Famous Celebrities and Famous Adoptions

Many of us have a fascination with the well-known in the world of adoption and foster care: actors, entertainers, athletes, politicians, and others. The list below includes names in the adoption community that may be more recognizable to Americans, but this isn't the end of it.Here is the list of most famous celebrity adoptions

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt

The Hollywood superstars have six children, three of whom are adopted: Shiloh, Maddox and Pax. Are they planning on adding to their brood? The kids (see photos) get to see a lot of the world because their parents are often on set in far-flung locations – Jolie is now directing her first movie in an unlikely place.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman

When Cruise and Kidman were married – and it was a long marriage by Hollywood standards – they adopted Connor and Isabella. (See photos). But their parents split and formed new families, and the kids have a say in where they spend their time. Kidman’s comment.

Rosie O’Donnell

O’Donnell, who was known as the “Queen of Nice” for her daytime TV show, is passionate about adoption, and she has adopted three children: Parker, Chelsea and Blake. (See photos) O’Donnell, who announced that she is gay not long before she quit her show, also was married.

Sheryl Crow

Singer Sheryl Crow is adding another member to her family with the recent announcement of the adoption of her second son, Levi. The Grammy-winning star told fans that Levi James was born on April 30. Crow adopted her first son, Wyatt, in 2007 when he was just two weeks old

Elton John

Elton John fell in love with baby Lev, a child in an HIV-positive orphanage in Ukraine. Although his hopes for adoption were dashed, he's not giving up.

Father George Clements

Father George Clements received widespread attention when he became the first Roman Catholic priest to adopt a child. (How many did he ultimately adopt?) Father Clements went on to found an adoption program that currently operates in 32 states.

George Lucas

"Star Wars" creator George Lucas adopted his first child when he was married and adopted two more children as a single dad. Lucas is the founder of an educational foundation, which focuses on project-based learning as well as helping special needs children.

Joan Crawford

The eldest adopted daughter of Joan Crawford wrote a book about Crawford's parenting skills. Crawford adopted a total of four children. The agency handling her first adoption was later tied to a black market baby ring.

Madonna

Superstar Madonna adopted Malawian-born David Banda in 2006. In 2009, Madonna petitioned to adopt a second child from Malawi. Over the protests of the child's father, she was initially refused, but Madonna won on appeal and Mercy James joined the family in the spring of 2009.

Ben Stein

Through admitted selfishness on his part, Ben Stein never considered becoming a father. After adopting his only child, he wrote a book about fatherhood.

Lionel Richie

Three-year-old Nicole Richie moved in with Lionel Richie and his former wife when Nicole's biological father hit hard times. Richie officially adopted Nicole six years later.

Katherine Heigl

Katherine Heigl and her husband, Josh Kelley, adopted their first child, a baby with special needs from South Korea (photos). The former "Grey's Anatomy" star says she was inspired by her sister. Heigl says her own reaction to motherhood was stronger than anticipated.

Alex Kingston

Best known for her role as Dr. Elizabeth Corday on the hit show "ER," Alex Kingston experienced two failed adoptions. Does Kingston want to try the adoption route again?

Jamie Lee Curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis and husband Christopher Guest adopted two children, son Tom and daughter Annie. Curtis, an accomplished actor and children's book author, wrote a book about adoption from a child's point of view.

Sandra Bullock

Oscar winner Sandra Bullock brought home Louis Bardo in January and kept the adoption a secret. Ten days after the Oscars, Bullock and husband Jesse James separated (when did they divorce?).

Top 10 most powerful nuclear tests

The following list contains top most powerful nuclear tests conducted with a yield of over 10 Mt TNT by country and then by date. For more information on countries with nuclear weapons, see List of countries with nuclear weapons. For more information on nuclear weapon arsenals, see List of nuclear weapons.

01.Tsar Bomba

Tsar Bomba (Russian: Царь-бомба), literally "Tsar-bomb", is the nickname for the Van hydrogen bomb - the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.

Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT (420 PJ); however, the bomb yield was reduced to 50 Megatons in order to reduce nuclear fallout. Only one bomb of this type was ever built and it was tested on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.

Model of the "Tsar Bomba" in the Sarov atomic bomb museum.

