Between fiery destruction, mudslides, and ash clouds that blot out the sun, volcanoes aren’t short on spectacular threats to human life.

But on the island of Hawaii, residents living downwind of the actively erupting Kilauea volcano are at risk of a range of more subtle health problems, including bronchitis, asthma attacks, lung infections, and sore throats thanks to volcanic air pollution, according to a new study.

Kilauea has been erupting since 1983, oozing streams of lava in a relatively peaceful volcanic display. Gas from the eruption is rich in sulfur dioxide (SO2), though, and trade winds regularly waft it toward small communities on the southern part of the island.

Along the way some of the gas can morph into hazy sulfate (SO4) particles. Together they make up Hawaii’s much-maligned volcanic smog, which locals have dubbed “vog.”

Bernadette Longo of the University of Nevada-Reno and colleagues wanted to know how the pollution affects people who live with it every day. The team compared medical records from residents in the Kau district southwest of Kilauea to those living in areas where exposure to vog was rare.

Between 2004 and 2009, they found that high exposure to vog nearly doubled the risk of coming down with a sore throat or asthma attack, and elevated bronchitis risk in adults by 57 percent.

Children proved far more susceptible to vog-related diseases, with risk of upper respiratory infections nearly doubling. The likelihood of an asthma attack rose by a factor of five, and bronchitis risk was six times higher.

Kilauea’s vog often swirls around the island to the west, wrapping the much more populous Kona coast in a noxious pall. When the winds shift, the cities of Hilo and Honolulu can suffer the same fate.

But the sparsely populated Kau area is by far the most affected. The local hospital, high school and elementary school have all begun real-time air quality monitoring to stay on the lookout for vog outbreaks.

“The schools installed air conditioners in every room; we found that they reduced particle counts indoors,” Longo said. “It’s a way of focusing on the ‘how do you deal with this?’ aspect of the problem.”

Longo presented the team’s findings last week at the annual meeting of the Geological Soceity of America in Portland.

While the team’s work represents an important advance, Jon-Pierre Michaud of the University of Hawaii at Hilo said some important questions remain unanswered. Their analysis couldn’t distinguish whether a case of acute asthma was brought on by vog or pollen, for example.

Also, the study only measured risks of acute diseases; it is unclear whether people who grow up with high vog exposure are more likely to develop chronic respiratory problems or other diseases later in life.

“I’d say a lot more isn’t known about the physiological response to vog than is known,” Michaud said.

Source: Discovery News

Just a lazy sunday afternoon, unpacking your newly purchased computer, WITH the brand new operating system Windows Vista on it. The wow starts now… at least they say. In my case, it wasn’t the WOW that started, but a terrible head ache instead! My computer was running very slow, and I had a lot of trouble to get and stay connected to the internet.

So I decided to just reinstall that traditional Windows XP… And there the real trouble started. It seemed impossible to just remove Windows Vista and install Windows XP instead!

The lazy sunday afternoon turned into night, and many hours had to follow before I finally got rid of Vista. To save you that time to figure out how to delete Vista from your computer I made this page. I hope it’s helpfull to you!

Please note that this page is just a helping hand. Use this information at your own risk!

Remove Vista, installed next to another Windows operating system (e.g. 98/XP)

In this case you already had a Windows operating system installed, and you installed Windows Vista on a separate partition of your harddisk. Now you want to remove Windows Vista and keep your previous Windows operating system.

Don’t forget to make a backup as there are some risks with removing Vista!

This is what you need:

- Windows Vista installation DVD

This is what you should do:

1. Start your computer selecting Windows XP from the boot menu

2. Insert the Windows Vista installation DVD into your drive and close the menu that might open

3. Go to START > RUN > and type: “e:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force” (without quotes, and replace e: with the drive letter of your Vista DVD).

4. Restart your computer and boot into Windows XP

5. Format the drive where Windows Vista was installed on

6. Remove two files (Boot.BAK & Bootsect.BAK) on your XP root folder (e.g. C:\)

This should remove your Windows Vista installation and make XP the default operating system.

Remove Vista, as an upgrade of Windows XP

In this case you had Windows XP installed and upgraded it to Windows Vista. Now you want your own Windows XP back. Unfortunately it’s not possible to downgrade Vista to XP. Therefore you’ll need to remove Vista, format your hard drive, and reinstall XP from scratch.

