In 1946, Hermann Muller won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the ability to x-rays (and therefore other forms of ionizing radiation) to cause mutations in living cells. There is no doubt that Muller’s discovery was profound and vital to understanding radiation’s effects on living things and to establishing the field of health physics and radiation protection. The fact that radiation could cause mutations also had important implications to the understanding of cell biology and genetics.

Muller was also an early proponent in the establishment of the linear non-threshold hypothesis for radiation exposure. Despite a lack of conclusive supporting evidence, LNT has become the mainstay for radiation policy and is accepted as fact by many government agencies. The simplistic model basically states that radiation always causes damage with the potential for cancer and that the increase in risk is directly proportional to the exposure level. Thus, there is no “safe” level and all radiation should be avoided when possible, though the danger is small if the exposure is small.

Despite the fact that, even by LNT predictions, the level of exposure from living near a nuclear power plant presents a miniscule increase in risk (less than living next to a coal burner), the model has been used very effectively to argue that nuclear energy is always unacceptable, because the tiny amounts of radiation involved still present a risk. (Don’t ask me how they can make the case that nuclear is worse than coal or gas, or for that matter, having a granite counter top which involve more exposure. I still can’t figure that out.) The model has also resulted in extreme fear of medical radiation, resulting in calls for limiting of potentially life saving imaging and cancer treatment procedures.

While it has always been known that Muller did not have conclusive evidence to prove his claims of an LNT dose-risk relationship, evidence now indicates he may have had evidence that actually refuted it.

Via UMass Amherst News and Information:

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Every once in a while I read a story about some technology or discovery that the writer seems to think is new or some kind of breakthrough. This is one of those cases.

Here’s the video that started this all:

And in this case, the same story has gotten a huge amount of coverage, up to 174 articles on Google News as of this posting.

Via News.com.au:

Back up: The future’s close – and it’s really cool
WE could be hooning on Marty McFly-like hoverboards sooner than we thought.

It’s called “quantum trapping” or “quantum levitation” – and it’s real.

This footage shows a magnet, cooled with liquid nitrogen and locked into space.

The display was made by scientist from Tel Aviv at a conference in the US.

Watch as the magnet hovers in place – giving hope to fans of the hit Back to the Future films.

Okay, stepping back for a second. Yes, this is really cool, both figuratively and literally. But it’s not anything new. It’s a great science demonstration that would put any middleschooler in the running for first place at the local science fair, but it’s not new and it’s not groundbreaking.

What is shown here is a superconductor. Superconductors have been around since 1911. They have electrical resistance of zero and this results in some other interesting properties. The first superconductors discovered only displayed the property of superconductivity at extremely low temperatures, requiring liquid helium to get down close to absolute zero.

Type II superconductors, the type which manifest this effect, were discovered in 1954. The effect directly was observed shortly thereafter.

In the 1980’s, “high temperature superconductors” were developed. These still require cooling well bellow normal ambient temperatures, but they can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, rather than liquid helium. The temperatures are much more manageable and some of these materials can even be briefly touched without injury, as shown in the video, although the superconductor itself is probably surrounded by insulation, thus making the surface less warmer than the actual superconducting material.

What is actually being shown is known as the Meisner effect, combined with flux pinning, which it found in Type-II superconductors. Without getting too deeply into it, placing it in the field sets up currents in the superconductor which oppose the field. At the same time, flux pinning causes the magnetic field to become entrapped in the superconductor due to tiny defects in the material. The net result is the superconductor physically resisting reorientation in the field and thus levitating. Flux pinning was the subject of much study involving superconductors in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

More info here. and here.

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A cautionary tale of how medicine can become far too accepting of a procedure of limited value and great potential for harm…

First, some background on the lobotomy:

The lobotomy may well be the most notorious and misunderstood medical procedure ever to have been developed.   It’s the butt of many jokes and is portrayed widely in the media as a savage operation preformed on those who were unruly as a means of turning them into dribbling vegetables, incapable of resisting and placid in all respects.  This is partially true, but is an overly simplistic portrayal of what the lobotomy really was and how it was used.

To understand the use of the lobotomy one must first realize the environment it was developed in.  Prior to the mid 20th century, there was very little that could be done for the severely mentally ill. Psychotherapy existed and was useful in helping those with problems like anxiety, phobias and depression better manage their symptoms, but this could do little for the truly insane. For those who suffered from severe delusions, violent episodes, severe depression with suicidal tendencies, extreme bipolarism, there was no effective therapy.

