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Woods Hole scientists and citizen volunteers have detected the first traces of cesium-134 and -137 from the 2011 Fukushima disaster on the shores of North America. The concentrations are too low to worry about healthwise (unless you’re that impossible-to-pinpoint incredibly unlucky surfer dude whose gonads are rail banged by those gamma rays–when you’re stochasticallyGinkgo has […] Physicist Ken Ford’s new memoir about helping to build the first H-bomb is a heart-rending story of youthful naiveté placed in the service of mass destruction. Describing himself as “interested in square dancing, cars, and girls (as we called them then) as well as physics,” Ford recalls believing as a 24-year-old student that “the world […] The fourth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear power disaster was marked by an announcement from the plant’s operator of another massive leak of highly radioactive water into the ground. It is obvious by now that there will be no end to this, that the site is a permanent wound on a small country’s coastline that […] A remarkable new highway sign graces the recently completed Joban Expressway in Japan, which connects Tokyo and coastal regions near Fukushima. Instead of giving drivers information about traffic or weather, it tells them how much radiation they’re being exposed to as they pass through areas that will be unliveably hot for the foreseeable future. The […] There is no rational explanation for why American intelligence services continue to tout “lie-detector” polygraph exams for employee screening, despite broad scientific consensus that they are worthless. Intimidation of the ignorant is their primary impact, perhaps along with maintaining a docile workforce, neither of which has anything to do with national security. The myth of […] The Washington Post‘s rather hook-line-and-sinker feature about a Dutch entrepreneur’s “plan” for a one-way trip to Mars in 2024 is one more piece of evidence of the damage that people with more money than they know what to do with can inflict on the rest of us (or at least on the 202,583Healthy lifestyle means […] Security clearance holders now number about 4.6 million people, a drop of 10 percent from last year’s tally of 5.15 million, according to new White House budget documents (see page 51). Even if you subtract a couple of million who automatically get low-level clearances just for joining the military services, this is still a lot […] The death this week of physicist Charles Townes at the age of 99 casts fading light on the generation of technologists whose sensibilities about science and society were infused with Cold War militarism. Townes will be remembered for his seminal research on lasers when he was young, but his long career was just as notable […] |