02.Operation Castle

Castle Romeo was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of American nuclear tests. It was the first test of the TX-17 thermonuclear weapon (initially the "emergency capability" EC-17), the first deployed U.S. thermonuclear bomb.. (Read more)

Operation Castle was the highest-yield nuclear test series ever conducted by the United States.

Another view of the Castle Romeo mushroom cloud

03.Operation Dominic I and II

Operation Dominic was a series of 105 nuclear test explosions conducted in 1962 by the United States. Those conducted in the Pacific are sometimes called Dominic I. The blasts in Nevada are known as Dominic II. This test series was scheduled quickly, in order to respond in kind to the Soviet resumption of testing after the tacit 1958-1961 test moratorium. Most of these shots were conducted with free-fall bombs dropped from B-52 bomber aircraft.

nuclear weapon detonation for the test ARKANSAS during Operation Dominic in 1962. The bomb was dropped from a B-52 bomber

04.Operation Hardtack

Operation Hardtack I & II was a series of 72 nuclear tests conducted by theUnited States in 1958. Hardtack I was carried out in the Pacific Ocean, at Bikini Atoll, Enewetak Atoll, and Johnston Island.

Hardtack Oak mushroom cloud at Eniwetok

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Hardtack Socorro mushroom cloud at the Nevada Test Site.

An RB-57 Canberra observes Hardtack Juniper at Eniwetok

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Hardtack Umbrella, Shallow depth underwater shot near Eniwetok.

05.Operation Redwing

Operation Redwing was a United States series of 17 nuclear test detonations from May to July 1956. They were conducted at Bikini and Eniwetok atolls. The entire operation followed Operation Wigwamand preceded Operation Plumbbob.

Redwing Dakota

06.Ivy Mike

Ivy Mike was the codename given to the first United States nuclear test of a fusion device, in which a major part of the explosive yield came from nuclear fusion. It was detonated on November 1, 1952 by the United States (Read more)

The mushroom cloud from the Mike shot.

07.Castle Bravo

Castle Bravo was the code name given to the first U.S. test of a dry fuelthermonuclear hydrogen bomb device, detonated on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll,Marshall Islands, by the United States, as the first test of Operation Castle. (Read more)

Castle Bravo mushroom cloud.

08.Operation Plumbbob

Operation Plumbbob was a series of nuclear tests conducted between May 28 and October 7, 1957, at the Nevada Test Site, following Operation Redwing, and preceding Operation Hardtack I. It was the biggest, longest, and most controversial test series in the continental United States.One of the most controversial test series, release more radiation to continental U.S. than any series. Close proximity of troop exercises to shot "Smoky" produced significantly increased levels of leukemia among exposed soldiers. (Read more)

The "Smoky" shot of Operation Plumbbob

Shot "Priscilla" 37 kilotons. The 5th detonation and 3rd largest test of the Plumbbob series. Over 700 pigs were used in various nuclear effects studies during the test. The blast was felt strongly and heard as a sharp bang at the control point 14 miles away, shattering windows and blowing swinging door from hinges.

09.Trinity (nuclear test)

Trinity was the first test of an atomic weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico on the White Sands Proving Ground.Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium device. The weapon's codename was "The Gadget". Using the same conceptual design, the Fat Man device was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9. The Trinity detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT. The date is usually considered the beginning of the Atomic Age. (Read more)

The Trinity explosion, 0.016 seconds after detonation. The fireball is about 600 feet (200 m) wide. Trees may be seen as black objects in the foreground for comparison.

10.Operation Ranger

Operation Ranger was the fourth American nuclear test series. It was conducted in 1951 and was the first series to be carried out at the Nevada Test Site. All the bombs were exploded in the open air, having been dropped by B-50 bombers. (Read more)

Fox detonation of the Operation Ranger series

Top Ten Environmental Disasters

As the Gulf of Mexico oil spill shows much interest for everyone, its time to take a look back at history's greatest environmental tragedies.

