Bismuth is a heavy, silvery-white metal with one more proton in each nucleus than lead. Despite its close physical similarity to lead and chemical similarity to arsenic, it's virtually nontoxic, and appears in a variety of cosmetics, pigments, and pharmaceuticals. You can read more about it here: Bismuth
For the better part of a century bismuth was thought to be the heaviest stable element, but its only naturally-occurring isotope is now known to be radioactive. Granted, the half-life is about 12 quintillion years, but radioactivity is radioactivity, and eventually every atom of bismuth will decay through beta emission into lead, which is now known to be the heaviest stable element. There are more facts about bismuth, but the real reason I'm writing about this is to justify the cover photo. As it turns out, bismuth surfaces easily oxidize into iridescent color patterns, much like oil slicks. The physics of this is interesting, and the imagery is simply, wonderfully, beautiful.
On August 15, 1977 astronomers at the Big Ear radio telescope in Delaware, Ohio heard a strong narrowband radio signal for 72 seconds in the constellation Sagittarius. To this day that radio pulse, known as the Wow! signal after researcher Jerry Ehman's excited scrawl on the computer printout recording it, remains the strongest evidence yet found for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. You can read more about it here: The Wow! signal
Ehman's discovery is unconvincing, mainly because no trace of similar radio signals has ever been found again in the same part of the sky, or anywhere else in deep space, in the 36 years since. The signal generated excitement at the time since it matched the expectations of those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence so closely. For 72 seconds it was clear and bright, two constant tones 30 times louder than the interstellar noise in the 1.42 gigahertz range, straddling the frequency of microwave radiation emitted by excited neutral hydrogen atoms. This is exactly what pioneering SETI researchers like Frank Drake and Carl Sagan expected a message from aliens to look like when they began the search in the early 1960s. A real civilization would presumably broadcast for longer than the length an early morning infomercial, but like Herman Cain I don't have facts to back that up.
For months after the August 15 signal the Big Ear continued to search for a civilization in Sagittarius, but heard nothing but the ordinary noise of space. Other telescopes were put to work over the years, searching the same part of the sky, but even the exquisitely sensitive Very Large Array (of Contact and 2010 fame) pondered only silence. The true nature of the signal remains poorly understood, and there are significant problems with every proposed explanation, from interstellar scintillation, to a reflection off a piece of space debris, to an alien rotating beacon. The SETI researchers and ufologists are right about at least one thing: The truth is out there. It's just really hard to discern sometimes.
Over a period of 12 days in July of 1916, a series of shark attacks killed four and injured one swimmer along the coast of New Jersey between Beach Haven and Matawan. While the loss of life was small compared to that caused by a simultaneous heat wave and polio epidemic in the northeastern United States that summer, to say nothing of the horrors of wartime Europe, the spectacle of an outbreak of shark attacks has a way of engendering a spectacular response. You can read more about that here: Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916
At the time much less was known about sharks and their behavior than we now realize, and it was difficult to tell the difference between grounded science and beachside innuendo. Shark attacks are a rare, and at the time it was thought that aggressive sharks simply didn't wander north of the warmer parts of the Gulf Stream near Florida and Georgia. The chain of northern attacks forced ichthyologists to revise their assessments, and steel nets went up around beach towns to protect swimmers. Speculation on the cause of the attacks ranged from the sensible (increased number of swimmers in the water due to wildly hot northeast temperatures) to the implausible (shady U-boat activity), but in all likelihood the attacks were simply a random peak in the noise of life on the coast of New Jersey.
Eventually the terror of the outbreak faded from memory. 58 years later Peter Benchley based Jaws loosely on the real events on the Jersey shore that muggy summer. Shark attacks, it seems, are better at inspiring imagination than fear these days.
In 1981 the Israeli Air Force carried out a preemptive air strike on an Iraqi nuclear reactor. The raid was completely successful, due in no small part to the surprise the Israelis achieved against Iraqi air defenses. You can read more about it here: Operation Opera
During the 1960s and '70s the Iraqi government vigorously pursued a nuclear development program. Unable to find assistance from France or Italy in obtaining a reactor for power or plutonium production, the Iraqi government was finally able to convince France to sell them a small research reactor with fuel and personnel training in 1976. While the reactor was small and unsuitable to produce the stuff of nuclear weapons as designed, Israel determined that any advance which carried the possibility of a nuclear-armed Arab neighbor was unacceptable. The government of Menachem Begin began serious planning for the attack in 1980, and the decision to carry it out was hotly contested within his cabinet.
While Operation Opera was clearly a blow to Iraq, whether it did anything productive for Israel is up for debate. Diplomacy in the Middle East has never been easy, and preemptive air strikes have a way of making people even less amenable to cool-headed thinking. It's difficult to make the case that Iraq's research reactor posed any credible existential threat to Israel, but like the United States 22 years later, Begin's government was eager to buy the story painted by the intelligence on Iraq.
