An infestation of hemlock trees in the state of Ohio has led the state's agriculture officials to cut down and burn invested trees. An aphid-like insect native to Asian known as the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid currently threatens eastern hemlock and Carolina hemlock in the eastern United States, and the infestation has spread to 16 states from Maine to Georgia.

The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid was first spotted in the U.S. in 1951. It was discovered in Ohio in January 2012, and at the time just five trees were infected. The state is trying to prevent it from spreading.

The Adelgid attacks of the base of the needles at the tips of branches. Systemic insecticides are applied to protect tens of thousands of hemlocks annually.

There are now 24 universities, seven institutions in both China and Japan, 20 state agencies, four federal agencies, and nine private organizations involved in the effort to combat the bugs.

Photo: An infected hemlock tree.

A wetter-than-normal fall has left Ohio's farmers with stockpiles of manure left over because the weather made fertilizing difficult. As a result, the state's streams are now at risk of pollution.

The concern is that farmers who were unable to spread the manure on their fields in the fall, when record rains fell, will now spread it over frozen, snow-covered fields this winter. Spreading the manure on the frozen ground could mean that the animal waste could be easily be washed into waterways during a quick thaw or rainstorm.

Runoff of the manure would threaten fish, and contains phosphorous that feeds the toxic, blue-green algae found on Ohio lakes, including Lake Erie and Grand Lake St. Marys, Ohio's largest inland lake. Algae blooms not only threaten health, but also the state's fishing and tourism industries.

Ohio's farm animals produce more than 17 million tons of manure annually. According to Ohio EPA records, in 2011, Ohio experienced 39 manure spills into streams. Four of those were during the winter months.

Kevin Elder, head of Ohio's Livestock Environmental Permitting Program, says that he believes the state got a lucky break. He said that the relatively warm weather over the past two weeks gave Ohio's large "megafarms" the chance to put a lot of their manure onto fields.

On Thursday morning, a strong earthquake struck near the Japanese nuclear power plant that was badly damaged by a devastating tsunami earlier this year.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a magnitude 5.9 quake struck just before 4:30am local time about 62 miles east of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant and 151 miles northeast of Tokyo. It struck at a depth of 23 miles.

No immediate reports of damage or injuries were made, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not immediately issue a tsunami alert.

Since the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami on March 11 which left more than 20,000 people dead or missing, similar quakes have struck the region. The tsunami also kicked off a nuclear crisis when it the Fukushima plant was heavily damaged and forced about 100,000 to evacuate their homes. They still do not know when they can return.

As my brother-in-law Craig Andrews and I sailed his boat from Rocky River to Vermilion for its annual winter storage last Saturday, we witnessed up close and personal the algae that threaten Lake Erie.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Lorain I noticed the prop of a speedboat ahead of us kicking up a green spray. I’ve seen white spray, but never green spray. I glanced down at the water we were plowing through and was startled. I blinked. I shook my head. I looked away and looked back at the water. Was this a mirage or an optical illusion? We were sailing through kelly green water.

Wait a minute. I looked closer. We were immersed in algae. We were two miles from shore in water 35 feet deep and we were in solid algae. The long tentacles of the plants shimmered just below the surface. The visual effect was much like the aurora borealis.

I was concerned that the algae would clog our propeller. We were under both sail and engine making about six knots. But it was no problem for us. It is not good for the fish, however. The algae sucks the oxygen out of the water.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), a 4.5-magnitude earthquake rattled Virginia early Thursday morning, just two days after 5.8-magnitude earthquake shook a wide area of the eastern U.S.

The quake struck just before 1:10am at a depth of 3.1 miles, just south of Cuckoo, Virginia, located about 36 miles northwest of Richmond. This was the strongest aftershock registered since the major earthquake that struck on Tuesday.

Tuesday's quake forced at least partial evacuations of the U.S. Capitol building and White House in Washington D.C., as well as the Pentagon in Virginia.

An out-of-control wildfire is New Mexico is raging worryingly close to the perimeter of the country's largest nuclear weapons facility. Firefighters are working hard to keep the Las Conchas fire away from sensative areas at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and so far lab officials say that the fire does not pose an immediate threat to the hazardous materials stored there.

Since Sunday, the fire has charred about 61,000 acres of land, and is just three percent contained. Douglas Tucker, the Los Alamos County Fire Chief, says that it could easily grow to 100,000 acres.

The birthplace of the atomic bomb, the Los Alamos laboratory has thousands of drums of plutonium-contaminated wasted stored outdoors. Authorities have increased efforts to protect the site from flames, as well as monitor the air for radiation.

Officials say that the materials were safely stored and are capable of withstanding flames from the fire, which was as close as 50 feet from the grounds as of midday.

On Monday, a small patch of ground on the lab grounds caught fire but was quickly put out by firefighters. Teams are on high alert to quickly put out any new fires, and spent much of Tuesday removing brush and low-hanging tree limbs from the perimeter of the lab.

On Tuesday it was discovered that tons of radioactive water had leaked into the ground from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. This is just the latest in a series of leaks at the plant that was severely damaged by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami in March 2011.

Authorities are still struggling to bring the damaged reactors at the power plant, located 150 miles north of Tokyo, three months after the natural disasters.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that about 15 metric tones of water with low level radiation leaked from a storage tank at the plant. Large amounts of water contaminated by varying levels of radiation have been accumulating in storage tanks at the plant after having been used to cool reactors that were damaged when their cooling systems were knocked out in March.

TEPCO has had a major problem in dealing with the radioactive water, and is currently trying to use a decontamination system to clean the water so that it can be reused to cool the reactors. However, the decontamination system has had some glitches. Officials have said that the water could spill into the Pacific Ocean if the system is not working properly.

According to some preliminary data, the atmosphere above the epicenter of Japan's March 11 earthquake underwent some very unusual changes in the days leading up to the disaster. While the research hasn't yet been published in an academic journal or been reviewed by other scientists, it may offer an interesting possibility for earthquake prediction.

Research Dimitar Ouzounov, a professor of earth sciences at Chapman University in California, emphasizes, however, that the day scientists are able to forecast earthquakes is still "far away."

Looking to the sky to predict earthquakes is nothing new. The theory, which is known as "Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling mechanism" theorizes that prior to an earthquake, the stressed fault releases more gases, especially the colorless, odorless radon gas. Once this gas is in the upper-atmosphere ionosphere, the radon gas strips air molecules of their electrons, splitting them into negatively charged particles and positively charged particles. The charged particles, which are known as ions, attract condensed water in a process that releases heat. Scientists can detect this heat in the form of infrared radiation.

Using satellite data, Ouzounov looked at what the atmosphere was doing in the days leading up to the devastating Japanese earthquake. He found that electrons in the ionosphere and infrared radiation increased in the days leading up to the earthquake.

According to the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, which was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami last month, radiation measuring several million times the legal limit has leaked into the ocean over the past few days.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. revealed on Tuesday that samples taken from seawater on April 2 near one of the reactors contained 7.5 million times the legal limit for radioactive iodine. On April 4, the figure fell to 5 million.

These readings were taken closer than before to where contaminated water has leaked. TEP says that this does not necessarily reflect a worsening of recent contamination, and that other measurements taken several hundred yards away have declined to levels about 1,000 times the limit allowable by law.

Experts have said that the radiation would dissipate quickly in the ocean, but have also noted that it is unclear what the effects of the large amounts of contamination would be.