Chernobyl

The worst nuclear power plant disaster in history. On April 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine exploded, resulting in a nuclear meltdown that sent massive amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, reportedly more than the fallout from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That radiation drifted westward, across what was then Soviet Russia, towards Europe. Since then, thousands of kids have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and an almost 20-mile area around the plant remains off limits. Reactor #4 has been sealed off in a large, concrete sarcophagus, which is slowly deteriorating. While the rest of the plant ceased operation in 2000, almost 4,000 workers still report there for various assignments.(Link)

Bhopal

Around midnight on Dec. 2, 1984, an accident at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India resulted in 45 tons of poisonous methyl isocyanate escaping from the facility. Thousands died within hours. More followed over the subsequent months, about 15,000 in all. In total, about half a million people were affected in some way. Those that survived suffered blindness, organ failure, and other awful bodily malfunctions. A shockingly high number of children in the area have been born with all manner of birth defects. In 1989, Union Carbide paid out about half a billion dollars to victims, an amount the afflicted say is not nearly enough to deal with the decades-long consequences. Bhopal remains the worst industrial disaster ever.(link)

Kuwaiti Oil Fires

Saddam Hussein knew the war was over. He could not have Kuwait, so he wasn't about to let anyone else benefit from its riches. As the 1991 Persian Gulf War drew to a close, Hussein sent men to blow up Kuwaiti oil wells. Approximately 600 were set ablaze, and the fires — literally towering infernos — burned for seven months. The Gulf was awash in poisonous smoke, soot, and ash. Black rain fell. Lakes of oil were created. As NASA wrote, "The sand and gravel on the land's surface combined with oil and soot to form a layer of hardened "tarcrete" over almost 5 percent of the country's area." Scores of livestock and other animals died from the oily mist, their lungs blackened by the liquid.(Link)

Love Canal

In 1978, Love Canal, located near Niagara Falls in upstate New York, was a nice little working-class enclave with hundreds of houses and a school. It just happened to sit atop 21,000 tons of toxic industrial waste, which had been buried underground in the 1940's and 50's by a local company. Over the years, the waste had begun to bubble up into backyards and cellars. By 1978, the problem was unavoidable, and hundreds of families sold their houses to the federal government and evacuated the area. The disaster led to the formation in 1980 of the Superfund program, which helps pay for the cleanup of toxic sites.(Link)

The Exxon Valdez

On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef in the pristine waters of Alaska's Prince William Sound. The first of what would turn out to be 10.8 million gallons of oil began to spew forth into the cold waters. It would eventually spread almost 500 miles from the original crash site and stain thousands of miles of coastline. Hundreds upon thousands of birds, fish, seals, otters, and other animals would perish as a result, despite the mobilization of more than 11,000 people and 1,000 boats as part of the clean-up. While the Exxon Valdez disaster is considered to be the largest man-made environmental disaster in U.S. history, the Gulf of Mexico spill may eventually surpass it in severity. (Link)

Tokaimura Nuclear Plant

On September 30, 1999, Japan's worst nuclear accident happened in a facility northeast of Tokyo. Three workers at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, then the center of Japanese nuclear power industry, improperly mixed a uranium solution. A blue flash heralded the trouble. As TIME wrote, "One [worker] was knocked unconscious. Within minutes, the others were nauseated, and their hands and faces were burned bright crimson." Two ended up dying, and hundreds more were exposed to various levels of radiation. (Link)

The Aral Sea

In early April, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon traveled to Central Asia, where he lay eyes upon a "graveyard of ships" — rusting fishing trawlers and other vessels stranded in a desert that stretched for miles in all directions. It was the Aral Sea...or what used to be the Aral Sea. Situated between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the Aral was once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, as big as Ireland. Since the 1960's however, when Soviet irrigation projects diverted several of its source waterways, the Aral has shrunk by 90%. What was once a vibrant, fish-stocked lake is now a massive desert that produces salt and sand storms that kill plant life and have negative effects on human and animal health for hundreds of miles around. Scores of large boats sit tilted in the sand — a tableau both sad and surreal.(Link)

Seveso Dioxin Cloud

On July 10, 1976, an explosion at a northern Italian chemical plant released a thick, white cloud of dioxin that quickly settled down on the town of Seveso, north of Milan. First, the animals began to die. As TIME wrote about a month after the incident, "One farmer saw his cat keel over, and when he went to pick up the body, the tail fell off. When authorities dug the cat up for examination two days later, said the farmer, all that was left was its skull." It was four days before people began to feel ill effects — including "nausea, blurred vision and, especially among children, the disfiguring sores of a skin disease known as chloracne" — and weeks before the town itself was evacuated. Residents eventually returned to the town, and today a large park sits above two giant tanks that hold the remains of hundreds of slaughtered animals, the destroyed factory, and the soil that received the largest doses of dioxin. (Link)

