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TOKYO (AP) — Japan's oldest person, 115-year-old Chiyono Hasegawa, has died.Hasegawa, who was born Nov. 20, 1896, died at a facility in southern Japan on Friday.

The facility where Hasegawa died confirmed her death, but declined to give further details. Japan's oldest person is now a man, 114-year-old Jirouemon Kimura, who was born April 19, 1897. Kimura is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest living man.

Besse Cooper of Monroe, Georgia, in the United States, is listed by Guinness as the world's oldest person, at 115. She was born Aug. 26, 1896.

Institute of Social and Economic Research, Ibadan, Prof. Femi Olokesusi, on Tuesday warned that two million Lagos residents risked being submerged by the Atlantic ocean.

Olokesusi said this in Ibadan while presenting a paper entitled, ‘Lagos: The Challenges and Opportunities of an emerging African mega city.’

The NISER chief said the catastrophe could only be stopped if proper environmental checks were carried out.

“As a coastal city, vulnerability will increase in intensity of storms and storm surges will exacerbate infrastructure problems,” he said at the July edition of the NISER seminar series.

Olokesusi, whose disclosure was from a UN-Habitat sponsored study which spanned five years of data collection (2005 to 2010), said flooding was among the major environmental problems which had persisted in Lagos in spite of government’s efforts.

He said while Lagos was gradually emerging as a mega city, there were still some challenges to be overcome before the city could claim the title.

On the challenges of environmental degradation and climate change, he said there was rapid land conversion in the city which had been taking place on more vulnerable land.

The land, he said, included flood-prone areas and coastal locations.

Olokesusi further said that the pre-historic ecology of the city had been tremendously modified and was now human-dominated.

Apart from this, he said pollution was a menace, adding that there was the urgent need to control this through the application of proper technologies.

“The second dimension is that of acquiring the technology and developing appropriate legal framework, institutions and human capacity to bring the pollutants to acceptable levels that conform to international standards,’’ Olokesusi said.

An 8.9-magnitude earthquake hit northern Japan on Friday, triggering tsunamis and sending a massive body of water filled with debris that included boats and houses inching toward highways.

The epicenter was 373 kilometers (231 miles) away from the capital, Tokyo, the United States Geological Survey said. But residents there felt the tremors.

The quake rattled buildings and toppled cars off bridges and into waters underneath. Waves of debris flowed like lava across farmland, pushing boats, houses and trailers toward highways.

In Tokyo, crowds gathered in the streets and tried to reach relatives via cell phone.
Scenes inside office buildings showed papers strewn all over the floor and people clinging onto seats and desks.

Such a large earthquake at such a shallow depth creates a lot of energy, said Shenza Chen of the U.S. Geological Survey.

It caused a power outage in about 4 million homes in Tokyo and surrounding areas.

A tsunami in the Pacific was moving closer to other shorelines in other countries, said CNN meteorologist Ivan Cabrera.

It triggered tsunami warnings for various countries, including Japan and Russia, the National Weather Service said.

"Earthquakes of this size are known to generate tsunamis potentially dangerous to coasts outside the source region," it said.

"Based on all available data a tsunami may have been generated by this earthquake that could be destructive on coastal areas even far from the epicenter."

The quake was the latest in a series in the region this week.

Early Thursday, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.3 struck off the coast of Honshu.

A day earlier, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck off of Honshu, the country's meteorological agency said.

The largest recorded quake took place in Chile on May 22, 1960, with a magnitude of 9.5, the USGS said.

Weeks after a story shot across the Web claiming that the imminent explosion of a nearby star would result in the appearance of a second sun in the sky — a story that was later debunked — two suns were caught on camera yesterday in China. The suns — one fuzzy and orange, the other a crisp yellow orb — appeared side-by-side, one slightly higher than the other.

What's going on? Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to Space.com, asked Jim Kaler, the University of Illinois astronomer who squelched the excitement over the aforementioned exploding Betelgeuse and who has written books on the day and night sky. The double sun image is an effect of optical refraction, Kaler said, but it's a "pretty darn rare" one, and one not fully explained by science.

"I doubt it's been computer modeled," he said. "There must have been some blob of atmosphere somewhere that caused this truly spectacular phenomenon, which in a sense is a mirage." [Amazing Sun Photos From Space]

Mirages appear when particles in the atmosphere refract, or bend, light. This typically happens near the horizon, where air is thicker, though, and mirages are usually aligned vertically above or below the original source of the light — not beside it, like in the video. It's possible, Kaler said, that an unusually thick patch of atmosphere wandered in front of the sun to create the unusual effect.

