Houston: Tropical Storm Fay could become hurricane

Tropical Storm Fay gathered strength Friday, shutting down schools and prompting evacuations, while the Texas coast braced for a weak but soggy hurricane that could dump 15 inches of rain.

By early Friday evening, Fay was about 105 miles south of Galveston and stationary. Sustained winds approached 60 mph and prompted a hurricane watch for a 150-mile stretch of coastline. The watch means hurricane-force winds of 74 mph and high water are possible within the watch area.

There were no immediate reports of serious damage or flooding.

The hurricane center predicted Friday that Fay would most likely make landfall in Freeport, about 55 miles south of Houston. Timing was difficult to forecast because of the storm’s lack of movement.

Washington: Asteroid threat remote but real, experts say

It wouldn’t take a very big rock falling from space to cause widespread damage and death on the Earth. The chances of that happening are remote perhaps once in thousands of years but the destruction would be so extreme that experts say humanity needs to find ways to defend itself.

At a NASA-sponsored scientific conference on the hazards of comets and asteroids smashing into the Earth, experts on Friday estimated that the planet would probably be hit about once per 1,000 years by a space rock big enough to release about 10 megatons of explosive energy.

Such a rock, estimated about 180 feet across, scorched through the atmosphere over Tunguska in Siberia in 1908 and flattened trees across 800 square miles of forest land. No crater was found and experts believe the damage came from atmospheric shock.

Bigger space rocks, that would cause more damage, would hit the Earth even more rarely.

Washington: Personal watercraft allowed through season

Personal watercraft enthusiasts can continue to zip across lakes in eight national recreation areas after an environmental group agreed Friday to postpone a deadline that would have banned the watercraft temporarily beginning Sept. 15.

The watercraft are commonly referred to by their commercial names Jet Ski, Wave Runner or SeaDoo. Environmentalists complain they are noisy, dangerous and pollute the environment.

The National Parks Service was required as part of a lawsuit settlement to complete environmental impact studies and craft rules on where in the eight recreation areas high-powered watercraft could be allowed.

But with a deadline looming, it was clear the Park Service would not be able to finish the studies and the personal watercraft would be banned from the selected lakes and rivers in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Montana and Arizona. The craft are allowed now through the end of the boating season.

Los Angeles: Satellites begin mapping gravitational field

Data gathered during two weeks by a pair of identical satellites have yielded one of the best-ever maps of the Earth’s lumpy, bumpy gravitational field, scientists said Friday.

The low-resolution look represents a tenfold improvement over previous maps, said scientists on the joint U.S.-German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission, called Grace for short.

Earlier maps were slowly cobbled together using a combination of satellite and ground data.

“It took 30 years to get what we had before,” said Mike Watkins, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Grace in just 14 days of data does better.”