Such individuals were placed in mental institutions, where they were often forced to live the entirety of their lives.   Often miserable places, institutions provided little more than warehousing for many individuals.   Mental institutions were enormous, becoming huge communities onto themselves.  Attempts were made to make life more pleasant by providing  classes and recreation, but the enormous expense of caring for the populations made that difficult to do on a large scale.   The worst cases were often left restrained or locked in padded cells.  With so many completely crippled by mental disease, conditions could easily degrade to the point where wards became filthy and filled with the screams of insane patients.

The origins of psycosurgury can be traced back to the 1880’s, when Gottlieb Burckhardt, a Swiss neurosurgeon began to experiment with operations on the brains of the most severely insane. Small sections of brain were removed in the hope that it might calm the continual mania of the patients operated on. The results were not encouraging, but research continued into the 20th century. It was known that traumatic brain injury, brain tumors or their removal could alter a person’s personality, but only the most basic understanding of the regions of the brain associated with various aspects of thought and emotion existed.

The lobotomy was developed in 1935 by Portuguese doctor António Egas Moniz, who intitially called the procedure the leukotomy. Moniz had become aware of experiments carried out on apes in which portions of the brain were intentionally removed or disconnected. Operations that removed the frontal lobes had a major effect on the learning capacity of the animals, but also made them more placid and less prone to expressions of frustration and emotional outbursts. He believed that doing so on humans might allow those with the most violent psychiatric episodes to lead more normal lives, or at least be more manageable. Early experiments involved injecting alcohol into the nerves that connected the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. This was later replaced by simply cutting the connections.

The belief at the time was that mental illness was caused by areas of the brain becoming too active or the brain being overstimulated and going haywire with out of control signals. It was thought that there was simply too much emotional activity that that cutting away the overly active portions of the brain would relieve this. While this belief is not always entirely false, it’s overly simplistic and does not apply to most cases of mental illness.  While there are portions of the brain that are associated with certain functions or aspects of personality, it is far too complex for a single region to be defined as the source of something like delusions, violent episodes or depression.

Still, the procedure did appear to have some validity. Many of those who received the operation did indeed become calmer and more easy to manage. Contrary to popular belief, it did not necessarily render the individual incapable of speech or basic function, although this did sometimes happen. It seems that overall, the results were highly variable. This is likely attributable to the simplicity and crudeness of the surgery. It involved drilling holes in the head of patients and cutting the pathways by inserting instruments. Exactly what kind of effects this had on the brain could vary quite a bit, especially since the individuals it was preformed on had all manner of conditions to begin with.

Early observations considered the outcome of the procedure to be result in a 33% to 33% to 33% success rate. In other words, roughly one third of patients could be considered to have improved from the operation. One third could be considered to be worse than before the operation and one third were roughly the same. This is hardly a stellar success rate, but given the lack of options for the worst cases of mental disease, it may have seemed worth the risk. There certainly were a few cases of individuals who seemed to gain extensive relief with few complications, but these were relatively rare.

A few individuals died during the procedure.  Others were left completely incapacitated and severely disabled.  Many, however, did retain their basic abilities to communicate and do simple tasks.   Some lost the ability to walk or talk but subsequently relearned it.   A number of reports indicated that the patients became very child-like and lost the ability to comprehend complex concepts.  Lack of emotional responses or social capacity was also reported.   Another effect was the loss of inhibitions.  Many seemed to have no fear or anxiety, even in circumstances where it would be appropriate.  Apathy and social disconnection were common.  Many patients began to overeat and put on large amounts of weight.  Some developed complications ranging from incontinence to lack of balance to sleep disorders.

The psychiatric community accepted the procedure with varying levels of enthusiasm. It gained rapid acceptance across the world, but many remained uneasy about the implications and ethical considerations. It was used primarily on the worst of the worst cases, at least initially. Directors of mental hospitals welcomed anything that could make it easier to manage their overcrowded wards, resulting in an expansion of use that raised questions about whether it was really being used as a last resort. Overall, the procedure was never without controversy, but given the lack of alternatives, it often was considered about the only thing that could be done to at least try to relieve severe mental illness.

