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About 160,000 turkeys have been culled at a British factory farm, due to an outbreak of the deadliest form of bird flu H5N1.

This is the Asian flu that kills family clusters in places like Indonesia. It's molecular make up makes it identical to an outbreak that occurred in Hungary.

The turkeys were in a strictly controlled environment, housed in a large shed. Over a thousand died of the infection, which was confined to one shed. There's no known H5N1 infection in the wild bird population. Thousands of dead waterfowl were analysed before this happened and none had H5N1.

None of the experts has any idea how it could have happened. A small bird getting in through an air vent, infected faeces on a worker's boot, or infection of the feed have all been suggested, none of which seem plausible.

Any ideas?

BBC NEWS | UK | Experts hunt for bird flu source

From Wikipedia:

"At the centre of the black hole, well inside the event horizon, general relativity predicts a singularity, a place where the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite and gravitational forces become infinitely strong.

It is expected that future refinements or generalisations of general relativity (in particular quantum gravity) will change what is thought about the nature of black hole interiors. most theorists interpret the mathematical singularity of the equations as indicating that the current theory is not complete, and that new phenomena must come into play as one approaches the singularity."

It occurs to me that if the 'new phenomena' included the generation of a new force of nature that was similar to gravity, but much stronger than it, that might explain two conundrums at a stroke - quasar redshifts and the 'missing mass' in galaxies. Let's call this new force of nature 'Metagravity'. If the black hole at the centre of a quasar generates this much stronger type of gravity, it could provide an explanation for the redshift. It would be a combination of a gravitational redshift added to the redshift of recession.

The same force would also explain why galaxies rotate as they do, and there would be no need to invoke 'dark matter' as an explanation for this.

As greenhouse gases trap outgoing infrared radiation from the Earth's surface, there is less infrared radiation to warm the upper reaches of the atmosphere. This results in the paradoxical situation that, as the lower atmosphere (troposphere) warms, the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) cools. While we have seen an increase in global temperature of around 0.7C on the ground, the temperature in the stratosphere has decreased by 1-2C.

The tropopause is the layer in the sky where the troposphere becomes the stratosphere. It is a very real barrier caused by a temperature inversion and prevents air between the two regions from mixing freely. If you look up at high cumulus clouds, you will see that the top of the clouds flattens out at the tropopause, giving the clouds an 'anvil' shape.

As the troposphere warms, and the stratosphere cools, it is certain that the altitude of the tropopause will rise. Normally, this altitude is about 15km in tropical regions and about 8km in polar regions. As it rises, the temperature difference between ground level air and the tropopause will increase. This means that atmospheric covection throughout the world will become more vigorous. To this observer, the potential consequences, for an increase in the frequency and (more likely) the intensity of convection related weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes and temperate latitude storms is enormous, yet I have never come across any mention of it in the literature.
It may be something that has been overlooked.

I'm a layman with a lifelong interest in science and one of the subjects I'm particularly interested in is alternatives to Big Bang theory. I came up with a theory of my own some years ago and sent copies to around 30 cosmologists. However, the reaction I got was pretty lukewarm, probably because they were all 'committed' to the Big Bang, so I thought I'd condense it to the bare essentials and post it on an Internet science forum to see what kind of reaction I'd get Okay? Here goes.

In order to explain the acceleration of galaxies, scientists have invoked the existence of a mysterious 'dark energy'. This is because their thinking is constrained by their belief in an expanding universe caused by the 'Big Bang'. A less biased researcher might conclude that the galaxies are under the influence of the only known force of nature that could cause such acceleration - gravity. This would require the existence of a supermassive, non-luminous body in space (presumably a black hole) towards which all the galaxies in the observable universe were being drawn.

If such a body existed, it does not seem likely that it would be the only such body in the universe, just as the Milky Way is not the only galaxy. There might be billions of such supermassive bodies, each drawing billions of galaxies towards them. This would mean that that which we call 'the observable universe' is merely a finite system of galaxies among many such finite systems in the universe at large.

If such a model could explain other observations such as the observation that the galaxies are all moving away from each other, then would it not deserve to replace the increasingly baroque and untenable Big Bang theory which requires us to believe so many scientifically unorthodox and unproven assumptions about the universe? I believe it should.

A simple 'thought experiment' reveals how the 'Gravity Model' would result in almost all the observable galaxies being redshifted. In 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy was broken up into 22 discernible fragments up to 2km in diameter. The fragments were described as being like a 'string of pearls'. Imagine five of those 'pearls' in a line numbered 1 to 5 with 1 closest to Jupiter and 5 furthest away, with equal spacing between them. You, as the observer, are on number 3, the middle fragment. You have at your disposal, the most exquisitely sensitive scientific instruments capable of detecting minute differences in redshift, velocity and acceleration. You would see that the other four fragments were all redshifted. Fragments 2 and 4 would have the same value. The redshift values for fragments 1 and 5 would also be the same, but the value would be higher than that of 2 and 4. In other words, the farther away a fragment is, the greater its redshift. This is not because the space between them is expanding, but because of the differential influence of Jupiter's gravitational pull with regard to the proximity of the fragments. This increasing redshift with increasing distance is exactly what we see when we look at the galaxies. Your instruments would also tell you that the fragments were accelerating.

However, it could be argued that the galaxies are not a two dimensional string of pearls. This is true. But in whatever direction you look, the galaxy you are viewing will either be closer to or farther away from the 'Great Body' than your own galaxy, and so will appear redshifted. Nevertheless, this presents the Gravity Model with its greatest challenge. Big Bang theorists claim that the universe is isotropic. This means that galaxies at a given distance from the observer would all be moving at the same velocity away from him in every direction. However, this idea that the universe is isotropic is simply not true. Various research groups have found that the recessional velocity of galaxies with similar intrinsic luminosities varies according to the direction in the sky in which the galaxy is to be found. One study adjudged minimum values to be around two thirds of the maximum. One might have expected a greater discrepancy. It may be that galaxies which lie in the direction of the Milky Way's galactic plane, and are therefore not seen, could provide more extreme values.

Another observation which Big Bang theory cannot explain is the 'peculiar' motion of galaxies. In the Gravity Model, the galaxies will not simply be travelling towards the Great Body in a straight line. They will be spiralling towards it, and the 'peculiar' motion is the transverse component of their spiral path.

The CMBR. I have read that the 2.7K temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation could be caused by hydrogen clouds, but that astronomers have not been able to detect enough clouds to account for it. If the observable universe is a finite system, as it must be in the Gravity Model, then the question arises as to what lies beyond it. The answer must be that it is a hydrogen field, since galaxies cannot condense out of nothingness. This hydrogen field would envelop the observable universe and presumably radiates at 2.7K It will be the source of galaxies and astronomers have observed gigantic highly flattened 'pancakes' of hydrogen containing up to 10 to the power of 14 solar masses. These are believed to be the precursors of large clusters of galaxies.

I've been looking for a forum like this. I'm into most scientific subjects, particularly environmental science, biochemistry, cosmology, climate science, wildlife and palaeoarchaeology. I live about 20 miles south of Glasgow in Scotland, UK. Hope I can answer a few questions as well as pose some.