MIRACLE !!!!!!!!! 155 PASSENGERS MIRACULOUSLY SAVED IN US PLANE CRASH: STORY AND PHOTO

NEW YORK -- A US Airways plane with 155 people on board ditched into a chilly Hudson River on Thursday, apparently after striking at least one bird upon takeoff from New York's LaGuardia Airport, according to officials and passengers.

Everyone on board was accounted for and alive, officials said. About 15 people were being treated at hospitals and others were being evaluated at triage centers.
Flight 1549, headed to Charlotte, North Carolina, was airborne less than three minutes, according to FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown.
The pilot radioed to air traffic controllers that he had experienced a bird strike and declared an emergency, a New Jersey State Police source said.
"I think a lot of people started praying and just collecting themselves," said passenger Fred Berretta. "It was quite stunning."
He said he was expecting the plane to flip over and break apart, but it did not.
"It was a great landing," Berretta said.
Air traffic controllers at LaGuardia saw the plane clear the George Washington Bridge by less than 900 feet before gliding into the water about 3:31 p.m., an aviation source told.

Witness Ben Vonklemperer said he watched the plane from the 25th floor of an office building.
"If someone's going to land a plane in the water, this seemed the best possible way to do it," Vonklemperer said. "The way they hit it was very gradual. A very slow contact with the water."
As the situation began to settle Thursday evening, the flight's pilot, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, emerged as a hero, with praise being heaped on him by passengers, officials and aviation experts.
"I don't think there's enough praise to go around for someone who does something like this. This is something you really can't prepare for," said former Delta pilot Denny Walsh. "You really don't practice water landings in commercial airplanes. Just the sheer expertise he demonstrated is amazing."
US Airways CEO Doug Parker said it would be premature to speculate about the cause of the accident until the National Transportation Safety Board, which is sending a team to the site, completed an investigation.
A source familiar with the situation, however, told CNN the pilot reported a double bird strike, but it was unclear whether that meant birds in both engines or two birds in one engine.
The pilot initially said he needed to go back, and air traffic controllers started to give him clearance to do so, but the pilot said he wanted to head to Teterboro, New Jersey, because it was closer. That was the last transmission from the pilot, the source said.
Passenger Alberto Panero said that within a few minutes after takeoff, he heard a loud bang and smelled smoke.
"That's when we knew we were going down and into the water. We just hit, and somehow the plane stayed afloat and we were able to get on the raft. It's just incredible right now that everybody's still alive."
Passenger Jeff Kolodjay of Norwalk, Connecticut, said he was sitting in seat 22A, near one of the engines.
"The captain came on and said, 'Look, we're going down. Brace for impact.' Everyone looked at each other and we said our prayers. I said about five Hail Marys," said Kolodjay, who was headed to Charlotte to play golf.
"The plane started filling with water pretty quick," he said. "It was scary. There was a lady with her baby on my left-hand shoulder, and she was crawling over the seats."
Police, fire and Coast Guard boats, along with commercial ferries, were quickly on the scene as passengers lined up on slightly submerged safety chutes.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said later Thursday that the plane was tied to a pier at Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. As night fell, Coast Guard and FDNY boats remained at the scene.
President Bush commended those involved in the rescue. "Laura and I are inspired by the skill and heroism of the flight crew as well as the dedication and selflessness of the emergency responders and volunteers who rescued passengers from the icy waters of the Hudson," he said.
Bloomberg also commended the pilot for not leaving the plane until he had checked to make sure everyone had been been evacuated.
"It would appear that the pilot did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river and then making sure that everybody got out," Bloomberg said.
"I had a long conversation with the pilot," Bloomberg said. "He walked the plane twice after everybody else was off, and tried to verify that there was nobody else on board, and assures us there were not."
"There is a heroic pilot," said Gov. David Paterson. "We have had a miracle on 34th Street, I believe we now have a miracle on the Hudson."
The temperature in New York was 20 degrees about the time of the crash off Manhattan's west side.
Dr. Gabriel Wilson, associated medical director of the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, said 55 survivors were checked out and cleared to leave from the scene.
Those being treated at hospitals included a husband and wife with hypothermia at Roosevelt Hospital, as well as a flight attendant with a leg fracture, hospital spokeswoman Michelle Stiles said.
Since 1975, five large jetliners have had major accidents in which bird strikes played a role, according to the Web site of Bird Strike Committee USA, a volunteer group dedicated to reducing the frequency and severity of the strikes.
More than 56,000 bird strikes were reported to the FAA from 1998 to 2004, according to the group's Web site.

