Telescopes aren't supposed to
explode.
Super-Kamiokande has been severely damaged by a chain reaction from an
exploding photo-multiplier tube.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Telescopes aren't supposed to
explode.
Super-Kamiokande has been severely damaged by a chain reaction from an
exploding photo-multiplier tube.
Commenting on the disaster the director of the observatory, Yoji Totsuka, said: "As a director of the Kamioka Observatory, which owns and is responsible to operate and maintain the Super-Kamiokande detector, it is really sad that I have to announce the severe accident that occurred on 12 November and damaged the significant part of the detector."He added: "We will rebuild the detector. There is no question."
This timetable of
new
Bush security measures is a little too close to the bone
to be funny, alas.
A variant
hemoglobin
gene called HbC confers resistance to malaria without
causing other medical problems:
The results suggest that having one copy of the HbC gene makes you 29 per cent less likely to get malaria, while receiving a copy from both parents cuts your risk by a whopping 93 per cent.The researchers estimate that 1/5 of the population of Burkina Fasso has at least one copy of the gene.The mutation does not stop you being infected with plasmodium, the single-celled parasite that causes malaria. Rather, HbC stops the parasite from gaining enough of a hold to cause any symptoms.
Despite carefully slanted headlines to the contrary, Jacob Weisberg
explains how
Gore would have won an
honest recount, conducted by the standards of Florida law.
[via rc3.org]
Another fine Jon Carroll
column
on current politics:
Class analysis has been out of favor for some decades, but it's amazing what a useful tool it has become. People with bodyguards are urging people without bodyguards not to give in to terror.
Chinese archeologists claim to have found
stone
tools in a 2-million-year-old site in China. According to People's
Daily
Xie Fei, a research fellow with the Hebei Provincial Relics Research Institute, said that the latest discovery at the Majuangou ruins in the Nihewan Basin proves that the date of the early stage human activities in east Asia is very close to the time of similar ruins discovered in Africa.Xie, who has conducted archaeological research at Nihewan for 18 years, said that it is a question that deserves discussion among international archaeological circles: whether human beings migrated to east Asia at a fast speed at an early stage, or there was another origin place of man in the world.
Palaeoanthropology materials so far available show that the humans originated from Africa, and the earliest Old Stone Age ruins so far unearthed in the world are located in Ethiopia, dating back some 2.33 million years.
The next question, if this holds up, is whether our ancestors in Africa mixed with the one's at this Asian site.
Does bin Laden
claim
to have nuclear weapons? It depends on whether you read Urdu or
English, apparently.
[via Ethel
the Blog]
The headline implies medical concerns, but the real questions are
ethical: Americans are going to China for
organ
transplants, many taken from executed prisoners.
Slight
discrepancies between theory and experiment when
firing
neutrinos at atomic nuclei may indicate a flaw in the Standard Model
of particle physics, or even a new force. (There's also
about a 1-in-400 probability that the difference in the results is due to chance.)
Fresh wasabi is available
online from an Oregon company called Pacific Farms, which asserts
that almost all the "wasabi" you're likely to meet, even in a good
restaurant, is artificially colored horseradish-and-mustard. That's
enough to make me curious, but leaves me with no idea of whether
I'd like the real thing. The minimum order is half a pound of the
fresh root, for $40.55 including "materials and shipping," or half a
pound of wasabi paste (contains sugar), for slightly less. Maybe not.
After Jane Marla Robbins's
house
burned down, both friends and strangers made some odd comments. She's
still trying to figure out what comes next, but does not feel
lucky to get rid of everything she owned, as some people told her.
A neurologist estimates that
3 percent
of the population has Tourette's syndrome, mostly in much
milder form than is generally associated with the disease.
While tics like barking obscenities or jerking one’s head are easy to spot, there are a slew of other repetitive and involuntary movements or vocalizations--tics--that are usually overlooked by family, friends and co-workers as strange or annoying habits, Kurlan says. Common tics include rapid eye-blinking, scrunching up one’s nose, little jerks of the head, facial twitches, or even constant sniffing or clearing one’s throat repeatedly.
Forgetting the past?:
"US
Will Increase Number of Advisers in Afghanistan".
NY1 news has a
live
Webcam watching the WTC site. Easier on the eyes and lungs than walking
down Broadway, and probably a better view.
Transplantable cells can be
kept alive
for a few days just by drying them and vacuum-sealing them.
This technique is hardly perfect: after three days, a third of the
skin cells started growing when rehydrated at room temperature, and
after five days, it was down to one-tenth, but nobody, including the
people who stumbled on this method, expected any success.
Possibly the funkiest 404
page on the Web: a Java implementation of Zork. [via
BoingBoing]
This calm,
realistic discussion of the likelihood of terrorists using
biological or chemical warfare--low--includes advice on what to
do if you're actually exposed. The main advice is don't panic,
and get away from the area, walking upwind. [via the muted horn]
--David Trimble
The IRA has begun decommissioning its weapons.
Un-American fund-raising: Jerry Falwell, after reluctantly apologizing
for blaming the Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on liberals,
feminists, and gays, is now using those remarks in a letter
asking
for money. His son claims it's Satan's fault that Falwell had
to apologize for blaming the victims. What
happened to taking responsibility for your statements?
[via Metafilter]
For the first time, astronomers have detected a
bright
glow around a black hole.
The glow is probably not a sign of radiation seeping out, a process scientists still contend is impossible. Instead, it may be caused by a bizarre kind of friction that the black hole, thought to be spinning at nearly the speed of light, feels against surrounding gases, heating them to tremendous temperatures.[free registration required, or use cpunks/cpunks to log in]That friction may be a result of magnetic fields, stuck to the event horizon like hair, whipping through the gases, said Dr. Mitchell C. Begelman, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado who is among the leaders of the new research, which involves American and European astronomers.
"What seems to be happening is that there's an extra energy source very, very close to the black hole, which is a big surprise," Dr. Begelman said. The magnetic fields, Dr. Begelman said, "are sort of applying a clutch to the black hole and slowing it down."
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.