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As most here probably know, Dr. Jack Kevorkian died this year at age 83.   Dr. Kevorkian become famous for his championing of doctor assisted suicide in the United States, where doing so is illegal in most jurisdictions.  Kevorkian is known to have assisted in the suicide of at least 130 persons.   His advocacy for doctor-assisted suicide began in the early 1980’s and the first suicide which he publicly acknowledged participating in was in 1990.

Kevorkian was most prolific in his activities between 1991 and 1998.  During that time he traveled around the United States aiding individuals in taking their own lives.   Kevorkian designed the equipment used, which included an IV drug machine and a carbon monoxide respirator.   He attached patients to the machines but did not take the final step of pushing the plunger or opening the valve.  That was done by the patients, and to some extent, insulated him from being easily prosecuted.   Still, he was in and out of court many times during the 1990’s.   He lost his license to practice medicine and was repeatedly ordered to stop his activities.

Kevorkian loved the attention that the controversy generated.   His court dates became media circuses and he never passed up an interview.  Kevorkian would always say that he was fighting for the right of a person to control their own destiny, die with dignity and relieve their own suffering.   However, many of his antics were not exactly dignified.

In 1998, Kevorkian appeared on the news program 60 Minutes and showed a videotape of the assisted suicide of Thomas Youk, a 52 year old ALS sufferer.   Youk expressed his desire to die and gave his full consent to the procedure to end his life.   In this video Kevorkian did something he had never publicly admitted to before, he pushed the plunger that delivered the lethal drugs himself.   Kevorkian also directly dared authorities to convict him of murder for his actions.   This time he bluffed a bit too hard.  They did and he was sentenced to ten to twenty five years in prison.  Kevorkian was finally paroled in 2007.   Since then he spent a bit less time in the media spotlight.   As a condition of his parole he agreed to no longer preform any kind of suicide service or provide any advice on the matter.

With the recent death of Kevorkian, there has been a lot of talk about his life and accomplishments.   A large number of individuals who identify with atheism, humanism, libertarianism and other related movements have been quick to praise Kevorkian.  Those who believe that a person should have the right to die often cast him as a hero, fighting for a basic human liberty and for the merciful release from pain and suffering.   This is not new.  During his life, Kevorkian was portrayed as a hero by a number of groups and activists.  In 2010, Al Pacino portrayed Kevorkian in the television movie “You Don’t Know Jack,” which showed Kevorkian as a compassionate activist fighting to legalize dying by choice.   Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of short stories published under the title “God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian,” was more of a spoof than a tribute, but Kevorkian seems to have enjoyed the attention anyway.

Sorry, but I can’t agree. I find the man despicable.

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Much to do has been made of the fact that the majority of nuclear plants in the United States are scheduled to operate beyond the initial operating period that was estimated when they were first constructed. This all seems to have started when the Associated Press “broke” the story, despite the fact that it had never actually been a secret at all. None the less, many followed reporting how plants were being stretched far beyond the expectations of what their designers had intended, exposing the public to untold risks as they rust and fall apart.

Of course, this is not really the case. The plants have undergone numerous upgrades and refits over the years and continue to be upgraded and inspected to maintain high levels of safety. New procedures and new systems retrofitted to older reactors have improved their efficiency and safety beyond what it was originally. Of course, even with improvements, the older Generation II reactors still are not as good as new Generation III+ designs, but none the less, they are perfectly safe and reliable sources of power.

The primary reason why the designs have outlasted what was assumed to be their design life comes down to economics. While it has become cheaper and easier to extend the life of reactors, it has also become much more difficult to build new ones. The original designers might have presumed that after twenty or thirty years, their designs would have been so far surpassed that new power plants would have made them obsolete and redundant.

Unfortunately, they had not counted on just how difficult it has become to build a new reactor.  Just getting the permits to build a new nuclear reactor can take upwards of a decade, and a combination of political lobbying, lawsuits and other tactics by special interest groups meets a potential reactor operator at every step of the way, possibly even derailing plans completely before construction is completed but after billions have been spent.   There exists no other facility whose construction will be opposed by so many with so much effort at so many levels.   Paperwork costs alone can top the hundreds of millions, and final costs for construction have skyrocketed since the 1970’s.

Thus we have what we have and their life is extended to the maximum possible since replacements remain so difficult and expensive to built.

This does not mean that they are unsafe.  In fact, there are many examples of technology lasting far longer than its designers had anticipated.

