Bob Hoskins is joining the cast of Doomsday, a film that takes place thirty years after a virus decimates the population. The film also stars Rona Mitra and Alexander Siddig (Bashir from Deep Space Nine).

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Here we have a series of post-apocalyptic looking photos from an abandoned city on Japan’s Gukanjima island. The city housed coal miners until it was closed and abandoned in 1974.

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FEMA - the Federal Emergency Management Agency - has a special web site - you know, for kids.

Guided by Herman the spokescrab, FEMA for Kids shows kids how to become a “disaster action kid”, how to connect with other kids about distasters you or they have been through, how to order “FEMA stuff”, and has a large friendly map of the US that you can use to locate disasters in progress.

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“We’re facing global disaster not because of things people do, but because Jesus loves us so much He wants us all to die horribly.”

Via: it’s all one thing: Armageddon science: blame Jesus, not America
[tags]shetterly, science, jesus[/tags]

BBC reports that Japan 49,000 chickens on a farm in the Miyazaki region of Japan would be slaughtered after 3,000 dead chickens from the farm all tested positive for bird flu. It wasn’t clear to me whether the chickens had died on their own or whether they had been slaughtered and then tested.

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Jamais Cascio has an overview of recent “apocaphilia” (great word!) on his web site, including the doomsday clock, carbon labels and nanotech.

ViaL Open the Future: Wednesday Topsight, January 24, 2007
[tags]jamais cascio, apocaphilia, doomsday clock, carbon[/tags]

SciFi Wire has another update on Jericho…this time an interview with Lennie James, who plays the enigmatic “Hawkins” on Jericho, the father of the token black family in town. Unsurprisingly, he says that some of Hawkins’ mysterious background will be revealed soon. The more interesting (and kind of cool) thing that he talks about is that he refused to be told anything about Hawkins’ background himself for the first five episodes, until he finally relented.

I’ll relent. I don’t think Jericho is particularly good… in fact, it is sometimes cringe-worthy… and yet I keep watching it and talking about it, not just because it’s apocalyptic. So I will make an effort to rag on it less in the future (unless it deserves it even more than usual).

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I always knew there was something creepy going on with cats and birds. Cats were just too obsessed by birds. Now all is revealed - the evil feline master plan to rise up against their unworthy ape masters spreading H5N1 bird flu to them.

New Scientist reports on the discovery that in areas where there have been outbreaks of bird flu, 1 in 5 cats have been infected with the virus as well.

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… Bruce Sterling reports on a highly infectious form of TB in Africa which is airborne and kills 98% of the infected.

Via: WIRED Blogs: Beyond the Beyond
[tags]wired, bruce sterling, tuberculosis, airborne[/tags]

No two-snouted pigs for you today! Today’s topic is everybody’s favorite subject - the weather - and even better - climate change.

The picture above is from the 2005 UN Climate Change Conference. Have you noticed how it seems like every year recently is the hottest or coldest on record, wettest or driest? They’re predicting that this trend will continue, and they’re using these charts to represent their forecasts of what areas of the Earth will see the most extreme weather.

This is all well and good, but then they go and say: “We hope it will help policy-makers gain a quick overview of the scientific facts without getting lost in the detail.”

Before I say this, let me get this out of the way: I believe that the Earth’s climate is changing, but I believe that the climate changes naturally. I believe it is possible that the climate is changing in response to human technology, but I don’t believe that this is necessarily a given. And discussions about climate change are generally about politics rather than science. I’m not going to talk politics here. I am not anti-climate change. In fact, part of me thrills to the possibility. But I am also not simply accepting human-driven climate change as fact.

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