Previous sightings of horizontally-aligned double images of the sun and moon are recorded in a book called "Light and Color in the Outdoors" (English edition: Springer 1993) by the famous Flemish astronomer Marcel Minnaert, which remains the most complete reference on double suns. "So many other instances have been reported that there is no longer any doubt about ... observations of sun and mock sun(s) being at exactly the same altitude," Minnaert wrote.

"The case of a mock sun 3 degrees and 25 arc-seconds to the left of the nearly set sun sounds incredible but has been recorded photographically." Indeed, Minnaert's description sounds nearly identical to the scene in question.

He goes on to state that the double or multiple image phenomena are produced by abnormal refraction, but that "it remains extraordinary that the images of the sun and moon were sharp and of the same size as the real sun and moon."

To check whether more has been learned about the double sun effect since the time of Minnaert's writing, Life's Little Mysteries consulted several atmospheric optics experts. None of them had ever seen anything quite like the effect shown in the video.

"This is not a common optical phenomenon that we're seeing here," said Grant Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Satellite and Meteorological Studies. "I'm asking myself if this is an artifact of the lens, but if that were the case — if it's reflections of the lens elements — then the images would move in relation to each other as the camera moves," Perry said. "But that doesn't happen."

In terms of an optical explanation, he said, "You would have to assume it is particles of ice or something in the atmosphere aligned in such a way that they would refract the sunlight at that very small angle, but only in one direction. It would require some fairly peculiar characteristics."

Several related atmospheric optical effects are fully explained by science. Sun dogs, sunset mirages, sun pillars and sun halos are all relatively common and well understood. But not this effect.

"It's very intriguing," said Kaler.

Building work on a car designed to break the 1,000 mph (1609 kph) barrier has started.

The manufacturing of the Bloodhound SSC is a major milestone for the UK-based team behind it and formally marks the end of a painstaking design process led by chief engineer, Mark Chapman.

"The biggest challenge is keeping the car on the ground," Chapman said.

"We spent two-and-a-half years building up concepts and pretty much eight months ago we cracked the aerodynamic shape that is completely stable up to 1.3 mach (858 mph) and creates no lift."

It was "a real light bulb moment," Chapman says, and paved the way for detailed plans to be drawn up for the car's frame and interior.

The chassis consists of a carbon fiber composite front end, made by UK-based Advanced Composites Group, while the back half of the car has a steel lattice frame covered with an aluminum shell.

The Bloodhound SSC's slender frame -- nearly 13 meters long (41 feet), 1.5 meters wide and two meters tall -- will house three separate engines.

At the center of the car sits an 800 bhp Formula One engine built by UK-based engineering firm, Cosworth.

The engine will not only help power the car, it will also double up as an auxiliary power unit (APU) to fire up the other two engines -- a Eurojet EJ200 and a high-test peroxide-powered rocket.

Combined, the Bloodhound SSC will generate a mind-boggling 133,000 bhp -- the equivalent of over 1,200 family saloons or 160 Formula One cars, according to Chapman.

Unsurprisingly, the 6.4 ton car isn't the quickest out of the blocks and would be outpaced by a Bugatti Veyron -- the world's fastest road car -- in a drag race from 0-100 mph -- taking 15 seconds compared to the Veyron's seven.

But it's no contest after that, Chapman says, as the Bloodhound SSC goes from 100-1,000 mph in 25 seconds.

And at that speed, it really is a case of blink and you'll miss it, Chapman says.

"You could be sat in Wembley Stadium and the car would come in one end and out the other while you blinked," he said.

Wing Commander Andy Green will be driving the Bloodhound when the record attempt is made in late 2012 or early 2013.

Green is a hugely experienced British Royal Air Force pilot and was at the helm of Thrust SSC when it set the current land speed record of 763 mph (1228 kph) at Black Rock Desert, Nevada in 1997.

But 1,000 mph is a giant leap forward for everyone involved on the project.

"Thrust SSC was designed to do 850 mph and it managed 763 mph. We can predict pretty closely what will happen up to 800 mph but beyond that we don't know exactly what will happen," Chapman said.

"The biggest unknown is how the wheels damage or don't damage the surface of the desert because the only way to test it is to actually do it."

Chapman and team have spent two years scouting for a suitable location to carry out the record attempt -- traditional places where land speed records are broken simply aren't big or flat enough, he says.

They finally settled on the Hakskeen Pan Desert in South Africa which Chapman thinks should allow them the 10 miles of flat surface they need to complete a record attempt.

Building is expected to be completed within a year with the first runway tests getting underway in the spring of 2012.