On a wooded island more than a hundred miles northwest of Helsinki, in the town of Eurajoki, Finnish engineers are digging a tunnel. When it is done 10 years from now, it will corkscrew three miles in and 1,600 feet down into crystalline gneiss bedrock that has been the foundation of Finland for 1.8 billion years. And there, in a darkness that is still being created, the used fuel rods from Finland’s nuclear reactors - full of radioactive elements from the periodic table as dreamed up by Lord Voldemort, spitting neutrons and gamma rays - are to be sealed away forever, or at least 100,000 years. The place is called Onkalo (Finnish for ‘hidden) and it is the subject of ‘Into Eternity, a new documentary by Mr. Madsen. Watching it during the recent Tribeca Film Festival brought me into a more visceral contact with the vicissitudes of geologic time than I might have really wanted. These days I find that I can barely envision the future more than about six months ahead - hardly enough time even to plan for a proper summer vacation. My images of the deep future have always been vaguely utopian, like ‘Star […]
NEW ORLEANS — For a spill now nearly half the size of Exxon Valdez, the oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster is pretty hard to pin down. Satellite images show most of an estimated 4.6 million gallons of oil has pooled in a floating, shape-shifting blob off the Louisiana coast. Some has reached shore as a thin sheen, and gooey bits have washed up as far away as Alabama. But the spill is 23 days old since the Deepwater Horizon exploded April 20 and killed 11 workers, and the thickest stuff hasn’t shown up on the coast. So, where’s the oil? Where’s it going to end up? Government scientists and others tracking the spill say much of the oil is lurking just below the surface. But there seems to be no consensus on whether it will arrive in black waves, mostly dissipate into the massive Gulf or gradually settle to the ocean floor, where it could seep into the ecosystem for years. When it comes to deepwater spills, even top experts rely on some guesswork. One of their tools, a program the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses to predict how oil spills on the […]
Fifty years ago this weekend, the Laser Age began – an era that has been as revolutionary as the Space Age. It’s thought that half of America’s gross domestic product is somehow connected with laser technology. When Theodore Maiman turned on the first pulsed laser at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California on May 16, 1960, few could have imagined how much of an impact the devices would have on communications, manufacturing, medicine (and concert light shows). But Charles Townes had a pretty good idea. After all, it was his work with microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation – masers – that set the stage for the optical lasers to come. In fact, he and others theorized that lasers could be built a couple of years before Maiman did it. Townes’ research earned him a share of the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics. Today, at the age of nearly 95, Townes is still a working scientist at the University of California, doing research in astrophysics. And when you talk with him on the phone, you get the impression that his intellect is still as sharply focused as a you-know-what. In an interview, Townes looked back […]
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said he is ‘confident China will allow the value of the yuan to rise against the dollar. ‘It is in China’s interest that they move to let their exchange rate start to gradually reflect market forces, Geithner said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s ‘Political Capital with Al Hunt, airing this weekend. ‘I’m confident they’re going to do that. Geithner, who last month delayed a report that may have branded China a currency manipulator, is scheduled to meet with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan in Beijing on May 24-25. China, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, halted the currency’s 21 percent, three-year advance against the dollar in July 2008 to help exporters weather recessions in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Chinese authorities have kept the currency at about 6.8 to a dollar, a policy that has blunted the competitiveness of Asia’s export-dependent nations, whose currencies have appreciated this year. Geithner said ‘a level playing field for U.S. exporters will be at ‘the center of our agenda in China. In April, China had a trade surplus of $1.68 billion as exports climbed 30.5 percent from a year ago, the customs bureau […]
Some 43 million Americans do it every day: take a tiny aspirin to help prevent heart attacks and strokes. In fact, doctors have been routinely recommending the practice to older adults for years. But recently, experts have been questioning the aspirin-a-day regimen, concerned that this everyday miracle drug can pose serious risks, including bleeding in the brain and stomach. The aspirin-a-day controversy erupted publicly in March when a 10-year study of nearly 30,000 adults ages 50 to 75 without known heart disease found that a daily aspirin didn’t offer any discernible protection. The group taking aspirin had cardiovascular disease at the same rate as those taking a placebo. Moreover, the study-published in the Journal of the American Medical Association-reported that taking a daily aspirin (100 mg) almost doubled the risk of dangerous internal bleeding. And last year the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force-a panel of medical experts-issued new guidelines for patients, recommending only those at risk for heart attacks or strokes should take a daily aspirin. Risk factors include having high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, as well as being overweight. The panel also recommended that people over 80 not take aspirin at all because of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