Minamata Disease

For years, residents of Minamata, a town located on Kyushu (Japan's most southwesterly island), had observed odd behavior among animals, particularly household cats. The felines would suddenly convulse and sometimes leap into the sea to their deaths — townspeople referred to the behavior as "cat dancing disease." In 1956, the first human patient of what soon became known as Minamata disease was identified. Symptoms included convulsions, slurred speech, loss of motor functions, and uncontrollable limb movements. Three years later, an investigation concluded that the affliction was a result of industrial poisoning of Minamata Bay by the Chisso Corporation, which had long been one of the port town's biggest employers. As a result of waste water pollution by the plastic manufacturer, large amounts of mercury and other heavy metals found their way into the fish and shellfish that comprised a large part of the local diet. Over the decades, thousands of residents have slowly suffered and died from the disease. It has taken as long for some to receive their due compensation from the corporation. (Link)

Three Mile Island

"Nuclear Nightmare" screamed the April 9, 1979 cover of TIME Magazine. On March 28, the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania partially melted down. Coming two weeks after the release of the Jane Fonda film The China Syndrome, Three Mile Island became the natural outlet for fears about the nuclear power industry. The ironic thing is, that while it has become known as one of America's worst nuclear incidents, nothing much really happened. No one died and the facility itself is still going strong. While the near meltdown is often cited as the reason that a new nuclear plant has not been built in America in the past thirty years, the industry had begun to slow down construction before Three Mile Island ever happened. (Link)

Source : http://www.time.com

Phenomenal Wonders Of The Natural World

The classical natural wonders are huge and hard to miss – vast canyons, giant mountains and the like. Many of the most fantastic natural phenomena, however, are also least easy to spot. Some are incredibly rare while others are located in hard-to-reach parts of the planet. From moving rocks to mammatus clouds and red tides to fire rainbows, here are seven of the most spectacular phenomenal wonders of the natural world.
Halo (optical phenomenon)

A halo also known as a nimbus, icebow or Gloriole) is an optical phenomenon produced by ice crystals creating colored or white arcs and spots in the sky. Many are near the sun or moon but others are elsewhere and even in the opposite part of the sky. They can also form around artificial lights in very cold weather when ice crystals called diamond dust are floating in the nearby air.

Sailing Stones

The mysterious moving stones of the packed-mud desert of Death Valley have been a center of scientific controversy for decades.Rocks weighing up to hundreds of pounds have been known to move up to hundreds of yards at a time. Some scientists have proposed that a combination of strong winds and surface ice account for these movements. However, this theory does not explain evidence of different rocks starting side by side and moving at different rates and in disparate directions. Moreover, the physics calculations do not fully support this theory as wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour would be needed to move some of the stones.

Aurora polar lights

Auroras, also known as northern and southern (polar) lights or aurorae are natural light displays in the sky, usually observed at night, particularly in the polar regions. They typically occur in the ionosphere. Aurorae occur deeper inside the polar regions, but these are infrequent occurrences, and these are often invisible to the naked eye.

Raining fish

Columnar Basalt

When a thick lava flow cools, it contracts vertically but cracks perpendicular to its directional flow with remarkable geometric regularity in most cases forming a regular grid of remarkable hexagonal extrusions that almost appear to be made by man. One of the most famous such examples is the Giant's Causeway on the coast of Ireland (shown above), though the largest and most widely recognized would be Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Basalt also forms different but equally fascinating ways when eruptions are exposed to air or water.

Blue Holes

Blue holes are giant and sudden drops in underwater elevation that get their name from the dark and foreboding blue tone they exhibit when viewed from above in relationship to surrounding waters. They can be hundreds of feet deep

and while divers are able to explore some of them they are largely devoid of oxygen that would support sea life due to poor water circulation - leaving them eerily empty. Some blue holes, however, contain ancient fossil remains that have been discovered, preserved in their depths.

Red Tides

Red tides are also known as algal blooms sudden influxes of massive amounts of colored single-cell algae that can convert entire areas of an ocean or beach into a blood red color. While some of these can be relatively harmless, others can be harbingers of deadly toxins that cause the deaths of fish, birds and marine mammals. In some cases, even humans have been harmed by red tides

though no human exposure are known to have been fatal. While they can be fatal, the constituent phytoplankton in ride tides are not harmful in small numbers.