2008 WAS HOLDED FOR ONE SECOND: IT WAS 24TH LEAP SECOND AFTER 1972,KEEPING CLOCK IN SYNC WITH EARTH'S ROTATION

On Wednesday, at 11:59:59 pm Universal Time (6:59:59 p.m. Eastern time), atomic clocks around the world will add one second to the day.
The idea of adding time at the end of the year dates back to the ancient Egyptians, who added a day every four years. But the leap second is a newcomer. This year, the world’s timekeepers will add its 24th leap second since 1972. Wednesday’s extra second will bring the world’s high-tech atomic clocks back into sync with time as defined by Earth’s rotation.
Why does the world need leap seconds? Chalk it up to the moon’s braking action on Earth’s rotation and to modern timekeeping that has become so precise it can make your head spin. Indeed, as timekeeping becomes more accurate and portable, it could improve everything from GPS navigation to cellphone reception.
Scientists developed the first atomic clock in 1949. As the clocks improved, researchers found themselves using timepieces of a precision beyond exquisite. Today’s versions might gain or lose one second after 60 million years.
These clocks became the standard for global timekeeping. No swinging pendulums or vibrating wristwatch-scale quartz crystals here. One second is formally defined as 9,192,631,770 cycles, or “ticks and tocks,” of microwave energy emitted or absorbed by cesium-133 atoms under carefully controlled conditions.
Meanwhile, researchers were also taking the measure of Earth’s rotation with greater precision, using a global network of radio telescopes aimed at quasars – the active cores of galaxies in the distant early universe. Quasars are so far away that they constitute the best frame of reference for measuring Earth’s rotation rate.
The moon is the single largest influence on Earth’s spin, slowing it by an average of 2 milliseconds per century. Since Earth’s rotation rate varies, so would the value of one second when it’s defined as a fraction of the time it takes for one spin of the Earth on its axis.
So where a leap year periodically makes up for the difference between a year on the calendar (365 days) and a year’s trip around the sun (365 days plus 6 hours), the leap second makes up the difference between an atomic clock’s second and one second as defined by astronomical time keeping.
At the US Naval Observatory in Washington, its newest atomic clock is getting a climate-controlled room of its own for the first time. The hardware forming the core of the new clock tips the scale at some 800 pounds, says Geoff Chester, a spokesman for the observatory. One component looks like a six-foot water heater.
That works for a 24/7/365 service whose job is to act as the nation’s timekeeper. But for a range of applications – from better GPS systems to more jam-resistant navigation gear – smaller may be better.
The current generation of portable atomic clocks is roughly the size of a pack of playing cards. But the devices need a car battery to run them. John Kitching and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., are designing atomic clocks that range in size from a sugar cube to a grain of rice. Their goal: mini atomic clocks that can operate on AA batteries.
With mini atomic clocks, hand-held or dashboard GPS navigation devices would pick up GPS satellite signals faster. They would require fewer satellites in view to get a good reading on a position – a feature handy for driving amid tall buildings. And for the military, tiny clocks in navigation gear would make jamming weak GPS satellite signals more difficult.
Such devices could also improve the reliability of cell phones, whose signals must be carefully timed as they travel from phone to tower. Protoypes are accurate to within 10 microseconds per day, or roughly 1 second per 274 years.
As for larger atomic clocks, current models measure the interaction of microwaves with electrically charged atoms, or ions, to measure one second. NIST researchers are working on a new generation of clocks that replace microwaves with light. A prototype “optical” clock is so stable it runs neither a second too fast or too slow for at least 400 million years.
It could result in more secure transfer of data over the Internet, as well as increased capacity of existing network pathways to handle more Web traffic.
And there are the unanticipated uses. NIST physicist James Bergquist notes that the idea of using a constellation of satellites for navigation came up only after atomic clocks were developed. He says something similar could well happen with the quantum leap in accuracy that optical clocks promise.