Reasons why something may outlast its original design life:

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It seems every time there is any development in nuclear technology, the media immediately starts equating it with weapons and assumes that it will be used for such. Not only that, but it also seems that the prevailing belief is that the only way to keep the world safe is to assure the United States does not engage in the new technology, because, if we don’t, well then obviously nobody else will, right?

Via the New York Times:

Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium — the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants.

One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation.

Until now.

In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by the ton.

That might be good news for the nuclear industry. But critics fear that if the work succeeds and the secret gets out, rogue states and terrorists could make bomb fuel in much smaller plants that are difficult to detect.

Iran has already succeeded with laser enrichment in the lab, and nuclear experts worry that G.E.’s accomplishment might inspire Tehran to build a plant easily hidden from the world’s eyes.

Backers of the laser plan call those fears unwarranted and praise the technology as a windfall for a world increasingly leery of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.

But critics want a detailed risk assessment. Recently, they petitioned Washington for a formal evaluation of whether the laser initiative could backfire and speed the global spread of nuclear arms.

“We’re on the verge of a new route to the bomb,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised President Bill Clinton and now teaches at Princeton. “We should have learned enough by now to do an assessment before we let this kind of thing out.”

New varieties of enrichment are considered potentially dangerous because they can simplify the hardest part of building a bomb — obtaining the fuel.

General Electric, an atomic pioneer and one of the world’s largest companies, says its initial success began in July 2009 at a facility just north of Wilmington, N.C., that is jointly owned with Hitachi. It is impossible to independently verify that claim because the federal government has classified the laser technology as top secret. But G.E. officials say that the achievement is genuine and that they are accelerating plans for a larger complex at the Wilmington site.

“We are currently optimizing the design,” Christopher J. Monetta, president of Global Laser Enrichment, a subsidiary of G.E. and Hitachi, said in an interview.

The company foresees “substantial demand for nuclear fuel,” he added, while conceding that global jitters from the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan “do create some uncertainty.” G.E. made those reactors.

Donald M. Kerr, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab who was recently briefed on G.E.’s advance, said in an interview that it looked like a breakthrough after decades of exaggerated claims.

Laser enrichment, he said, has gone from “an oversold, overpromised set of technologies” to what “appears to be close to a real industrial process.”

…

The plan was to exploit the extraordinary purity of laser light to selectively excite uranium’s rare form. In theory, the resulting agitation would ease identification of the precious isotope and aid its extraction.

At least 20 countries and many companies raced to investigate the idea. Scientists built hundreds of lasers.

Ray E. Kidder, a laser pioneer at the Livermore nuclear arms lab, estimated that the overall number of scientists involved globally ran to several thousand.

“It was a big deal,” he said in an interview. “If you could enrich with lasers, you could cut the cost by a factor of 10.”

The fervor cooled by the 1990s as laser separation turned out to be extremely hard to make economically feasible.

Not everyone gave up. Twenty miles southwest of Sydney, in a wooded region, Horst Struve and Michael Goldsworthy kept tinkering with the idea at a government institute. Finally, around 1994, the two men judged that they had a major advance.

The inventors called their idea Silex, for separation of isotopes by laser excitation. “Our approach is completely different,” Dr. Goldsworthy, a physicist, told a Parliamentary hearing.

….

In May 2006, G.E. bought the rights to Silex. Andrew C. White, the president of the company’s nuclear business, hailed the technology as “game-changing.”

Mr. Monetta of Global Laser Enrichment, the G.E.-Hitachi subsidiary, said the envisioned plant would enrich enough uranium annually to fuel up to 60 large reactors. In theory, that could power more than 42 million homes — about a third of all housing units in the United States.

The laser advance, he added, will promote energy security “since it is a domestic source.”

In late 2009, as G.E. experimented with its trial laser, supporters of arms control wrote Congress and the regulatory commission. The technology, they warned, posed a danger of quickening the spread of nuclear weapons because of the likely difficulty of detecting clandestine plants.

Experts called for a federal review of the risks. In early 2010, the commission resisted.

Late last year, the American Physical Society — the nation’s largest group of physicists, with headquarters in Washington — submitted a formal petition to the commission for a rule change that would compel such risk assessments as a condition of licensing.

“The issue is too big” to leave to the federal status quo, Francis Slakey, a physicist at Georgetown University and the society official who drafted the petition, said in an interview. He added that Mr. Obama or Congress might eventually have to get involved.