Ice Circles

While many see these apparently perfect ice circles as worthy of conspiracy theorizing, scientists generally accept that they are formed by eddies in the water that spin a sizable piece of ice in a circular motion. As a result of this rotation other pieces of ice and flotsam wear relatively evenly at the edges of the ice until it slowly forms into an essentially ideal circle. Ice circles have been seen with diameters of over 500 feet and can also at times be found in clusters and groups of different sizes as shown above.

Mammatus Clouds

True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system. Typically composed primarily of ice, they can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction and individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. While they may appear foreboding they are merely the messengers appearing around, before or even after severe weather.

Fire Rainbows

A circumhorizontal fire rainbow arc occurs at a rare confluence of right time and right place for the sun and certain clouds. Crystals within the clouds refract light into the various visible waves of the spectrum but only if they are arrayed correctly relative to the ground below. Due to the rarity with which all of these events happen in conjunction with one another, there are relatively few remarkable photos of this phenomena.

Sinkholes

Sinkholes are one of the world's scariest natural phenomena. Over time, water erodes the soil under the planet's surface until in some cases, quite suddenly,

the land above gives way and collapses into the earth. Many sinkholes occur naturally while others are the result of human intervention. Displacing groundwater can open cavities while broken pipes can erode otherwise stable subterranean sediments. Urban sinkholes, up to hundreds of feet deep have formed and consumed parts of city blocks, sidewalks and even entire buildings.

Penitentes

Named after peak-hooded New Mexican monks (lower right above), penitentes are dazzling naturally-forming ice blades that stick up at sharp angles toward the sun. Rarely found except at high altitudes, they can grow up taller than a human and form in vast fields. As ice melts in particular patterns, 'valleys' formed by initial melts leave 'mountains' in their wake. Strangely, these formations ultimately slow the melting process as the peaks cast shadows on the deeper surfaces below and allow for winds to blow over the peaks, cooling them.

Lenticular Clouds

Ever wonder the truth about UFOs? Avoided by traditional pilots but loved by sailplane aviators, lenticular clouds are masses of cloud with strong internal uplift that can drive a motorless flyer to high elevations. Their shape is quite often mistaken for a mysterious flying object or the artificial cover for one. Generally, lenticular clouds are formed as wind speeds up while moving around a large land object such as a mountain.

Light Pillars

Light pillars appear as eerily upright luminous columns in the sky, beacons cast into the air above without an apparent source.these are visible when light reflects just right off of ice crystals from either the sun (as in the two top images above) or from artificial ground sources such as street or park lights. Despite their appearance as near-solid columns of light,the effect is entirely created by our own relative viewpoint.

Sundogs

Like light pillars, sundogs are the product of light passing through crystals. The particular shape and orientation of the crystals can have a drastic visual impact for the viewer, producing a longer tail and changing the range of colors one sees. The relative height of the sun in the sky shifts the distance the sundogs appear to be on either side of the sun. Varying climactic conditions on other planets in our solar system produce halos with up to four sundogs from those planets' perspectives. Sundogs have been speculated about and discussed since ancient times and written records describing the various attributes of our sun date back the Egyptians and Greeks.

Fire Whirls

Fire whirls (also known as fire devils or tornadoes) appear in or around raging fires when the right combination of climactic conditions is present. Fire whirls can be spawned by other natural events such as earthquakes and thunderstorms, and can be incredibly dangerous, in some cases spinning well out of the zone of a fire itself to cause devastation and death in a radius not even reached by heat or flame. Fire whirls have been known to be nearly a mile high,have wind speeds of over 100 miles per hour

and to last for 20 or more minutes.

Orange Moons

This last phenomena is something most people have seen before beautiful orange moon hanging low in the sky. But what causes this phenomena and, for that matter, does the moon have a color at all? When the moon appears lower on the horizon, rays of light bouncing off it have to pass through a great deal more of our atmosphere which slowly strips away everything but yellows, oranges and reds. The bottommost image above is true to the hues of the moon. but has enhanced colors to more clearly show the differences in shade

that illustrate the mixed topography and mineralogy that tell the story of the moon's surface. Looking at the colors in combination with the craters one can start to trace the history of impacts and consequent material movements across the face of our mysterious moon.