Dave Martin / AP file

This aerial photo taken April 28, 2011 shows tornado damage in Pleasant Grove, Ala. The photos and mementoes that were blown for hundreds of miles during the tornado outbreak two years ago are giving researchers new insight on how debris is carried.

By Jeff Martin
AP

Photos and mementos that were snatched up and blown hundreds of miles during a Southern tornado outbreak two years ago are giving researchers new insight on how debris is carried by the storms and how it could threaten the public.

A new study has documented how one photo traveled nearly 220 miles over Alabama and Tennessee, said John Knox, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia who led the research. That is among the longest-documented trajectories of tornado debris.

The slightly scratched snapshot, which shows a stream flowing through a mountainous landscape, traveled from the northwest Alabama town of Phil Campbell to the east Tennessee town of Lenoir City.

The study was recently published online by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

It tracked the direction the items traveled in relation to the storms that struck Alabama and other Southern states on April 27, 2011.

The researchers analyzed the takeoff and landing points of the items using geography software and mathematical models.

Most debris fell slightly to the left of the storm's track. But the items that traveled the farthest were found to the right of the path.

Knowing where the debris is likely to fall could help protect the public if a tornado were to strike a hazardous site and suck up toxic biological or radioactive debris, Knox said.

"We need to get enough understanding so we can get fairly reasonable predictions of where the stuff goes," said John Snow, a professor of meteorology and dean emeritus at the University of Oklahoma who studied tornado debris in the 1990s. Knox's study builds on research done by Snow and others.

Though nuclear reactors are designed to withstand the force of tornadoes, radioactive materials such as fuel rods are often stored nearby, Snow said. A direct hit on such material is one of many catastrophic scenarios involving tornado-blown debris.

Tornadoes have struck toxic materials in the past. In May 2008, a twister slammed into the Tar Creek Superfund site in Oklahoma, where mountains of mining waste tower over the landscape.

Joshua Wurman, an atmospheric scientist who founded the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colo., was not involved in the Georgia research but thinks it could have benefits.

"Let's say a tornado struck some kind of toxic waste dump. Sure, some of the debris or dust would have some contaminants in that," Wurman said. "Understanding which direction those contaminants would go could be useful."

The 934 objects studied by Knox and his students were posted on a Facebook page and later claimed by their owners.

Patty Bullion created the site hours after the tornadoes struck, when several photos and scraps of paper were found in her neighborhood in the northern Alabama town of Lester. She began posting the pictures on her site. More than 2,000 of those photos and documents eventually were claimed by their owners and returned to them. That gave the researchers a gold mine of raw data on which to build.

"I was very thankful that the page could be a help," Bullion said. "I never dreamed that it would send as many pictures home as it did and then help with research like that. God works in mysterious ways."

Bullion has since taken down the Facebook site. The items pictured there are highly personal, she said, and she didn't want them to be on Facebook forever.

The historic 2011 tornado outbreak in the South, combined with Bullion's social media effort, represented a unique opportunity for the new study, Knox said.

On April 27, 2011, more than 120 tornadoes caused more than 300 deaths across the South.

The items studied from the 2011 outbreak represent "just a small cross section of debris that just carpeted the Southeast," said Knox. "What was amazing was that there was so much debris that went so far."

An earlier study on tornado debris by Snow and his colleagues identified only two objects that had traveled more than 135 miles. By contrast, the Georgia study identified 44 items that traveled a comparable distance or farther.

The nearly 220 miles covered by the landscape photo sucked up by one of the Alabama tornadoes rivals the record path taken by a canceled check from Stockton, Kan., on April 11, 1991. The check was carried 223 miles from Kansas to a farm near Winnetoon, Neb., according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Robert Melcher, now 77, recalls finding the check while he repaired fences on his farm near Winnetoon. He returned it to the Kansas bank, and later received a letter from its owner, Ernestene Swaney, whose home near Stockton had been hit by a tornado. She thanked him and inquired whether he'd found any items from her collection of Elvis Presley memorabilia, Melcher said in an interview. The check was the only item he found.