This year, thousands of citizens, supporters of arms control, nuclear experts and members of Congress wrote the commission to back the society’s effort. Many of them cited well-known failures in safeguarding secrets and detecting atomic plants.

But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington, objected. It said new precautions were unnecessary because of voluntary plans for “additional measures” to safeguard secrets.

A commission spokesman said the petition would be considered next year. In theory, the risk-assessment plan, if adopted, could slow or stop the granting of a commercial license for the proposed laser plant or could result in design improvements.

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Every year I hear this same bullshit and it never irritates me less:

Via NPR:

Nuclear Power Criticized On Hiroshima Anniversary
On Saturday, Japan commemorated the 66th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, but the ceremony was different this year.

In March, a massive earthquake triggered a meltdown at the Japanese nuclear plant in Fukushima. The plant continues to leak radiation in the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl. Saturday’s ceremony focused on the nuclear attack on Japan in 1945, but the country’s ongoing nuclear disaster loomed large.

The atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m., killing 70,000 people instantly. As the bell tolled Saturday, most people froze, closed their eyes and put their hands together to pray.

Cicadas roared in the trees overhead.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan remembered the dead from long ago, then he spoke of Japan’s most recent atomic tragedy.

“I deeply regret believing in the security myth of nuclear power and will carry out a thorough verification on the cause of this incident,” he said.

The “security myth” was the Japanese government’s pledge that it could control the atom. Officials said the same forces that leveled Hiroshima could be harnessed to power this resource-poor nation. Most Japanese believed it for years.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, a poll showed that 70 percent of Japanese now want nuclear power phased out.

After Saturday’s ceremony, anti-nuclear activists took their cause to the streets of Hiroshima. They drew a direct line between the two atomic events separated by more than six decades.

One group of activists peeled off and headed to the Chugoku Electric Power Co. The company has been trying to build a plant 50 miles from Hiroshima for the past three decades. Local resident have been fighting the whole time. Saturday, they shook their fists at the granite walls of the company’s headquarters.

Toshiyasu Shimizu, a member of the Kaminoseki town council, says fighting the plant has felt lonely at times.

“People, including those in the neighboring town, were not interested. But now they see nuclear power as their own problem, so there has been a dramatic difference,” he says.

After all these years, Shimizu says, he feels like most of the country is beginning to agree with him

They’re not the same:

Lets get something straight:  Nuclear weapons are not nuclear power reactors and nuclear power reactors are not nuclear weapons.  Power reactors don’t produce the kind of material usable for weapons and are operated by different entities for different purposes.   Many nation states have nuclear power programs but do not have nuclear weapons.  Conversely, a nuclear power program is not necessary to produce nuclear weapons.   The US, for example, amassed hundreds of weapons in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, yet the first electricity producing commercial reactor was not operational until 1956, long after the weapons program was well established.

Both nuclear weapons and nuclear power reactors use nuclear fission.  That is the extent of their similarities.  Yet not even this is quite the same, since weapons use fast fission of a supercritical mass of material without a moderator, while reactors use a continuous thermal-spectrum reaction in low enrichment material.    Fission is a fundamental source of energy as broad and natural as fire and nuclear energy is as broad a category of energy as chemical energy and even more fundamental to nature.

On Ionizing Radiation:

Nuclear weapons produce radioactive fallout.  Nuclear power plants also produce radioactive material, although except in the case of catastrophic failure, it is contained and sequestered.   None the less, it would be a mistake to see radiation as some kind of evil entity unique to artificial nuclear reactions or uniquely dangerous.   ANY kind of energy can be deadly if it is not contained and exists in sufficient quantity.   People have been killed by the loss of containment of high pressure steam or heat.  Others have died when insulation breakdown exposed them to electricity or when a machine flew apart and the mechanical energy bashed their skull in.  Historically, if you actually look at how many lives are lost, the failure of proper containment of radioactivity is quite low in deaths per gigawatt hour.

Ionizing radiation is also a fundamental force of nature, just as other forms of energy are.  It is part of the electromagnetic spectrum and exists with or without human activity.  It’s produced by stars, lightning bolts, natural radioisotopes and other sources.   It is also produced by humans, in many cases intentionally to produce medical images or destroy tumors.   Medical radiation has saved countless lives.   Its dangers exist only as a product of its missus.  Just as a medical laser or scalpel can heal or harm.

