Peanut Butter News

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(CNN) — The mid-Atlantic region continued digging out Monday from the weekend’s record blizzard, but snow-weary residents learned of a new winter storm due in the area on Tuesday.

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning, with predictions of another 10 to 20 inches of snow, for northern Virginia and eastern Maryland, including the District of Columbia, beginning Tuesday afternoon and continuing through Wednesday.

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JEMEZ PUEBLO, N.M. – A poverty-stricken Indian tribe that holds the sun and nature’s other gifts sacred sees a brighter future for itself in solar power.

The 3,000 members of the Jemez Pueblo are on the verge of building the nation’s first utility-scale solar plant on tribal land, a project that could bring in millions of dollars.

Experts say tapping into the sun, wind and geothermal energy on Indian land could generate the kind of wealth many tribes have seen from slot machines and blackjack tables.

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(CNN) — Ordinarily a sunny playground that mocks the rest of winter-suffering America, Miami, Florida, was in sore need of a giant Snuggie on Sunday.

There wasn’t a scantily clad beautiful person at any of the outside tables at South Beach’s tony Balans restaurant. Everyone was crammed inside to assuage their Saturday nights with pancakes and Cuban coffee, chuckling at the heat lamps that waiters had scrambled to put up outdoors.

“Yeah, the lamps were not so good. So we brought inside all the tables to make sure our customers could manage,” said manager Mike Fernandez. “I’m from Chile and living here, you know, it’s not supposed to be like this.”

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — General Electric said Thursday it has secured a $1.4 billion contract to supply wind turbines and provide services for what will be the world’s largest wind farm operation when completed in 2012.

The conglomerate will supply 338 of its 2.5-megawatt turbines to New York-based Caithness Energy to be installed in 2010 and 2011 at Shepherds Flat, the 845-megawatt farm that stretches across 30 square miles in north-central Oregon.

The Shepherds Flat Project will supply energy to Southern California Edison, providing enough to power approximately 235,000 California households, GE and Caithness said in a statement.

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BEIJING – China announced plans Thursday to cut its carbon emissions by up to 45 percent as measured against its economic output — a commitment from the world’s largest polluter that builds momentum ahead of a widely anticipated climate conference in Copenhagen next month.

The announcement comes a day after President Barack Obama promised the U.S. would lay out plans to substantially cut its greenhouse gas emissions at the summit.

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(CNN) — Hurricane Ida moved into the southern Gulf of Mexico Sunday, prompting a declaration of emergency in Louisiana and concern along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The storm regained hurricane intensity overnight Saturday, becoming a Category 2 hurricane, but forecasters said it is expected to weaken as it moves north. Ida drenched Nicaragua after making landfall last week as a Category 1 hurricane, then weakened to a tropical storm before resuming strength.

In El Salvador, at least 91 people died in flooding and mudslides, according to the government, but a low-pressure system out of the Pacific — not Hurricane Ida — triggered the disaster, forecaster Robby Berg of the National Hurricane Center said Sunday.

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NASA scientists have finally seen in their data a debris plume created by the impact of a moon probe last week.

The faint plume was seen in the data from the engineered crash one week after the impact of the LCROSS probe.

Scientists are hoping that analysis of the plume will show signs of water ice ejected from the probe’s target crater, named Cabeus, at the lunar south pole.
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The debris plume, created by the probe’s Centaur stage rocket, was captured by the LCROSS ultraviolet/visible and near infra-red spectrometer. Its signature was faint, but distinct.

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Heene is the storm-chasing father whose giant Mylar balloon ascended into the sky late last week, sparking fears that his 6-year-old son Falcon was aboard.

A dispatcher with the Larimer County Sheriff’s Department declined to release any information about the search, but said the office will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. ET Sunday. Calls to the department’s spokeswoman were not immediately returned.

“We anticipate criminal charges will be filed sometime in the near future,” Sheriff Jim Alderden told CNN late Saturday.

Speculation over whether Thursday’s incident, which prompted a widespread search, was a hoax has mounted against Heene, father of three young boys. Explainer: How ‘balloon boy’ drama began »

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The recently launched Herschel Space Telescope has just returned glowing pictures of our own Milky Way galaxy in infrared light.

The European Space Agency mission (with contributions from NASA) lifted off in May on a quest to observe the universe in long-wavelength infrared light. The telescope used two instruments simultaneously to snap the new Milky Way photos in five different ranges, or “colors,” of infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes.

“Herschel’s infrared vision lets us sense the feeble heat from some of the coldest objects in the cosmos,” said Paul Goldsmith, the project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

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NEW DELHI, India (CNN) — India on Wednesday launched a second satellite to study oceans.

The cube-shaped Oceansat-2 will monitor the interaction between oceans and the atmosphere, as part of climate studies, according to the country’s main space agency.

The satellite, launched from India’s southeast coast, carried six nanosatellites from European universities as auxiliary payloads, said the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It also is equipped with two solar panels projecting from its sides, for generating power and charging batteries.

India says it has the world’s largest constellation of remote-sensing satellites — 16, including Oceansat-2. They produce images for uses such as agriculture, rural development, water resources, forestry and disaster management.

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Delicious,” he says, kissing the tips of his fingers on one hand, making the universal sign for good tasting food.

William tells me he went out on a boat with some friends a few days ago and shot the whale. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Welcome to Greenland. On this remote but enormous island subsistence whale hunting is allowed.

This was just the memorable start to an extraordinary journey.

Cameraman Neil Bennett and I had traveled to the small town of Tasiilaq in southeastern Greenland to meet up with the Arctic Sunrise, a ship belonging to the environmental group Greenpeace. Read Neil’s blog on filming in challenging conditions

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(CNN) — It may not be possible to travel back in time, but seeing stars and galaxies as they looked millions or even billions of years ago is no problem thanks to telescopes, the closest thing we have to time machines.

Now, astronomers are holding their breath to see what they’ll observe and discover with a new generation of huge telescopes set to be built around the world.

Peering ever deeper into space and further back in time, the powerful devices will be able to show what the universe was like when it was just a few hundred million years old and emerging from a period of total darkness after the Big Bang.

“[We'll be] looking at the first generation of stars forming in the universe, which is kind of a cool idea: The time when the lights went on in the universe.