In the Georgia study, Knox and his students categorized the items by weight. Among the heavier items, a Hackleburg Panthers cheerleading jacket flew from Hackleburg, Ala. to Elkmont, Ala., a distance of just over 66 miles.

Many of the items held deep significance to their owners, such as the metal sign that used to hang above the bleachers of the high school football stadium in Smithville, Miss.

The sign was a tribute to former Smithville marching band member Lee Frederick, who had died of bone cancer in 1998. It was found in Russellville, Ala. — about 50 miles away — a month after one of the tornadoes destroyed Smithville High's stadium and much of the town.

Knox said the response from his students, who became co-authors of the research paper, was phenomenal.

Knox said he sought to teach them how to conduct the research in a way that was ethical and sensitive to the victims since the tornadoes destroyed lives and homes.

"Hopefully that's a message that the students will take with them," he said. "In this case, we had people whose houses were destroyed and the family members killed and the only thing they may have gotten back was a picture of Grandma and Grandpa that went 150 miles into another state."

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

A man was arrested after posting photos on Facebook that showed him picking up a manatee.

By LiveScience staff

A man has been arrested in Florida after posting pictures on Facebook that showed him harassing a baby manatee, authorities announced this week.

The incriminating images show Ryan William Waterman, 21, and his two children petting a manatee calf at Taylor Creek in Fort Pierce last month, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). In one shot, Waterman is holding the calf partially out of the shallow water, and in another image, one of his young children is sitting on top of the animal as if riding it.

While the family's actions might look playful, biologists said such contact could be deadly for a manatee calf.

"This was a young manatee, which was likely still dependent on its mother for food and protection. Separating the two could have severe consequences for the calf," FWC manatee biologist Thomas Reinert said in a statement. [Photos: World's Cutest Baby Wild Animals]

"The calf also appeared to be experiencing manatee cold-stress syndrome, a condition that can lead to death in extreme cases," Reinert added. "Taking the calf out of the water may have worsened its situation."

Waterman faces charges under the Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act, which makes it illegal to molest, harass or disturb manatees, classified as an endangered species in the state. His offense also violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which makes it illegal to hunt or get up close to manatees as well as all other marine mammals, such as whales, seals and walruses.

These laws, however, have not prevented some recent close encounters in Florida, perhaps due to a lack of awareness. (Waterman, in fact, told local television station WPEC-TV that he meant no harm and didn't know it was illegal to touch a manatee.)

In December, a woman snapped pictures at Pompano Beach, on Florida's Atlantic coast, of swimmers who might have been trying to ride a sickly sperm whale. The 35-foot-long creature was reported to be flapping its tail at the time of the incident and eventually washed ashore dead.

And last October, a woman turned herself in after photos surfaced showing her riding a manatee at Florida's Fort DeSoto Park near Tampa. At the time, reports suggested she could have faced up to 60 days in jail and a possible fine of $500 for her crime.

There are estimated to be just 3,800 manatees in Florida, and each year, about 87 are killed by humans, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, most of them dying in boat collisions. Coastal development, which has altered and destroyed manatee habitat, also threatens the species.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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Allison Emmerson, University of Cincinnati

A tomb in Pompeii is covered in red graffiti. Wall scribblings were common all over the city, both on public buildings and private homes. Research presented in 2012 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America suggests tombs were no different.

By Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience

Think of it as the earliest version of the Facebook wall post: Ancient Pompeii residents revealed their social networks through graffiti on actual walls.

Now, a new analysis of some of these scribbled messages reveals the walls of the wealthy were highly sought after, especially for political candidates hoping to drum up votes. The findings suggest that Pompeii homeowners may have had some control over who got artistic on their walls, said study researcher Eeva-Maria Viitanen, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki.

"The current view is that any candidate could have chosen any location and have their ad painted on the wall. After looking at the contexts, this would not seem very likely," Viitanen told LiveScience. "The facades of the private houses and even the streetwalks in front of them were controlled and maintained by the owner of the house, and in that respect, the idea that the wall space could be appropriated by anyone who wanted to do it seems unlikely."

