EARL NEXT DOOR: The Outer Banks of North Carolina are eerily calm and breezy this morning, but that tranquility is expected to slowly crumble throughout the day, the National Hurricane Center warns, as the monstrous Hurricane Earl approaches the coast. Earl is back up to a Category 4 storm, and while its exact path remains up in the air, the cyclone is already getting dangerously close to the U.S. Mid-Atlantic Coast. It has maximum sustained winds of 145 mph — the strongest of any Atlantic cyclone so far this season — and is churning to the northwest at about 18 mph, possibly on its way to grinding along the East Coast before crashing into Nova Scotia on Sunday. The governors of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland have all declared states of emergency, and President Obama declared a federal emergency in the Tar Heel state Wednesday night. As tourists and residents scramble to evacuate barrier islands from the Carolinas to Cape Cod, the NHC has even issued a tropical storm warning for New York's Long Island, a rarity that could wreak havoc in the world's fifth-largest city if it bears out (not to mention potentially delaying the U.S. Open). But for now, most of the concern is focused on coastal North Carolina. "On the track that we're forecasting, there will be a significant impact to the Outer Banks," one NHC hurricane specialist tells Bloomberg News this morning. "They have less than 24 hours before the arrival of hurricane conditions. There isn't a whole lot more time, and conditions are going to deteriorate throughout the day." Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Fiona is fading away behind Earl, but a new cyclone — Tropical Storm Gaston — has already formed behind Fiona, and is expected to become a hurricane over the weekend. (Sources: National Hurricane Center, Associated Press, Miami Herald, New York Daily News, Bloomberg News)

 

GREEN WITH INSANITY: Human civilization has a long history of overcoming adversity, so when a lone militant named James L. Lee tried to advocate wiping out the species by taking over a suburban office park on Wednesday, humanity had little difficulty neutralizing the threat. Police shot and killed Lee (pictured) Wednesday afternoon, ending a four-hour standoff in which the environmental terrorist held three hostages at gunpoint inside the headquarters of Discovery Communications in Silver Spring, Md. The hostages and everyone else in the building are now safe, according to Montgomery County police, who ended the crisis once they noticed Lee was becoming more agitated. While hostage negotiators distracted him, a tactical team moved into a position where they could see and hear what was going on. "At one point, the suspect ... pulled out the handgun that he came in with and pointed it at one of the hostages," Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger tells the Washington Post. "At that point, our tactical units moved in and shot the suspect." Lee had a history of protesting against Discovery Communications, including a 2008 demonstration at the Silver Spring office in which he hired homeless picketers and threw $20,000 into the air. He also published a rambling manifesto online, in which he referred to civilization as "filth" and called for an end to "parasitic" and "disgusting" human babies. "The planet does not need humans," Lee wrote. But after all the uproar he caused, the only thing Lee proved was that the planet didn't need one particular human. (Sources: Washington Post, New York Times, AP)

 

BACTERIA GIVE BACK: Dangerous, drug-resistant E. coli bacteria may not seem very kind-hearted to us, but they do take care of their own, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. In fact, some of the most antibiotic-resistant E. coli are so altruistic they'll even sacrifice themselves to give their relatives a better shot at surviving. They do this by producing a small molecule called "indole," which washes across an entire E. coli community and triggers protective mechanisms in the brood's less drug-resistant members. But producing that much indole weakens the individual bacterium pumping it out, the researchers discovered, meaning that individual is essentially taking one for the team. "They don't grow as well as they could," biomedical engineer James Collins explains in a press release, "because they're producing indole for everybody else." Before this discovery, microbiologists assumed individual bacteria developed drug resistance via random mutations they passed on to their offspring, replacing less resistant individuals that couldn't survive antibiotic treatments. "Typically, you would expect only the resistant strains to survive, with the susceptible ones dying off in the face of antibiotic stress," Collins says. "We were quite surprised to find the weak strains not only surviving, but thriving." While it's nice to see such camaraderie in nature, this phenomenon may help explain why bacterial drug resistance is so difficult to fight, Collins says, since an E. coli strain that seems susceptible to antibiotics can suddenly become resistant thanks to its more charitable citizens. "Now, when we measure the resistance in a population," he points out, "we'll know that it may be tricking us." (Sources: USA Today, ScienceDaily)

 

ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: India has a long history of wildlife conservation, and was even among the birthplaces of the modern environmental movement, along with the U.S. and Britain, back in the 1800s. But while India has made substantial strides protecting its forests, as well as some iconic animals like tigers, it has largely ignored the elephant in the room, the London Independent reports today. But that's about to change, thanks to a decision by Indian government officials to declare Asian elephants the country's "national heritage animal," an honor that will reportedly grant them the same protections India gives to tigers. "We need to give the same degree of importance to the elephant as is given to the tiger in order to protect the big animal," environmental minister Jairam Ramesh tells the Independent. There are an estimated 26,000 Asian elephants living in India today, 3,500 of which are working animals, and while their overall population hasn't plummeted as quickly as tigers' has, they face their own unique predicament: gender imbalance. Poachers disproportionately target male elephants because they're the only ones with tusks — the source of prized ivory — and that has left some parts of India with only one male elephant for every 100 females. And while that might sound like fun for those few males, both sexes are also being boxed out of their habitats by rampant development, pitting them against angry villagers who often kill them in retaliation for trampling their human neighbors in panicked stampedes. But with the new designation, many in India are now optimistic that human-elephant relations can still be salvaged. "The tiger captured the political imagination and came to symbolize India's threatened wildlife, but the elephant did not," says a history professor at Delhi University. "I think the threat to the tiger invoked a sense of crisis and then everybody rallied around. With the elephant it is not a crisis of extinction, but a crisis of attrition." (Source: Independent)

 

— Russell McLendon