1 AND WMO HEADER FZNT01 KWBC.

16-22 inches (40-55 centimeters) long from nose to tail, the Cuban Solenodon resembles a large brown rat with an extremely elongated snout and a long, naked, scaly tail. The Cuban Solenodon was mistakenly believed extinct since the last sighting in 1999 mainly because it is a nocturnal burrower, living underground. It is therefore very rarely seen. Since its discovery in 1861 by the German naturalist Wilhelm Peters, only 36 had ever been caught. The Cuban Solenodon that was found in 2003, named Alejandrito, brought the number to 37. He weighed 24 ounces and was healthy. He was released back into the wild after two days of scientific study were completed.

It's no wonder so few have been found since then. The furry mammal is nocturnal. It stays underground during the daytime and comes up to eat worms and insects only when the sun goes down. Some scientists thought the almiqui might be extinct because none had been found since 1999.

Forming in the western Caribbean on Friday, Tropical Storm Gamma was projected to aim for southwest Florida by Monday afternoon and arrive over this region by that evening possibly with winds up to 65 mph, heavy rains and a high potential for tornadoes -- exactly one month after Wilma.

The good news, at this point: Gamma was not expected to grow into a hurricane but rather remain a tropical storm. Further, a cold front could weaken the storm or guide south of the state, said Jamie Rhome, meteorologist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami Dade County.

Residents should watch it carefully, but don't panic, he said.

"While we want people to pay really close attention to this system, we don't want mass hysteria, given South Florida's sensitivity to tropical systems," he said.

Battery manufacturers know there's no new magic to be discovered that will instantly double battery capacity. The operating principles of the chemical systems that make batteries work are well understood and have been for decades. The issue for the industry is refinement. The last great development in chemistry, the lithium polymer cell, after ten years remains an unfulfilled promise because neither computer-makers nor battery-makers have yet fully exploited its potential for squeezing extra power into odd shapes.

If any breakthrough looms on the horizon, it's the battery-like power system that's not really a battery -- the fuel cell. For decades, fuel cells have percolated on the edges of awareness for engineers and scientists. They were mere curiosities that created power via chemical methods more efficiently than any other means. But they were too exotic and expensive (and big) to be considered for consumer applications. In the next few years, however, several manufacturers hope to have you toting fuel cell-power computers and cell phones that will run all day -- or several days -- without recharging or attention.

Providing amenity space for building users ? replacing a yard or patio

Increasing roof life span

Reducing storm water run off

Providing noise insulation

Filtering pollutants and CO2 out of the air

Providing locally grown food (with roof-top vegetable gardens)

Increasing wildlife habitat in built up areas

Reducing heating (by adding mass and thermal resistance value) and cooling (by evaporative cooling) loads on a building

Reducing the urban heat island effect

A newfound ancient sea creature looks to be part crocodile, part T. rex, and 100 percent terrifying.

The 13-foot long beast, Dakosaurus andiniensis, had a massive 18-inch-long jaw with interlocking 4-inch teeth. It is a long-lost relative of the crocodile yet it had fins.

"This species was very unusual, because other marine crocodiles that were around at the same time had very delicate features ? long, skinny snouts and needle-like teeth for catching small fish and mollusks," said Ohio State University researcher Diego Pol, who determined the crocodile lineage. "But this croc was just the opposite. It had a short snout, and large teeth with serrated edges. It was definitely a predator of large sea creatures."

Lu?s team finally realised that the spacecraft might not need to land at all. Placing a heavy enough object near the asteroid for long enough could produce sufficient gravitational tug to change its orbit.

For a 200-metre-wide asteroid, the spacecraft would need to weigh about 20 tonnes and lurk 50 metres from its target for about a year to change its velocity enough to knock it off course.

"This is hands down the best idea I have seen," says Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "This will work, but you need to put a large enough spacecraft out there at the right time."

Private space museum tours, celebrity lunches, a desert field trip with planetary scientists, autographed books and more will be offered in The Planetary Society's on-line auction, November 2-12, 2005, on eBay. Tours and memorabilia connected with Buzz Aldrin, Star Trek's Robert Picardo, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Brin, and more. The last hour of the auction coincides with Society's 25th anniversary dinner, honoring James Cameron and Ray Bradbury.

The deadly tornado that obliterated homes across a swath of southwestern Indiana was unusually intense and fast, packing winds that topped 200 mph as it roared through the night at up to 75 mph, meteorologists said Monday.

The storm's strength, its 41-mile path of destruction and the fact that it struck in the middle of the night in November are all unusual, said Dan McCarthy, warning coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

Bites from rabid vampire bats were blamed for 23 deaths in northern Brazil over the past two months, according to local newspaper reports.

Many scientists fear such encounters will become more common as the bats' forests homes are destroyed and they are lured towards cattle ranches and farms where livestock and humans make easy prey.

Also, instead of sucking the blood of their victims as is generally believed, vampire bats make a small tear in their victim's skin and lap at the blood as it oozes out. When the bats have finished their meal, they're often so engorged with blood that they're too heavy to fly. The bats have to crawl off their sleeping victims and go someplace to digest their meal before returning home.

One resident of the trailer park told WFIE of Evansville she saw a tornado pick up a car with members of her family in it and toss the vehicle into a tree. Brandi Crawley said no one was seriously injured.

"The damage is very, very extensive," said Chad Bennett, an assistant fire chief in Newburgh in Warrick County. He said the area hardest hit was just north of the city limits.

"Now that daylight has come, it is making it a little more easy to see the scope of the damage, and it is very shocking."

Bennett estimated the damage path was about 3/4 of a mile wide and 20 miles long.

Ryan Presley, a weather service meteorologist in Paducah, Ky., said a single tornado touched down near Smith Mills in western Kentucky and cut a 15- to 20-mile swath through Indiana's Vanderburgh and Warrick counties.

The tornado appears to have been an F3, with winds ranging from 158 mph to 206 mph, and may have been even stronger, Presley said.

Most years the shower is weak, producing no more than five rather dim meteors every hour. But occasionally, the Taurids put on quite a show. Fireballs streak across the sky, ruining night vision and interrupting fishing trips.

Asher thinks 2005 could be such a year.

According to Asher, the fireballs come from a swarm of particles bigger than the usual dust grains. "They're about the size of pebbles or small stones," he says. (It may seem unbelievable that a pebble can produce a fireball as bright as the Moon, but remember, these things hit the atmosphere at very high speed.) The rocky swarm moves within the greater Taurid dust stream, sometimes hitting Earth, sometimes not.

"In the early 1990s, when Victor Clube was supervising my PhD work on Taurids," recalls Asher, "we came up with this model of a swarm within the Taurid stream to explain enhanced numbers of bright Taurid meteors being observed in particular years." They listed "swarm years" in a 1993 paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society and predicted an encounter in 2005.

1. Total Destruction of Earth
2. Gulf Coast Tsunami
3. East Coast Tsunami
4. Heat Waves
5. Midwest Earthquake
6. Supervolcano
7. Los Angeles Tsunami
8. Asteroid Impact
9. New York Hurricane
10. Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake

The record 13th hurricane of this year's Atlantic storm season made landfall Sunday on Nicaragua's central coast, about 320 kilometres northeast of Managua, as a Category 2 hurricane before quickly weakening to a tropical storm and eventually becoming a tropical depression before beginning to dissipate.

Col. Mario Perez Cassar, Nicaragua's civil defence chief, said 80% of the buildings on the central coast were heavily damaged or destroyed.