Ancient graffiti
Pompeii, which was famously destroyed and frozen in time by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, was a city of "avid scribblers," Viitanen told LiveScience. People scratched messages into the city's stucco walls or wrote them in charcoal. They copied literary quotes, wrote greetings to friends and made notes of sums. [ Images: The Lost City of Pompeii ]

Amid all these amateur " wall posts " were political campaign ads, most of which were done by professional painters, Viitanen said. It was these posts that she and her colleagues focused on, mapping out each message and noting its context. The researchers wanted to know where candidates put their messages — near bars and other high-traffic areas, or on the walls of private houses? And where did certain candidates focus their campaigns?

Pompeii's political ads
To narrow down the enormous amount of graffiti, the researchers focused on three regions of the city: two residential areas on opposite sides of town and one business district. There were more than 1,000 electoral messages scrawled on the walls in these regions, most dating from the last three centuries of Pompeii's existence.

Most of the messages are simple, containing just a name and the office the person was running for, Viitanen said.

"Sometimes there are some simple attributes such as 'a good man,' 'worthy of public office,'" she said. One candidate even bragged about his bread-baking abilities on his campaign-wall post, Viitanen said.

Other ads were sponsored by groups supporting a particular candidate, including such unsavory fraternities as pickpockets, late-night drinkers and petty thieves.

"Makes you wonder whether their candidates were really worth voting for!" Viitanen said.

Campaigning in Pompeii
The first find was that politicians wanted an audience. The campaign ads were almost invariably on heavily trafficked streets, Viitanen reported last Friday at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Seattle.

The second, more surprising, discovery, was that the most popular spots for ads were private houses rather than bars or shops that would see a lot of visitors.   

"Bars were probably more populated, but could their customers read and would they vote?" Viitanen said.

Some 40 percent of the ads were on prestigious houses, she said, which is notable because there were only a third as many lavish homes as there were bars, shops and more modest residences. Clearly, candidates were vying for space on the homes of the wealthy.

That discovery makes Viitanen and her colleagues think the ads reveal early social networking. It seems likely that candidates would need permission from the homeowner to paint their ads, suggesting the graffiti is something of an endorsement.

The research is preliminary and not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, and Viitanen said there is much more work to do to map the social networks revealed on the ancient walls.

"So far, we have barely scratched the surface on this," she said. "There are hundreds of texts and locations, and it takes a lot of time to go through them all."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook  and Google+.

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DigitalGlobe

An image from DigitalGlobe's WorldView 1 satellite shows Russia's Vostok Station in Antarctica, the site of a drilling operation that has just reached a subglacial freshwater lake. Lake Vostok may have lain undisturbed for 20 millions of years more than two miles beneath the surface, and thus could harbor living organisms unlike anything scientists have ever seen. The picture was taken on Feb. 8 from an altitude of 308 miles (496 kilometers).

The Russians say that drilling down to a 20 million-year-old lake in Antarctica, more than two miles beneath the surface, is the equivalent of putting an astronaut on the moon. If that's the case, this satellite photo from DigitalGlobe is the equivalent of watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin at work.

The photo of Russia's Vostok Station was taken on Wednesday, just a couple of days after Russian researchers reached Lake Vostok in a delicate drilling operation that's been in the works since 1989. Scientists believe the gigantic subglacial reservoir may contain microbes or other organisms unlike any we've seen so far. The achievement also sets the stage for even more ambitious drilling projects that could take place someday on Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter; or on Enceladus, a frozen Saturnian moon that spews forth geysers of water ice. Both those moons are thought to harbor huge subsurface oceans — and perhaps life as well.

The technological challenges involved in the drilling project, as well as the long-term implications raised by studying Lake Vostok, led the head of Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, Valery Lukin, to say that "it's fair to compare this project to flying to the moon."

When the folks at DigitalGlobe's analysis group heard the news from Vostok Station, they checked into whether one of their three satellite eyes in the sky got a good look at the operation. They weren't disappointed. WorldView 1, orbiting more than 300 miles above the planet, got a clear shot showing the drilling tower and other structures at the facility.

