A very rare event happened In the northeastern part of the United States yesterday. A 5.8 magnitude earthquake centered in Mineral, Virginia sent tremors outward, all the way north to New York and New England, and south to North Carolina. Limited damage was reported and some even found the event to be exciting. The earthquake follows a number of natural disasters we have witnessed this year, including Japan's massive quake and tsunami, tornadoes ravaging southern states and the Mississippi River rising to historic levels, flooding cities in its path. And now Hurricane Irene, which experts predict could turn into a category 4 storm, and may hit Florida on Friday.

More than 1.5 million acres have burned in what officials are calling the worst wildfires that Texas has ever seen. The Texas Fire Service reported yesterday that there had been some progress in fighting The Wildcat Fire, north of San Angelo, The Cooper Mountain Ranch Fire, east of Lubbock and the The Rockhouse fire, south east of El Paso. Some strides were also made at Possum Kingdom Lake, west of Ft. Worth. But two fire fighters have died in the fight to control the blazes, and federal teams have been called into help.

Every day between April and August, Philip Connors climbs a 55-foot tower and settles into a 7-by-7 foot enclosed platform for the next eight hours. The tower is in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, and his duty while there, is to look out for fires. But while Gila receives more than thirty thousand lightening strikes per year, Connors’s job is actually closer to Walden Pond than reality TV. Alone with nature, and his thoughts, he enjoys solitude, freedom and independence — independence which surely helped him complete a new book called “Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout.”

A fungus dubbed white-nose syndrome, first discovered in bat colonies in 2006, is threatening to wipe out nine species of bats across the country. Since first discovered, scientists estimate that over a million bats have died of the disease. If the animals disappear, their main food source, insects, may balloon to troubling proportions, destroying crops and spreading disease. To tell us more on this story of bats' struggle for survival is Ed Jahn of Oregon Public Broadcasting. 

The images we often associate with Iraq are of destruction, war and dysfunction. But one man hopes to show people another side of the country, with a lovely tour down a Kurdistan river.  

Day 36, and oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Volunteers from all over the country are heading to the shores of Louisiana and Mississippi to help in any way they can. A lot of these volunteers are training to save and clean animals that have been affected by the oil, particularly birds, whose oil-soaked feathers prevent them from flying and keeping warm. 

Millions of people across Asia were plunged into darkness during the longest eclipse of the century. The total solar eclipse, where the moon blocks the sun, turned day into night for several minutes across southeast Asia. For an eyewitness account The Takeaway turns to Jyotsna Singh, a BBC reporter in Delhi, India.

Summer brings warm evenings dotted by the light of fireflies. The apparently serene scene is full of murder, deception, and secret trysts as the fireflies communicate with each other and try to mate. Joining The Takeaway with more on the passionate life of the firefly is science writer Carl Zimmer. You can read Zimmer's New York Times article on fireflies in today's Science Times, "Blink Twice if You Like Me".

It has deep red flesh. It measures more than six feet high. It blooms only about once a decade. But the most memorable thing about the "Corpse Flower" at the Huntington Botanical Garden is that it gives off the stench of rotting flesh. The Takeaway is joined by Garden Director Jim Folsom, who's in San Marino, California, with the flower, Amorphophallus titanium.

Watch the crowds gather around a blooming corpse flower in this time-lapse video.

Biologists have discovered that mosquitoes on the Galapagos have evolved to pierce the skin of reptiles, including iguanas and endangered tortoises. The mosquitoes daily reptilian snack brings a threat of transferring vector-borne disease to the animals. Leaving scientists to ask the question: how can we keep the Galapagos as pristine as when Darwin first found them? Evolutionary biologist Simon J. Goodman joins The Takeaway with more.

Goodman is co-author of the research article, "Natural colonization and adaptation of a mosquito species in Galapagos and its implications for disease threats to endemic wildlife," which was published in this week's issue of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here's a view of Galapagos Wildlife:

In the movie “Twister,” a group of renegade scientists chase tornadoes, keeping the audience on the edge of their seats until they were reminded that it’s just fiction. Well, a group of real life scientists are doing just this, but not for the drama, but to really understand how tornadoes form. If we needed any reminder of how deadly tornadoes can be, last week, twisters in Missouri and Oklahoma killed at least two people and destroyed homes and businesses. In an effort to prevent such incidents, the largest and most ambitious study of tornadoes is now underway. The project is named Vortex 2 and involves almost 100 scientists and students from 16 universities and research institutes. Throughout the plains states, scientists are deploying sophisticated technology to better understand the storms. The Takeaway checks in with Katja Friedrich, a meteorologist at the University of Colorado, to learn how they are conducting their experiments, and what they hope to learn.