Finally, most of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had nothing to do with ionizing radiation.  Most died as a result of heat, overpressure or trauma falling debris.

Why is it, we that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the focus of so many memorials, so many demonstrations and such intense media attention when much greater loss of life has gone largely forgotten?

This is photograph shows a Japanese city that has been completely destroyed.  Only a handfull of scattered concrete or stone buildings stand and they are gutted and empty.   However, this is not Hiroshima.  This is not Nagasaki.   This is Tokyo.   Tokyo, which was never subjected to nuclear attack was largely reduced to cinders and rubble.  More than 50% of the enormous city was completely destroyed.   The total number killed during the Second World War in Tokyo is unknown.   The official counts top 100,000, but in reality, it was probably far more.

Tokyo was destroyed by a combination of conventional high explosive bombs and incendiary bombs.   It was the incendiary bombs that caused the most damage.   The destruction of Tokyo was accomplished by several B-29 bomber raids, with each attack involving dozens or hundreds of aircraft, up to 520 bombers in some cases.   During the Second World War, the US developed highly effective tactics for the use of incendiary bombs.    These included the use of high explosive bombs to blow open roofs and break apart buildings followed by wave after wave of incendiary bombs, packed with super hot burning white phosphorus and sticky napalm, which would splatter onto structures and anything else in the area and create a nearly unstoppable inferno.

Especially effective against cities with many wood structures, firebombing produced a man-made firestorm, a massive city-wide blaze that firefighters could do little to stop.   The flames would become so violent they would form tornado-like vortexes of flames that engulfed whole structures.   The heat could melt glass and crack concrete.   All organic material in the area became fuel.    For those unfortunate enough to be caught in the flames, there was no escape.   In most fires, victims die of smoke inhalation, but in these firestorms, people could be burned to death before they could take many breaths.   Some bodies were cremated on the spot, others were burned beyond recognition.   A few managed to escape the heat and flames in cellars or other sheltered areas, only to suffocate due to the flames consuming all available oxygen.

But Tokyo was not alone in being leveled by firebombs.   There were many more.   At least 25,000 died in the firebombing attacks on Dresden alone.   Hundreds of thousands more, mostly civilians died due to explosive and firebombing of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Milan, Kobe and elsewhere.   In Japan alone, more than 50 cities were destroyed or heavily damaged by bombing.  Of course, such raids were not limited to the Allied side of the war effort.   The Luftaffa laid waste to Rotterdam, Stalingrad and Warsaw.   Bombing of London, Belfast and other British cities was intended to destroy the cities and kill hundreds of thousands or millions.   It was only due to advanced radar and highly effective air defense, combined with the limited bomb loads of German aircraft that saved the British Isles from similar destruction, though thousands of lives were still lost.   The Japanese also engaged in massive aerial bombardment in China, the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be understood not as isolated events but within this greater context of strategic bombing of World War II.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed large portions of the cities and killed tens of thousands.   This is really no different than the other air raids of the era, except that it was done with only one aircraft and one bomb.  It took a fraction of a second and not days.   It used a different technology.   Otherwise, it was no more deadly or devastating than conventional bombing.

Of course, the ethics and effectiveness of citywide bombing can be debated. At the time, precision bombing was not available in any large scale and the destruction of urban areas was considered the most effective way of both forcing an enemy to consider surrender and destroy their ability to make war. The Second World War was the last true example of total war, where the entire economies and industries of world powers are shifted completely to making war and as such, are considered targets in their own right.

So perhaps we should ban fire, since that has proven to be a much more horrific weapon.   It’s killed scores more than nuclear weapons.  It’s easier to acquire, nations are more prone to using it, it is just as indiscriminate, perhaps more so, it kills in a mercilessly painful manner, it’s environmentally destructive and it can easily get out of control and cause more damage than had been planned.

Of course, fire also powers everything from automobiles to candles and even the cells in our body use a form of low temperature, enzyme-catalyzed combustion in cellular respiration.

Finally, why I like nuclear explosions:

(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb)

To most the image of a nuclear explosion is one of horror and destruction.   There’s certainly good reason for this.  The idea of such a device being used against humanity, to destroy cities and end lives is a horrific one.   Nobody would want to see a modern nuclear weapon used in anger.  The consequences would be a nightmare.