THE TOP SCIENCE STORIES OF 2008

Year-end reviews of top news stories often reek of gloom and doom. Not so with top science/technology stories. Lists assembled by scientific organizations and publications tend to glow with discovery and promise. A small sampling makes the point.
Major advances in geneticists’ ability to reprogram living cells made most of those lists. The journal Science calls it the “breakthrough of the year.” This is the ability to take a living adult cell – say a skin cell – and return it to the state of a stem cell. That’s a cell that can become any one of many different types of cells. The new techniques for such reprogramming demonstrated last year represent such an advance over anything done in the past that geneticists expect to gain unprecedented insight into what Science calls “the biology of how a cell decides its fate.”
Equally prominent is the demonstration for the first time ever that astronomers can see alien planets directly from telescopes on the ground and in space. Over 300 planets orbiting other stars have been found so far. Astronomers located them by analyzing how their gravity tugged on their star or how they dimmed the star’s light when passing in front of it. Now several alien worlds have been imaged directly in what one astronomer called “the beginning of a new era” in planet hunting.
Also, astronomers using the infrared sensor on the Hubble Space Telescope have detected carbon dioxide and methane on an alien planet. Both gases are considered possible indicators of organic life processes. That planet is too hot to sustain life. But NASA says demonstrating that such biomarkers can be detected encourages astronomers to expect that they can pick up life signs on smaller more hospitable planets when the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope is on orbit around 2013.
There was new encouragement in searching for ways to make hydrogen a practical fuel. Chemists have used electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for two centuries. But the catalysts (such as platinum) used to facilitate the process are too costly and require conditions too specialized for large scale use. Last year, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team reported successful use of a catalyst based on relatively cheap and abundant cobalt that works under relatively easily maintained conditions. There’s a long way to go from this lab demonstration to an industry that uses sunlight-generated electricity to produce hydrogen fuel. But, as a commentary in Science pointed out, with the route to a practical catalyst now open, experts expect progress can be swift.
Advances in computing power and in analysis using DNA and related life molecules encouraged scientists in their quest to understand the development of earthly life. Researchers reported that 70 percent of the DNA of the extinct mammoth now has been sequenced. They expect soon to read the entire mammoth code. And at France’s University of Lyon, Manolo Gouy and colleagues reported getting a better estimate of the nature and date of the last common ancestor from which organic life subsequently evolved billions of years ago. The clues are hidden in the present-day chemistry of organic life.

2008'S MOST INTRIGUING , FUN AND BRAVE TECHNOLOGIES

It’s hard for one guy to declare the “best of” anything. So here’s a list that feels more natural to me: the most intriguing devices or fascinating tech developments in 2008. Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments section below.

Coolest device: Apple iPhone 3GSlick, elegant, and easy to use, you could argue that you don’t need a laptop if you have one. You can very easily browse the Web, listen to music, make a phone call, play a game, and figure out where you are and how to get where you’re going. When you’ve done all of that, Apple’s App Store offers thousands of other things that you can do on the phone. But the best thing about the iPhone 3G is that it gets it right: the feel, the look, the way it works. Which, it has to be said, is something that Apple does better than anyone else. I can’t say the same about the BlackBerry Storm, surely the year’s biggest tech disappointment. That smart phone feels as if it was designed by a committee that was not sure why they were all together.
Best use of an existing technology: The Obama campaignThis is not a political endorsement, merely an acknowledgement of Obama’s brilliant use of technology that has been around for years. By using text messaging and e-mail to reach out and repeatedly touch potential voters – especially young ones – the Obama campaign not only brought millions of new voters into the American political system, but also raised a ton of money at the same time.