For another look at the sophisticated science of tornado studies, watch this clip.

For nearly 100 years, birds couldn't shake their human paparazzi.

As part of the U.S. government's Bird Migration Program, bird enthusiasts from Kansas to the West Indies tracked down our feathered friends — the Jennifer Anistons of yesteryear — scribbling down notes about their habits: When they came to the area in springtime, where they roosted (and with whom they roosted), and when they flew away for winter.

The note-taking program was first started in 1882 under the leadership of bird expert Wells W. Cook, and it ended in 1970. I spoke with the program's last director, Chandler Robbins, who, at 90, is just three years into his retirement from the United States Geological Survey. Robbins has been protecting the notecards from the incinerator for more than 30 years. He gave us a history of the bird program and told us why it's so important for the two-by-fives to be dusted off and used — before the paper that holds them crumbles away. Click on the LISTEN button below to hear the conversation!

Starting in 1882 and continuing for almost a century, the United State's Bird Migration Program collected two-by-five notecards from bird watchers around North America. Today, these long preserved cards — did we mention that there were over six million of them? — are being dusted off, in the hopes that they can tell us something about a bird of a different feather: climate change. Jessica Zelt, coordinator of the newly established North American Bird Phenology Program where she is in charge of digitizing the cards, joins the show to tell us more.

Are you itchin' to get your hands on a little American history? You can transcribe the migration notecards into the digital directory from your very own home. Click here to help! Go on, be a part of bird history.

For more, read Molly Webster's Producer's Note

And before we let you go, we'd like to leave you with a little bird quote from our friends here at the Internet, because really, what's the World Wide Web good for if not to root-out some profound, bird-related witticisms? Ahem: "My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather." ~Loire Hartwould

(c) USGS.gov

(c) USGS.gov

There's a polar bear meeting in Norway this week, where politicians are considering how to handle the dire predictions surrounding the fate of our arctic friend. And this meeting got us thinking: in the face of a warming globe, is extinction the only option? Are organisms, along with a little thing called natural selection, finding a way to beat this formidable foe? We hope Warren Allmon, a paleontology professor at Cornell who specializes in macroevolution, can shed some light on our queries. Mr. Allmon is also the director of the Museum of the Earth.

Polar Bear S.O.S. has enlisted children to spread the word about the animal's plight. Hear their message below.

When you think of dinosaurs, what comes to mind? Hulking creature? Gargantuan teeth? What about something the size of a small house cat? In a story that everyone's inner child will love, researchers in Canada have found North America's smallest carnivorous dinosaur. Paleontologist Nick Longrich joins The Takeaway to talk dinos and break down what the continent's ecosystem looked like millions of years ago.

Anyone who has watched wildlife documentaries may know that animal behavioral patterns are tracked by inserting microchips into the animals' bodies. This is tricky, because it requires tranquilizing the animal in order to place the chip. But new technology now allows for non-invasive research. Science journalist Jim Robbins joins The Takeaway to explain how scientists are using technology and animal products, like poop, to learn everything they can about wildlife without even touching the animals.

For more, read Jim's piece on DNA-powered wildlife research in the New York Times article, Tools That Leave Wildlife Unbothered Widen Research Horizons.

If you want to do your own wildlife surveys, you'll need to be able to match scat with the critter that created it. To bone up, watch this video.

Yesterday’s dramatic crash landing of a U.S. Airways jetliner into New York’s Hudson River, and the equally dramatic rescue, had many people glued to their television screens. Fortunately, no one aboard the plane was killed. But the news that a flock of geese may have caused the crash has a lot of people wondering just how worried they should be about so-called “bird strikes.” For that answer we turn to Patrick Smith, pilot and author of Salon.com’s Ask the Pilot.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed technology that uses tracks movements of fish in a tank by corresponding their movement with musical notes The end result is a polyphonic pleasure that will allow visually impaired people to enjoy aquariums, zoos, and other places of informative learning. What would you call this new instrument and what does it sound like? Bruce Walker of the Georgia Tech Sonification lab joins John and Adaora.

Watch video of the Accessible Aquarium Project (the Associated Press via ajc.com) »

With a fixed amount of water on earth, a growing population means the competition for water is increasing.

» Video: "America's Disappearing Forests" (The New York Times)
» "Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West" (The New York Times)

"If you stand on a mountaintop in Colorado you can look in every direction and see dead trees. It is everywhere."
--Jim Robbins on the impact of pine beetle infestations