Peter Garrison is not an aerospace engineer, but has designed, built, and flown two remarkable airplanes (both carrying the handle Melmoth) in parallel with his freelance writing career. His Wikipedia entry is here and his personal site can be found in the image credit link, but it's his account of the conception and life of Melmoth the first that most inspires me: Two Mike Uniform
Designing airplanes is not easy, and building airplanes is probably even more difficult. While the physics and construction themselves aren't too terribly daunting to someone with adequate training and practical know-how, assurance that air will flow smoothly, structure won't cripple, and controls will sufficiently control requires an intense amount of contemplation, perseverance, and luck. While Garrison lacked a formal academic background in engineering, he clearly invested in a good portfolio of those three, though Melmoth's luck sadly ran out in a runway collision in 1982. Still, the tales Garrison tells of journeys in each direction are bewitching to hear, full of wonder, exhiliration, and more than a few headdesk-worthy moments. The author's reflection on the feeling of the end of a long and hazardous flight, in particular, is hard to top when it comes to pure romance:
It was a heavenly feeling to shut off the engine, to see the prop stumble to a halt and hear only the faint soft whir of the freewheeling gyros; to step out of the plane into a strangely balmy evening; to ride the taxi to the hotel; to sip tea and nibble biscuits in its almost deserted pub, survivors -- incognito! -- of a gamble with a ghastly way to go.
Then again, the description tagged to the title photo of this post is simply wonderful:
The new outer panels, although they increased the wing area, did not have a noticeable effect on speed. They did, however, improve the climb rate at altitude. One day I took a couple of friends (there was a jump seat behind the two front seats) for an air tour of the Sierra. I am not sure that they really enjoyed it.
In 1961 Jose Gabriel da Costa, a Brazilian rubber trapper, began a spiritist movement that combines elements of Christian imagery with ritualized drug-induced entheogenic exploration. The movement is known as União do Vegetal or UDV, which translates to English as "Union of the Plant." You can read more about that here: União do Vegetal
UDV received considerable publicity at the turn of the millennium, very little of which had anything to do with the movement's Christian spiritist trappings. Attention focused on the psychedelic trappings instead, in particular UDV's sacramental use of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a mixed brew containing leaves native to the Amazon jungle that contain dimethyltriptamine (DMT) and a potent monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI). Though UDV's roots are young, this blend has been pivotal to shamanist religions in South America for centuries. While we're still, haltingly, trying to figure out what makes cocktails like ayahuasca so powerful, some of the pieces of the puzzle are beginning to fall into place.
The Drug Enforcement Agency lists DMT as a schedule I controlled substance, but it can be better described as a neurotransmitter than as a drug. DMT is literally the stuff that dreams are made of, ubiquitous in mammals, tightly correlated with cycle of wakefulness and REM sleep, and apparently essential to consciousness, though the link is poorly understood. Since some level of DMT is always present in the brain, the body is able to process it quickly, and the trip from inhaled pure DMT lasts only a matter of minutes. When combined with an MAOI, this natural breakdown is inhibited, and the traveler can stay in psychedelic wonderland for hours. This ability to wander through entheogenic space is the backbone of UDV's central sacrament, and is what drew the attention of US customs agents in 1999.
A year after a shipment of ayahuasca leaves was interdicted by the American government UDV sued for an exemption from the Controlled Substances Act on a religious basis. UDV sought a similar exemption to that granted to Native American tribes for traditional peyote ceremonies, and after going to the Supreme Court, they got it in a unanimous decision in 2006. While I think the outcome of that case was sensible, it's curious to see that our government openly and unambiguously accepts the spiritual utility of the psychedelics while simultaneously banning them for almost all of its citizens. Our democracy can do better, and I think that it should.
I'll get down from my soapbox now. Here's a video that has nothing to do with UDV, but seems psychedelically delightful to me anyway:
In 1957 the United States Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission began a joint project to study the feasibility of high-speed unmanned nuclear-powered aircraft. By 1961 a working prototype of the propulsion system was completed and earmarked for a proposed production cruise missile known as SLAM, a beautifully evocative acronym for Supersonic Low Altitude Missile. The research program for SLAM, known as Project Pluto, is one of the most terrifying defense ideas ever seriously considered, and you can read more about it here: Project Pluto
I don't think there's much to add to Project Pluto beyond what the Wikipedia article has to say, other than that this is a weapon that would satisfy the defense department of Satan himself. SLAM was to carry a dozen thermonuclear warheads for months at a time, never slowing below the speed of sound, ready to drop them on Soviet targets on short notice. Once these bombs were depleted, the reactor would still have fuel enough to fly on almost indefinitely, presumably to blast enemy troops with the shock waves riding on the missile's nose and to irradiate them with gamma rays from the unshielded reactor. It was a baroque idea that never quite made sense due to the advent of reliable guidance and reentry systems for ballistic missiles. Unlike its distant technical cousin Project Orion, I have no mixed feelings about Pluto's permanent assignment to the dustbin of history.
Only two significant Plinian volcanic eruptions occurred in the contiguous 48 states during the 20th Century. The second and larger of that pair happened on May 18, 1980, when Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington roared to life after 123 dormant years. You can read more about that eruption here: 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens
For the record, the other Plinian eruption mentioned in the first paragraph was the 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak, further south in Cascades from the northern ultras of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.
