Feels Like Earthquake Weather...

Hurricane Irene, a powerful storm that ran north along the US East Coast four days after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake rattled Virginia in 2011, may have triggered some of that earthquake's aftershocks. The rate of aftershocks following the 23 August 2011, earthquake near Mineral, Virginia, increased sharply as Irene passed by.

The researchers are not the first to examine a potential link between hurricanes and seismic activity. Shimon Wdowinski, a seismologist at the University of Miami, Florida, says that he has found a strong correlation between extremely wet tropical cyclones striking Taiwan and big earthquakes that occur up to three years later. He thinks that the erosion of landslide debris in such a storm's aftermath triggers a change in fault loading, eventually producing an earthquake.

That work is not yet published. But another study by researchers in the United States and Taiwan found a similar association between slow earthquakes - which take places over hours or even days - and tropical cyclones in Taiwan.

http://www.nature.com/news/hurricane-may-have-triggered-earthquake-aftershocks-1.12839

The physical traits of previous sexual partners could be passed on to future children. Telegony was first hypothesized by Aristotle and was a widely held belief in the Middle Ages and up until the 19th century. The theory was discredited by the advent of genetics, but may have some truth to it after all. Scientists at the University of New South Wales discovered that, for fruit flies at least, the size of the young was determined by the size of the first male the mother mated with, rather than the second male that sired the offspring.

"We know that features that run in families are not just influenced by the genes that are passed down from parents to their children. Various non-genetic inheritance mechanisms make it possible for environmental factors to influence characteristics of a child. Our new findings take this to a whole new level - showing a male can also transmit some of his acquired features to offspring sired by other males," says lead author Dr Angela Crean.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/11133203/Could-previous-lovers-influence-appearance-of-future-children.html