Most exciting new development: (Tie) Google’s Chrome browser and the T-Mobile G1When it comes to Web browsers, I’m a Firefox acolyte. I wouldn’t use Internet Explorer if you promised to pay my mortgage for a year. But as much as I like Firefox, I’m convinced that Google’s Chrome browser will be the best one available in 2009. Sadly, it’s only available for Windows. But we PC users seldom get to use something better than you can find on a Mac. So it’s nice to feel a bit ahead – at least for a while.
Meanwhile, the iPhone needs to keep a wary eye on the T-Mobile G1 for one good reason – Android, the open-source system that makes it work. The iPhone is very cool, but Apple has been notoriously proprietary about nearly everything concerning the device. Android threatens to tear down the walls that phonemakers have built and create an iPhone-like experience that’s open to everyone.
The 800-pound gorilla: TwitterDo you Twitter? Doesn’t everyone? Or at least it seemed as if everyone was twittering in 2008. The social networking application that didn’t even exist before 2006 took off like a lightening bolt in 2008. One reason for the surge was that people realized that you could do more with Twitter than tell people what you were eating for dinner or that you were bathing your cat. News organizations, for instance, now use it as a reporting tool. During the presidential campaign, several well-known political reporters/bloggers would regularly send updates to readers via Twitter. A few times I’ve read that Twittering might even replace blogging itself one day. I think it could. I know that I blog far less and Twitter far more these days.
Most fun device – Flip video camcorderPoint. Shoot. Edit. Burn. Or post on YouTube. The pocket-size Flip video camera (along with the Kodak Zi6 camcorder) means that anyone – your grandmother, your 6-year-old cousin, your flaky uncle who still can’t figure out how to use the remote – can now shoot video. Then, thanks to the USB connector on the side, you just plug it into your computer, edit it with the camera’s built-in software, and then make a copy for the world to see.If you thought there was a lot of video already available online, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

