Earth Science:

Video footage and a NASA press release describing how NASA technologies are being deployed to help track the spread of West Nile Virus received wide play on national cable and local stations across the country.

Dr. Robert Venezia completed 20 live television interviews Tuesday morning, which began with a strong interview with the CNN Tech section and ended up with six interviews in the top-10 U.S. markets. CNN later aired a two-minutes long package for their 1 p.m. show and repeated it frequently throughout the day on its primary channel and Headline News.

A total of 175 stories were broadcast up in the top 200 markets for an estimated viewing audience of 12 million.
CNN's Web Page: http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/10/08/WestNile/index.html.

Space Science:
Spaceflight now.com featured an article about the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, which was detected by NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE) satellite then observed by scientists with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory on Oct 4.

Technology:
A new hand-held device that may allow police investigators to instantly confirm whether a suspect has recently fired a gun was a featured article filed by the UPI wire service. Jacob Trombka, a physicist at Goddard, is quoted in the article explaining how the device will use x-ray fluorescence. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry can identify chemical elements in a substance by measuring the wavelengths it emits when exposed to X-rays. A handheld forensic tool could work along similar lines, taking X-ray fluorescence readings at the scene of a crime and beaming them to a computer for instant analysis.