A sensor recently installed at The University of Southern Mississippi will allow Hattiesburg-area residents to help check air quality.

The university said in a news release that USM is one of three places in Mississippi to install a PurpleAir sensor as part of an initiative with NASA Langley, led by the University of Toledo.

The other Mississippi sites are in the northeastern part of the state and on the Gulf Coast.

Several states in the South — including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina — have several sensor sites.

Sherry S. Herron, associate professor emerita of science education at USM, collaborated with University of Toledo professor Kevin Czajkowski to get the sensor installed on the Hattiesburg campus. Herron has been USM’s GLOBE partner since 2005.

GLOBE.gov is the citizen-science and education outreach for NASA.

“With the launch of the NASA TEMPO satellite on air quality scheduled for December 2022, we are trying to engage more professors, K-12 teachers and students, and other citizen scientists across the United States in the project,” Herron said.

The TEMPO instrument is a UV-visible spectrometer that monitors air pollutants hourly across North America during daytime.

It collects high-resolution measurements of ozone, nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants, which should improve air quality forecasts.

Villa Epecuén is an abandoned tourist village that is located on the eastern shore of the Laguna Epecuén, in the Province of Buenos Aires, within the Argentine Republic.

Established in 1920s as a spa village due to the therapeutic properties of the salt water of the lake, it was one of the most popular places fro the Argentinians to come and relax since it was easily accessible from the capital by train.

During its peak in 1970s, the entire area could hosted up to 5,000 visitors, even though some sources state that the number was reaching as high as 7,000.

Unfortunately, due to a long term weather event which brought more rain to the surrounding hills than the usual amount, on 6 November 1985 a standing wave in the enclosed body of water, named seiche, broke first a nearby dam, then the dyke protecting the village.

The slow growing water consumed the entire village where in 1993 it reached a depth of some 10 meters (33 feet).

There were more than 1,000 inhabitants who left their businesses, lodges, guesthouses, hotels, and only took what they could before the incoming water wrapped the entire area.

Luckily, the wet weather suddenly reversed and after more than two decades the saline waters began to recede in 2009, revealing the once popular and prosperous village that nowadays is a chaotic mass of crumbling rubble, more precisely an apocalyptic landscape which is covered with thick white layer of salt.

Villa Epecuén nowadays is reachable by a track that is flanked by petrified trees, and at the entrance is still visible the Francisco Salamone’s monumental slaughterhouse, greeting all those who dare to visit a historical place which left many inhabitants homeless.

From all of the inhabitants, only one returned to live once again in the place he calls home.

Pablo Novak, born in 1930, returned to Villa Epecuén in order to try to live again a normal life as it once was when the village was thriving with the plenty of tourists willing to relax and enjoy.

The eerily quiet streets are again spreading across Epecuén like arteries allowing the visitors to have a surreal experience, and with the few buildings still standing nowadays, there is a museum located in the former train station which covers the history and rescued items such as record players, ponchos and llama-wool jumpers.

Representing the brutal truth that not everything is built to last forever, Villa Epecuén will remain in the history books as a place which once thrived, then became abandoned and now slowly it is regaining its popularity by all those enthusiasts who would like to experience something out of the ordinary.

President Muhammadu Buhari has directed the nation’s armed forces, security and intelligence agencies to intensify the clampdown on illegal refineries following the reported deaths of tens of people on Friday night after an illegal refinery exploded at Abaezi forest in the Ohaji-Egbema Local Government Area of Imo State.

Reacting to what he described as a “catastrophe and a national disaster,” President Buhari said responsibility for the loss of lives and property must squarely lie with the sponsors of the illegal refinery, “who must all be caught and made to face justice.”

In conveying “the condolences and the full depth and range of the nation’s shock and trauma” to the families of the victims, the Ohaji Egbema community and the government and people of Imo State, the President urged community leaders, the police, and the secret service to never allow the occurrence of the heart-breaking incident in any part of the country again.

The Sun unleashed an intense solar flare, sparking radio blackouts in several parts of Asia and Australia.

According to the US Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the solar flare peaked late on April 17 at 3.34 GMT (9.04 IST) and was followed minutes later by a massive sun eruption known as a coronal mass ejection, Space.com reported.

The flare registered as an X1.1-class sun storm and lasted about 34 minutes, SWPC officials said.

The flare originated from Regions 2994 and 2993, a cluster of active sunspots that has seen “significant flaring” since it appeared on the eastern limb of the Sun, according to the SWPC.

“Solar activity is expected to be active over the next week as these sunspots migrate across the visible disk,” the agency said in an update.

The SWPC stated that the solar flare spawned a brief radio blackout and was classified as a Type II solar radio burst, the report said.

“A pulse of X-rays from the flare produced a strong shortwave radio blackout over southeast Asia and Australia,” said NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which recorded the X1-class solar flare.

“Mariners, aviators, and ham radio operators may have noticed unusual propagation effects at frequencies below 30 MHz,” it added.