AS ATHEISTS ROLL OUT LONDON AD'S, BELIVERS UNRUFFLED

Paris - It's the first mass marketing of atheism in Britain – and many in the community of faith say that's just fine.
On Jan. 6 some 800 British red "bendy" buses carried the sign: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
The Atheist Bus Campaign organizer, a young comedienne named Ariane Sherine, took exception last June to several London buses swathed with biblical quotes, placed by Christian fundamentalists.
Her idea to fund a few challenge ads took off; donors sent in $200,000 in two days. Ms. Sherine was joined by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, a leading British atheist and author of "The God Delusion."
He predicted anger from believers. "They have to take offense, it is the only weapons they've got," Mr. Dawkins said as the first bus rolled through the streets of London. "They've got no arguments."
But the response by most faith leaders isn't quite what was expected.
Religious institutes, church pastors, and divinity school professors have not treated the ads with Old Testament wrath, but with a relatively open mind and even embrace of so important an issue.
If Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, they say, the ads remind that an unexamined faith is not a real faith, and people need to think, and even pray, more deeply.
"The campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life," says the Rev. Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer of Britain's Methodist church.
"Many people simply never think about God or religion as a serious question, and if this prods them a little bit, then that's great," says the Rev. Stephen Wang, of the Westminster diocese of the Roman Catholic church.
Moreover, in a secular post-cold-war world, where godless communism is said to be replaced by godless consumerism, a declaration of atheism is hardly a renegade position, some theologians say.
"The bus ads simply echo the secular premises of society," says Gabriel Fackre, professor emeritus of the Andover-Newton Theological School in Boston. "There's no longer a protestant orthodoxy in Great Britain or America. The churches are in a counterculture position whether they realize it or not. That puts us much closer to 1st-century Christianity, and that is an opportunity for the church."
Much of the campaign's initial buzz centered on the assertion that God "probably" doesn't exist. Does this suggest a hedging of bets – a move past atheist dogma? Only partly.
Some organizers wanted a flat "there is no God" statement. Dawkins favored an "almost certainly no God" wording. But Ms. Sherine says that British advertising officials advised that a phrase less absolute and not subject to proof would ensure the ad did not run afoul of the advertising standards authority.
This led to amusement by atheists and believers alike that a statement pro or con about that which has been known through the ages as Creator, First Cause, Deity, divine Love, the laws and powers of the universe, the "Christ consciousness" of Teilhard de Chardin, the Great Shepherd, that which answered Job out of the whirlwind and guided "Arcturus with his sons" – could be adjudicated by mid-level British civil servants.
On the website of the British newspaper, The Guardian, Sherine said the word "probably" is "more lighthearted, and somehow makes the message more positive."
Believers have criticized the second part of the message, "stop worrying and enjoy your life." Nick Spencer, of Theos, a public theology think tank in London, felt the "enjoy yourself" message – coming in the midst of an economic crisis that is taking jobs and spreading anxiety across Europe, possibly implies selfish indifference, and "could not be more ill-timed.... But since Brits are frightfully embarrassed about bringing up God in public, it is a godsend in some ways to have the atheists do it for us."
Dawkins, whose book, "God Delusion" sold 1.5 million copies, told the Los Angeles Times that "We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticize it."
Christianity does have a history of intolerance, theologians admit. But it also has a healthy history of doubt and skepticism, as well as interchanges between faith and science – and has reformed itself through a seeking of truth in and outside the church. Some of its best-known modern thinkers have expressed admiration for nonbelievers.
Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading midcentury American theologian, sometimes invoked by Barack Obama, said he preferred honest agnostics to overly pious believers.
The Lutheran Karl Barth, a leading 20th-century European theologian, wrote the forward to the English language version of Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach's prominent atheist critique, "The Essence of Christianity." Barth wasn't worried about the atheism, says Herman Waetjen, professor emeritus of New Testament studies at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, because Barth felt Feuerbach exposed many fault lines, mistakes, social and collective projections, and other falsifications of Christianity that had arisen around the 19th-century church.
"Barth was happy to write a forward to a book that exposed the kind of Christianity he felt to be so unlike the radical God of the Bible he was reading. He saw the value of Feuerbach. So for a campaign like the bus ads that forces us to think – well, I thank them for it," Professor Waetjen says.
Sherine says she conceived the ads after visiting the fundamentalist website of Christians who sponsored the pro-God bus ads last year.
She was shocked to hear that in their interpretation of the Bible, unbelievers would "burn in a lake of fire." Sherine rejected such an outcome for her Parsi grandmother, and felt that nonbelievers deserved their own message. The windfall of donations are funding 1,000 ads now in British subway stations and on 200 London buses and 600 other buses as far north as Glasgow, Scotland. The ads also appear on a handful of buses in Spain and Italy.
Disbelief or skepticism of God or doctrine has always flowed strongly beneath what scholars called "lived religion." Doubters and the devout have often felt forced to reject or break out of restricting concepts of God, Professor Fackre says: "The question is not atheism or belief, but what kind of atheism or belief? We see some believers espousing something very far from Scriptures. So what kind of God are we rejecting? And what kind are we espousing?"
One Christian element significant in the struggle, particularly with Martin Luther, is "grace." The phrase is the Apostle Paul's, describing the righteous spiritual action of God when it may seem to humans unearned. It gets used in faithful discourse about changed individual lives. But it has also been central to momentous events, inclcluding the Protestant Reformation. As Theodore Trost, of the religion department at the University of Alabama puts it, "In Luther's moment, he sees that Paul, in talking about grace, is saying that Christianity is a different religion than what medieval Europe was experiencing."
Even the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida at the end of his life struggled with that which he said can't be deconstructed, including Paul's notions of love, grace, and gifts.
Many religious people, like many atheists, look to the natural world for evidence of transcendence. On Jan. 5, a day before the atheist campaign started, scientists revealed that our Milky Way galaxy is far larger than previously thought, contains an unknown arc of stars, and is moving more than 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously believed.
The New York Times, in an editorial that some in the faith community found religious implications in, stated: "One of the wonderful things about astronomy [is that] our understanding of the galaxy around us undergoes a significant shift, and the only real change is the new terrain that opens up inside our heads."

