Daniel Hernandez, intern, stays by Gabrielle Giffords’ side

Daniel Hernandez stays behind with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as she is carried from the scene of the shooting on Saturday at a mall near Tucson. The intern’s quick thinking may have saved Giffords’ life.

Daniel Hernandez had been U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ intern for five days when she was shot Saturday outside Tucson.

The junior at the University of Arizona was helping check people in at the “Congress on Your Corner” event when he heard gunfire. He was about 30 feet from the congresswoman. When the shots began, he ran toward them.

When the shots began that morning, he saw many people lying on the ground, including a young girl. Some were bleeding. Hernandez said he moved from person to person checking pulses.

“First the neck, then the wrist,” he said. One man was already dead. Then he saw Giffords. She had fallen and was lying contorted on the sidewalk. She was bleeding.

Using his hand, Hernandez applied pressure to the entry wound on her forehead. He pulled her into his lap, holding her upright against him so she wouldn’t choke on her own blood. Giffords was conscious, but quiet.

He stayed with Giffords until paramedics arrived. They strapped her to a board and loaded her into an ambulance. Hernandez climbed in with her. On the ride to the hospital, he held her hand. She squeezed his back.

Eight hours after the shooting, Hernandez stood with Giffords’ friends and staff and told them what had happened. The tall, strong 20-year-old said, “Of course you’re afraid, you just kind of have to do what you can.”

“You just have to be calm and collected,” he said. “You do no good to anyone if you have a breakdown… . It was probably not the best idea to run toward the gunshots, but people needed help.” Read more at www.azcentral.com

Deadliest Catch-22

“Thousands of dead crabs have washed up along the Kent coast, with environmental experts believing the cold weather in Britain is to blame,” London’s Daily Mail reports.In an MSNBC/LiveScience report, we get the simple explanation. ’tis the snowfall on the beach that melted wot dun it:

“It’s been a phenomenon for probably a third year in a row,” Tony Child, Thanet Coast project manager, told LiveScience.

But Child said every year the die-offs have occurred after there was snow on the beaches. The meltwater causes temperatures near shore to drop, and Child said the deaths must be linked to hypothermia.

Now, get  load of this quote from another person in the Daily Mail Article:

“Coastal warden Tony Sykes said: ‘We suspect that climate change and warmer weather has lured the crabs towards the shoreline.”

So this claim from coastal warden Sykes isn’t the same ridiculous claim we’ve been hearing lately, that global warming causes cold weather. Nooo… the problem here seems to be that the crabs made the mistake of believing in global warming. Read more at wattsupwiththat.com

Gulf oil spill methane bloom disappears

Methane mystery solved

Methane from the BP oil spill was consumed by bacterial blooms.Photo: Greenpeace InternationalTwo months after the BP oil spill, scientists discovered methane concentrations in the Gulf of Mexico were a million times greater than background levels.

“Based on past data and research, we thought the methane would persist in those deeper plumes for years,” Dr. John Kessler, an assistant professor of oceanography at Texas A&M, said in an interview.

In June, Kessler and scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, led a research expedition to the Gulf to measure methane.

In a paper to be published today in Science Xpress, Kessler and his colleagues report that when they returned to the Gulf in September to take further measurements, they discovered that the methane had all but disappeared.

In the intervening months, bacterial blooms had dissolved some 200,000 tons of methane.

“There appears to be a rather substantial plume of methane-consuming organisms that seemed to have appeared sometime between when we left the water in June and when we returned to the water in September,” said Kessler.

A big question that had loomed back in June was how much of the methane, a potent greenhouse gas, would escape into the atmosphere. The oil spill offered a unique opportunity to gather data on how large releases of methane could affect the planet.

“We surveyed the entire deepwater plume, 36,000 square miles,” said Kessler. “We measured 207 different locations, and when we added up the oxygen deficit at each location we came up with a number that only can be explained when you have a complete consumption of that methane. If it had cycled to the atmosphere you would not have that oxygen content. Everywhere the methane should be there was a consistent oxygen deficit.” Read more at www.grist.org