Yet a nuclear explosion is also something else.  It is a release of energy, a huge release of energy.   That’s really all that an explosion is.   Explosions can be used for fighting wars or for fireworks, mining, seismic sounding, explosive welding and any other number of purposes.  Nuclear explosions are huge because of the density of the energy source they tap.  They use the most fundamental type of energy in the universe and do so with very high efficiency.

Nuclear bombs are by far, the most energetic devices humans have ever created.   And unless there is a source of antimatter in large quantities for the taking, they will be the most energetic devices humans have ever created.   The largest bombs produce more energy than all humanity produced for thousands of years yet they could fit in your garage.   When set off, they are the greatest expression of humanity’s ability to harness the forces of the universe to produce energy – so much energy they transform huge areas of the atmosphere into plasma and create shockwaves that travel around the earth.  Large nuclear explosions can create their own weather systems, move mountains or carve enormous chambers under the earth’s crust.

It’s a nearly cosmic level of energy.  It has no upper bounds, as explosives can be built using the Teller-Ulam design to any size.   This is humanity’s great step toward something almost unimaginable.

While fallout concerns have greatly limited peaceful nuclear explosions on earth, the potential is even greater beyond this planet.  Nuclear explosives could potentially change the orbit of asteroids, mine asteroids and comets and propel spacecraft to a significant portion of the speed of light.

On earth, nuclear explosions have proven as awe-inspiring as they are destructive.   They are the only example of humanity seeing the effects of unrestrained thermal fusion up close.  The elements einsteinium and fermium were first observed in the fallout of a nuclear blast. The power of nuclear explosions has helped unlike the secrets of the ionosphere, the earth’s crust and fundamental properties of matter.

It is simply energy: A huge amount of energy. Whether it is destructive depends on how it is used.  Like all forms of energy, it has dangers and can be a weapon.  It also has much greater potential.

If that headline sounds a bit grandiose , it’s because it is.   We’ve achieve a victory, a big one.   By the ingenuity and effort of mankind a tiny destructive organism that recently existed by the trillions has been wiped from the face of the earth.   This hasn’t happened many times before, but when it does, it’s a huge victory, and one which we hope to repeat many more times.

In this case what has been eradicated is not a human disease but one that decimated livestock.   Rinderpest, or the “German Cattle Plague” was a virus related to measles but attacking bovines, such as cattle and some related species.   At times outbreaks had decimated both meat and dairy herds around the world.  It has destroyed herds since at least Roman times and even in the later half of the 20th century, it was causing billions of dollars in damage.   It ruined farmers and herders and epidemic levels in Africa contributed to famine in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

For centuries, the battle to control Rinderpest met with some success through quarantine and inspection for the disease.   Yet the threat continued to exist.  Various vaccines were developed, with early experiments going back as far as the 1700’s.   Sir Arnold Theiler is credited with producing the first fully effective general purpose vaccine for Rinderpest in the early 20th century.   More advanced vaccines would be developed throughout the century.   Organized international efforts toward eradication began in 1920 when the World Organization for Animal Health was formed with the specific goal of controlling Rinderpest.

And now it’s gone!

VIA CNN:

Deadly animal disease that shaped history is eradicated
- It decimated herds and caused disaster, devastation and death associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and the colonization of Africa.

But after years of global efforts, rinderpest — German for cattle plague — doesn’t exist anymore. It is the first animal disease to be eradicated and only the second disease ever, after smallpox in 1980.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization declared Tuesday that the world was rid of rinderpest.

“This is of tremendous benefit to people and is also a relief for a lot of animal suffering,” said Peter Cowen, an associate professor of epidemiology and public health at North Carolina State University.

“The eradication of rinderpest in the animal health world is every bit as courageous an effort and as creative an effort as was the eradication of smallpox,” he said.

Rinderpest is not exactly a household name. For starters, it did not exist in America. And it affected only cloven-hoofed beasts — cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, yaks.

Animals don’t have silly ideas about vaccines causing autism or being made by the evil corporations that spread chemtrails and try to use microwave weapons to make us buy transfat-containing irradiated GMO products from Haliburton and the Freemasons.   Most farmers know a thing or two about animal health and realize how important protecting their herds are.   So there are no issues with eradicating these diseases by vaccination as there are in humans.

But we *can* do this with human diseases.  We did it with Small Pox and we can do it with Polio, and Measles and Mumps and Rubella and others.

