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POPSThe Dust Storm Saga We here are still engulfed by dust and smoke from fires. The dust carried all the way to the very top of queensland and across the ocean to kiwi land. People here have no idea how much is dust and how much smoke. There is a difference though our skies are a white haze - so the sun looks like the moon and I wrote to friends and said, "I feel like I am on the moon looking at the moon's moon." Strange is an understatement. The second photo is one I took today we are almost into a whole week of the dust, haze storm. Personally, I have not been too affected by it. This article from BBC is interesting though. We had floods earlier this year that flooded 60% of Queensland. A good friend here, has a husband who works in a mine inland. The Environmental Protection Agency called for it to be closed down because the tailings dam was overflowing into the main water catchment for the town and all the towns further downstream. It had a pH of 2.
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POPSMan-Eating Bird - Non-Fiction
WOW!!! With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller's sea eagle. And the bird's talons were as big as a tiger's claws. "It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child," said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. "They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine." Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. "In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation," Dr Scofield said. New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other continents in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. "Haast's eagle wasn't just the e