"This goes to our ability to see anywhere on Earth on a daily basis," Chuck Herring, a director in DigitalGlobe’s analysis center, told me today.

The sun is illuminating the scene from the bottom of the picture, which means Vostok's structures and vehicles cast shadows that stretch up toward the top of the frame. The biggest shadow is cast by the station's main residence and office building, just above center. The drilling tower casts a long, thin shadow with a flag on top, above and to the left of the main building.

The shadows arrayed below and to the right of center are probably the vehicles used for overland transport to the Antarctic coast, said Peter Doran, an expert on polar lakes at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "They have these amazing, large vehicles with tracks," Doran told me. "They remind me of something out of 'Mad Max.'"

The square-sided area near the very center of the picture is apparently a built-up berm, most likely part of a storage facility for supplies or ice cores.

DigitalGlobe

This wider version of the WorldView 1 picture of Vostok Station shows more of the Antarctic wasteland surrounding the facility. Compared with the close-up, this view is rotated roughly 65 degrees clockwise. The skiway on which supply planes land can be seen running diagonally from top center to lower left, while the ice road to Russia's Mirny Station on the coast runs from the settlement toward lower right.

Paul Morin, director of the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, said one of the most remarkable things about the picture is ... how unremarkable it looks. "Stations like this look very much the same," he said. "Vostok is one of the most remote places on Earth. These guys have done an amazing feat, drilling at this location."

Doran said it was reassuring to see that everything looked normal, considering all the worries that researchers had about the Vostok drilling operation. Some observers feared that once the drill reached the lake, there'd be an explosive upwelling of water from the reservoir. To get international approval for the operation, the Russians had to conduct a detailed engineering analysis demonstrating that they were proceeding safely and surely.

"Even with all the numbers, you just had to wonder whether they had it right," Doran said. Based on the DigitalGlobe imagery,"it's clear that nothing really unusual happened," he said.

Morin said the imagery from DigitalGlobe and other providers has made a huge difference for scientists studying Antarctica's forbidding frontier. "Before commercial imagery, we had better pictures of Mars than we had of Antarctica," he observed. Aerial imagery of Vostok Station will be particularly helpful for scientists on the outside. "We have to stay abreast of what all these stations look like, because occasionally we have to go there," Morin said.

DigitalGlobe's Herring said his company is building up "a tremendous amount of imagery" every day — five times as much as any other commercial satellite image provider. "Right now our raw imagery archive grows by two petabytes of data per year," he said. That's 2 quadrillion bytes of data, which is a big or a small number, depending on your perspective. It's more image data than all the pictures that are stored on Facebook, but just a tenth the amount of data processed by Google on a daily basis.

No matter how you see it, keeping track of 2 quadrillion bytes' worth of images is a challenging task, but Herring said DigitalGlobe is up to the challenge.  "Combining our constellation with the analysis center, we've seen a huge value, a tremendous amount of value for our customers," he said.

WorldView 1 and DigitalGlobe's other satellites will continue to keep watch on Vostok, "to monitor change and understand the facility, and validate what's said in the press about what's going on there," Herring said. For now, the Russians have closed up shop at the drilling site and hunkered down for the Antarctic winter. The researchers will return to their field work in a few months.

In the meantime, the Russians will have to lay out their plans to extract water samples from the lake itself. "If they're going to do that, they've got to write a new document that would be approved by an international body," Doran said. "They're not done. This was just the first pinprick."

Where in the Cosmos? Today's satellite picture of Vostok Station served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. Every week, we're serving up a mystery picture and asking Facebook fans to tell us what the picture shows. It took only four minutes for Martin Lynge of Nuuk, Greenland, to register the right answer — and as a reward, we're sending Martin a pair of 3-D glasses (courtesy of Microsoft Research) plus a 3-D picture of yours truly that will serve to scare the neighbors in Nuuk. To get in on next week's "Where in the Cosmos" contest, be sure to check out the Facebook page and hit the "like" button.

More fun with space pictures:

• Feb. 3: Moon craters and Mars colors
• Jan. 27: 3-D color map of the universe
• Jan. 20: Stephen Hawking's curios explained 

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.