Environment

Researchers in China have discovered the world’s longest insect. A two-foot-long stick insect was found wriggling on a mountain road in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 2014 , according to state media. Xinhua reports: Zhao Li, with the Insect Museum of West China (IMWC) in Chengdu, found the 62.4-cm-long stick insect during a field inspection in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 2014, breaking the record for length for all 807,625 insects discovered so far, according to the IMWC. The previous record holder was a stick insect found in Malaysia in 2008.

The San Andreas fault is one of California's most dangerous. While the last big earthquake to strike the southern San Andreas was in 1857, as LA Times reports Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, explained this week "the springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight. And the southern San Andreas fault, in particular, looks like it’s locked, loaded and ready to go."

Have you noticed that the crust of the Earth is starting to become a lot more unstable? 

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of The Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

A leading earthquake scientist has said that the San Andreas fault in Southern California is ready to blow any day now. According to Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded and ready to roll”. Latimes.com reports: “The springs on the San Andreas system have been wound very, very tight. And the southern San Andreas fault, in particular, looks like it’s locked, loaded and ready to go,” Jordan said in the opening keynote talk. Other sections of the San Andreas fault also are far overdue for a big quake.

A nuclear waste leak in the U.S., which has become known as ‘Americas Fukushima’, has left 33 workers ill from exposure to radiation, as authorities scramble to clean up the facility at the Hanford Site in Washington state.  The leak was found back in 2011 on the inner hull of one of the site’s 28 double-wall storage tanks. Weather.com reports: The previous leak posed an insignificant threat, but workers came across an even larger leak in recent weeks while attempting to clear the inner hull of its remaining waste.