Don’t forget to make a backup as there are some risks with removing Vista!

This is what you need:

- Windows XP installation CD – MS Dos environment boot disk (more info)

This is what you should do:

1. Start your computer with the Windows XP installation CD in your CDROM drive (note: you may have to change your BIOS settings to give priority to loading your CDROM drive instead of your hard drive!)

2. In the setup type R to repair an existing installation

3. Type fixboot C:\ (where C:\ is your Vista root, replace C with any other letter if applicable)

4. Type fixmbr C:\

5. Type EXIT

6. Then close the Windows XP setup and restart your computer with the bootable floppy or CD

7. At the command prompt type format C:\ (note: all data on C:\ will be removed, so make sure you’ve made a backup before doing this!)

8. Now restart your computer with the Windows XP installing CD in your CDROM drive

9. Install Windows XP as usual

This should remove your Windows Vista installation and make XP the default operating system.

Remove Vista and install another operating system (e.g. XP)

In this case you only have installed Windows Vista on your computer, or you’ve bought a new computer with Vista already installed on it. When some of your hardware or software may not function properly under Vista, you might want to remove it, and install e.g. XP instead.

Don’t forget to make a backup as there are some risks with removing Vista!

This is what you need:

- Windows XP installation CD – MS Dos environment boot disk (more info)

This is what you should do:

1. Start your computer with the Windows XP installation CD in your CDROM drive (note: you may have to change your BIOS settings to give priority to loading your CDROM drive instead of your hard drive!)

2. In the setup type R to repair an existing installation

3. Enter “fixboot C:\” (where C:\ is your Vista root, replace C with any other letter if applicable)

4. Enter “fixmbr C:\”

5. Enter “EXIT”

6. Then close the Windows XP setup and restart your computer with the bootable floppy or CD

7. At the command prompt type format C:\ (note: all data on C:\ will be removed, so make sure you’ve made a backup before doing this!)

8. Now restart your computer with the Windows XP installation CD in your CDROM drive 9. Install Windows XP as usual

This should remove your Windows Vista installation and make XP the default operating system.

The moon may have been adopted by our planet instead of descended from it.

If a new twist on a decades-old theory is right, conditions in the early solar system suggest the moon formed inside Mercury’s orbit and migrated out until it was roped into orbit around Earth.

The idea flies in the face of scientific consensus, known as the giant impact hypothesis, which holds that the moon formed from red-hot debris left over after a Mars-sized object collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

However, the moon has several curious traits that go unexplained with that theory, and Robert Malcuit of Denison University has argued for decades for an alternative view of our moon’s history.

Malcuit’s version of events is tantamount to cosmic blasphemy, but scientists have recently found 4 billion-year-old minerals in Australia that suggest our planet was too cool to have sustained a cataclysmic moon-forming impact early in its history.

“Everything in the giant impact model is hot, hot, hot,” he said. “It’s incompatible with what we see in the geologic record. Earth is cool enough at that time to have ocean water on its surface.”

Malcuit’s computer modeling studies, which he has worked on since the 1980s, show that it is possible for Earth’s gravitational pull to capture the moon.

At first, the moon’s orbits would have been highly elliptical, swinging close to Earth and then far away about eight times a year.

The gravitational pull from each pass would have stretched the planet 18 to 20 kilometers (11.2 to 12.4 miles) near the equator, churning the hot mantle and crust. Rocks closer to the poles, like those found today in Australia, would have been spared. The upper layers of the newly-captured moon would have melted from gravitational friction, until the satellite’s orbit stabilized about 3 billion years ago.

Malcuit presented his theory at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Ore.

Traditionally, scientists cite the moon’s low density and a lack of iron as reasons why it came from Earth — the giant impact skimmed light material off Earth’s upper layers and flung it into orbit.

“I think this it is highly unlikely,” that Malcuit’s idea is correct, Jack Lissauer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Moffett Field, Calif., said. “Capture is very, very difficult. You have to have just the right velocity and very special parameters to all be just right.”

Lissauer allowed that the current giant impact theory of the moon’s formation may yet be revised, even replaced, but probably not by Malcuit’s capture model. The fact that Earth was cool 4 billion years ago doesn’t mean the moon was captured.

“Heat from the impact dissipated very quickly,” he said. “It wouldn’t take 100 million years, and it certainly wouldn’t take 500 million. The impact is not going to affect Earth at 4 billion years ago.”