Giant sinkholes appear across China

Dozens of sinkholes have emerged across in China in recent weeks, triggering fears of earthquakes.

Craters of different sizes have been seen in a vast area of land stretching across eastern and southern China's Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangsu and Guangxi province, state media reported.

In Ningxiang county in central Hunan Province, the toilet of a farmer's home collapsed, but nobody was injured, official Xinhua news agency reported.

Days earlier, a giant sinkhole swallowed up the entire playground of a primary school in the county.

Another hole with an 80m diameter opened up in the same county recently and families living nearby were soon evacuated from the dangerous areas.

Cheng Jie, a geological expert from the China University of Geoscience, said: "I think it is very unlikely that the sinkholes were caused by human activities. It is mainly a result of natural causes, like the sharp weather changes from extreme droughts to heavy rainstorms."

NASA Warns of 'space storm'

Yesterday, 06:20 am

Increasing solar activity could wreak havoc.The sun waking from a deep sleep may not sound like such a bad thing and years ago it might not have been.However in today's world reliant on technologyfor the basics of everyday life, increasing levels of solar activity and the flares from the consequent 'space storm' could wreak complete havoc.

Nasa is telling us to prepare for a once in a generation storm which could result in widespread blackouts and leave us without critical communication signals for considerable periods of time.

The overheating of national power grids, mass disruption of air travel and the complete shut down of electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites are just some of the consequences of the sun reaching its maximum power in only a few years time.

As well as this, the bolt of lightning caused by the super storm could bring disastrous consequences for the world emergency service systems, hospital equipment and of course would leave us without our computers, sat navs and ipods.

The worst case scenario would see large parts of the world plunged into darkness for months

Most likely say senior scientists it will last hours and maybe days but this in a world reliant on high tech systems for almost everything we do is likely to have a drastic impact.