There have been a number of photographs taken of alleged “cryptids” such as bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.   Many are poor quality and could be anything.  Others are fairly good views of something, but are likely hoaxes with the photos either staged or doctored.   Now it appears that one group thinks offering 2,000 USD will change that.

Via io9:

This summer, io9 is going cryptozoological. We’re offering a $2000 bounty to the person who sends us the best authentic photo or video of a “cryptid,” or mystery animal. And that’s just the beginning of Cryptid Summer.

Illustration of Sasquatch by Rick Spears (get his book about cryptids here!); photograph of the beach by Pichugin Dmitry/Shutterstock.

A cryptid, according to Wikipedia, is “a creature or plant whose existence has been suggested but that is unrecognized by a scientific consensus, and whose existence is moreover often regarded as highly unlikely.” Think Bigfoot or the Montauk Monster. Cryptids are often urban legends, but there is a scientific side to these mystery animals, too. New life forms develop all the time, and in very unexpected ways. Many animals would have been considered cryptids until scientists began to study evolution and zoology. Think about Cryptid Summer as an opportunity to explore the strange side of evolution and life science.

The Bounty
io9 will be offering a $2000 bounty for the best photographic or video evidence of a genuine cryptid. In August, we will invite our panel of experts, including zoologists, the team behind excellent cryptid blog Cryptomundo, cryptid expert Loren Coleman, and a photoshop analyst, to judge which pictures are the most authentic. We’ll give the bounty to the one that they judge to be the most mysterious yet authentic creature.

How to enter:
Send the picture as a .jpg attached to an email explaining where you took the photo, what you saw, and how the cryptid behaved. If you have a video, we prefer .mov files. Please include your full name and a way we can contact you. Do NOT send photos or video that you didn’t personally take.

I fully expect them to get plenty of entries, but authenticating them? Well that depends on how gullible they are.

The problem with authenticating a photo:

(more…)

I recently came across the television show “Filthy Cities.” It’s originally broadcast on BBC-2, although in the US it can be found on The Discovery Channel. (and amazingly, they redid the entire show in a shot-per-shot retake with an American host for the US version.)

As far as historical documentaries go, it’s not the most scholarly.   That said, I was happy to see such a show exists, because it touches on an all too underreported aspect of history:  the past was pretty damn miserable.   The great cities of the world, whether London, Paris or New York spend centuries stewing in human and animal waste, garbage, thick smoke and a variety of chemicals discharged from tanneries and factories.   Human waste was disposed of in the streets and litter collection was nearly non-existent.   Horses and other animals contributed to the problem.   Without modern sanitary mortuaries and refrigeration, even dead corpses could rot in summer and could be hastily burred in shallow graves.

The word “filthy” does not even do justice to how miserable it was.

Things began to get better with the Industrial Revolution.  While sewers of some type date back to the Roman empire, the first modern city-wide sanitary sewer system took shape in Paris in the mid 1800’s.   It was an enormous step forward.  Other cities followed.   Still, other problems persisted.   Regular collection of refuse and carting away of rotting material was not universal for large cities until well into the 20th century.   The disposal of horse manure (and horse carcases) was a problem that was never really rectified until diesel and gasoline vehicles overtook horses for street transportation.

Not all the major improvements occurred in such a distant past. As late as the 1950’s, the use of coal for heating in the heart of cities could make the air almost unbreathable. Many large cities continued to dump huge amounts of raw sewage into local bodies of water until fairly recently. Boston Harbor frequently contained dangerous levels of fecal bacteria until the opening of the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant in 1995.

Of course, things were not necessarily much better in rural areas either.   Latrines and outhouse pits stunk in the summer and the lack of hot or running water meant people could go months without bathing.  The thatched roofs of cottages may look quaint in pictures, but they began to rot after only a few years, becoming infested with insects and leaking.   During periods of heavy rain, roads became a stew of mud and animal feces, and those who had to travel them didn’t have the luxury of modern rubberized boots.

Here are two episodes of the series, viewable in full:

(Warning – They’re a bit graphic at times)
Filthy Cities: Revolutionary Paris
Filthy Cities: Medieval London

Of course, the filthiest conditions were generally those of the poor and working class, while the wealthy had at least somewhat better living conditions. Given the circumstances, it’s not surprising that so many died from infectious disease. If anything, it’s amazing people actually could survive in such filth.

Most today just have no idea how good we have it.