Craggy, weather-beaten Claude L. Fallwell had lived a full life, and he wanted a full epitaph. Now past 70, he had crossed the country in a covered wagon, been cowboy, cook, farmer, fruitgrower, preacher and proprietor of a farmers' market. Fallwell ambled down to the La Grande Evening Observer and asked how much it would cost to buy enough space to tell his whole story. He finally settled for a two-column want-ad a week, at $15 for each ad.Last week Fallwell's "epitaph" was ...

After her husband left her, Jennifer Santana lost her job. When she was evicted from her apartment, Santana, 37, held her family together by living with a friend and then in her van. But as the nights grew cold in early December, she stood huddled with her three children in front of the Orange County cold-weather shelter in Santa Ana, Calif. "There were long lines of men and women, and the people were laying out mats on ...

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while ...

HOW THEY START... Wildfires result from a confluence of fuel, dryness and some kind of trigger. Each factor contributes to the severity of the blaze --Fuel means flammable solids--grass, pine needles, undergrowth, smaller trees--that, with oxygen, feed the fire --Dryness can be caused by short-term weather patterns with low humidity or by a lengthy drought that parches the landscape --Triggers can be as natural as a lightning strike, as innocent as a campfire or as sinister as an arsonist FUEL ...

Nobody does anniversaries quite like NASA. Launches and landings and all of the other things spacecraft do may be governed by nonnegotiable variables like orbital mechanics and weather, but in NASA's world, they seem to take a lot of fortuitous calendrical bounces too. The Viking 1 lander settled down on the surface of Mars on July 20, 1976 — the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The Pathfinder probe made its own Mars landing on ...

In January 1992, deep within a tempestuous stretch of subarctic sea, a Taiwan ship on its way from Hong Kong to the U.S. was beset by foul weather and lost several steel containers overboard. One of these cracked open upon hitting the water, liberating its cargo: 28,800 plastic children's bathtub toys in the shapes of turtles, frogs, beavers and ducks. Several months and many untold thousands of sea miles later, the figurines began to bob ashore along the coasts of Alaska ...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long been known worldwide for its engineering programs, and a symposium at MIT this week will draw scientists from around the globe to focus on a hot facet of the field -- climate engineering.Creating an artificial cloud cover, or modifying clouds to reflect light back into space, is one of them. But probably the more popular climate engineering technology now involves pumping sulfates into the atmosphere to block the sun's rays and cool temperatures, ...

NASA launched its Ares I-X rocket Wednesday, after multiple delays over two days because of bad weather.

Throughout his life, Ronn Wade has been surrounded by death. And in most cases, it hasn't seemed to bother him. Wade calls the collection fascinating and says we can learn a lot from mummies in general. "They were exposed to a lot of things we are today -- like bacteria, disease," he notes. "We can see signs of osteoarthritis, stress, even hardening of the arteries." When you hear the word "mummy," you might think of the ancient Egyptians who preserved ...

Thousands of Filipinos who live near coastlines and mountainous areas were evacuated Friday as the storm-battered country braced for Typhoon Parma, which is expected to make landfall Saturday. Parma had maximum sustained winds of 132 mph (212 kph) and was on the doorstep of northern Luzon, in the northern part of the Philippines, early Saturday. It was expected to make landfall along the country's northeastern coast Saturday. Tropical Storm force winds extended well over 300 kilometers (186 miles) -- far ...