MOST US CHRISTIANS DEFINE OWN THEOLOGY - MORE THAN HALF SAY OTHER FAITH CAN ALSO LEAD TO SALVATION

American individualism has made its imprint on Christianity.
A sizable majority of the country's faithful no longer hew closely to orthodox teachings, and look more to themselves than to churches or denominations to define their religious convictions, according to two recent surveys. More than half of all Christians also believe that some non-Christians can get into heaven.
"Growing numbers of people now serve as their own theologian-in-residence," said George Barna, president of Barna Group, on releasing findings of one of the polls on Jan. 12.
In the Barna survey, 71 percent of American adults say they are more likely to develop their own set of religious beliefs than to accept a defined set of teachings from a particular church. Even among born-again Christians, 61 percent pick and choose from the beliefs of different denominations. For people under the age of 25, the number rises to 82 percent.
Many "cafeteria Christians" go beyond the teachings of Christian denominations to embrace parts of other world religions.
Half of Americans also believe that Christianity is now just one of many faith options people can choose from (44 percent disagree with that perception). Residents of the Northeast and West were more likely than those in the South and Midwest to say Christianity has lost its status as the favored American religion.
Christians expressed a variety of unorthodox beliefs in the poll. Nearly half of those interviewed do not believe in the existence of Satan, one-third believe Jesus sinned while on earth, and two-fifths say they don't have a responsibility to share their faith with others.
The most striking divergence from orthodoxy, however, was first revealed in the 2007 US Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That comprehensive survey of 35,000 Americans found a majority of Christians saying that people of other religions can find salvation and eternal life.
The results stirred controversy among some Christian leaders for whom Jesus as the only path to salvation is a paramount teaching. Some questioned whether those surveyed about "other religions" might have been thinking of Christian denominations or traditions – such as Protestants referring to Roman Catholicism – rather than non-Christian faiths.
Pew undertook a follow-up survey, which it released in late December. That poll found 65 percent of American Christians (including 47 percent of Evangelicals) do indeed think that many different religions can lead to eternal life. Among these Christians, 80 percent cited one non-Christian faith as a route to salvation; 61 percent named two or more.
The survey also asked about views on how one obtains eternal life. Among all adults with a religious affiliation, 30 percent say correct beliefs are what counts, 29 percent say salvation depends on one's actions during life, while 10 percent say both are essential. Those who emphasize the impact of actions are more inclined to believe that practitioners of non-Christian faiths can achieve eternal life. Most of those who emphasize beliefs say non-Christian paths do not lead to heaven.
The poll confirms a broad rejection of religious exclusivity. Among all religious adults interviewed, 65 percent say many religions lead to eternal life and only 29 percent say theirs is the one true faith. Sixty-nine percent of all non-Jews say Judaism can lead to eternal life and 52 percent of non-Muslims say that of Islam.
Forty-two percent of religious Americans also say atheists are able to find eternal life.
While some people hail these findings as heartening for American pluralism, others see them as a wake-up call. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary writes on his blog about biblical Christianity's role in countering such inclusive views and helping people find the true Christian way. Others point to the power of egalitarian American culture.
"It's just part of a 200-year working out of ideas about personal autonomy and equality that are sort of built into the American experience," says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "The notion that someone is going to burn in hell because they have their own beliefs is just not resonant within our larger political ideals."