The 1980 eruption was a bad event for the Pacific northwest, but in retrospect it could've been much worse. On March 18 an earthquake swarm began, which reached a crescendo on the 27th with an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale topping off 174 shocks noticeable to human feet. Later that day the first eruption leading to the big event of May began, sending ash as far as Bend, Oregon and Spokane. Clearly something wicked was coming this way, and Washington governor Dixy Lee Ray ordered the zone immediately around the mountain evacuated of residents and commercial logging activity on April 30.
As magma moved within the mountain, the north face began to bulge outward. By mid-May the northern cryptodome extended 400 feet beyond the volcano's original contours and contained about 0.13 cubic kilometers of magma. It kept growing at five to six feet per day, but visible eruptions ceased on May 16. Those evacuated from the red zone grew impatient, and the next day 50 cars'-worth of residents were allowed to return to gather their belongings. A second trip was scheduled for 10 AM the next morning, a Sunday in 1980, and limited logging operations were to resume on the following Monday.
"Lucky" would be an odd way to describe the timing of an eruption that killed 57 people, but given that a two hour delay in the eruption timing would probably have tripled the death toll and that a 24 hour delay would've put 300 additional loggers in the blast zone, the geological scheduling seems vaguely miraculous. Western Washington's weather can be dodgy in the month of May, but the 18th was a beautiful day 33 years ago and the photography captured of the eruption was some of the century's most spectacular imagery.
Mount St. Helens's eruption wasn't the largest of the 1900s, but it still an event of terrific magnitude. The energy released was larger than that of the largest thermonuclear weapon ever tested by the United States. The blast removed over a thousand feet from the peak of the mountain, sent pyroclastic flows into the Toutle River valley faster than the speed of sound, and sent ash 12 miles into the air that fell as far away as Oklahoma. As comforting as the notion is that humans are really in control of our own affairs on Earth, clearly that's just not how it works.
Between 1984 and 1999 Seattle's NBC affiliate, KING-TV, ran a locally-produced sketch comedy show known as Almost Live! Bill Nye left Boeing to begin his performance career on the show, and it remains one of the best sources of cultural satire on the region. The Wikipedia article has more information, but the show's guide to living in Seattle is a reasonable introduction:
Some thing have changed since the early-'90s, but much remains the same. Though Ballard has become trendy and hipster-ish and Renton is less of a company town for Boeing these days, Capitol Hill remains aggressivly nonconformist and nothing bad happens in Mercer Island even today. My first experience living near Puget Sound was in Kent, and I think Almost Live! is excessively harsh on south King County. Blue collar or not, at least they have a decent mall now.
In 2009 a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory made the controversial claim that they'd discovered a planet through astrometry around a tiny star known in catalogs as VB 10 and more eloquently (but less pronounceably) as Van Biesbroeck's Star. You can read more about that reported planetary system on astronomer Greg Laughlin's blog here: VB 10b
Few of the planets discovered have ever been seen, and VB 10b, assuming it's really there, is one of an even rarer set of planets, those discovered by careful observation of their parent stars' position. Clearly this is an unusual system, and in order to sling Van Biesbroeck's Star far enough to be seen from Earth VB 10b has to weigh in at more than three times the mass of Jupiter, about a tenth of the mass of its anchoring star. Clearly this is a planet on the verge of becoming a star and a star that barely sustains fusion. Even if the discovery turns out to be spurious it's exciting to think that such places are really out there. As Laughlin points out, long after the rest of the Milky Way has gone dim places like VB 10 will shine on as they savor their nuclear fuel slowly for the long haul. It's nice to know there will be some light nearby long after the Sun goes dim.
As of this writing the current commander of the International Space Station is Pavel Viogradov, a veteran Russian cosmonaut in the top 20 of the list of people with most time in space. This post is about the commander who immediately preceded him, Chris Hadfield. Mr. Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut and a veteran of three spaceflights, but is most famous for making wonderful videos while in space. You can read more about him here: Chris Hadfield
Before he became an astronaut Hadfield made his living flying fighters, first intercepting Soviet bombers over the Canadian arctic, and then testing the airworthiness of new aircraft for NATO forces in California. He flew over 70 types of aircraft before being selected to fly spacecraft as well. Since this should be sufficient to identify Mr. Hadfield as a badass, I will now direct your attention to the Reddit AMA he conducted while in space. This should be sufficient to convince you that he's a cool dude.
Since I previously made a claim about his videos, here's a brief proof by selected examples. First, a short film on the strange ways water behaves in microgravity:
Want to know more about the practical effects of fluid dynamics in weightlessness? In that case, this video might be to your liking as well:
Here's one just because it involves Russian space pajamas. Which apparently are a thing:
And finally his true magnum opus, which needs no introduction other than Bowie's in spaaaaaaaace:
Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity explained a lot when it was introduced in 1915, but there was little empirical evidence to suggest its validity at the time. In the 98 years since then extensive experimental testing has removed virtually all doubt about the practical implications of relativity. You can read more about that testing here: Tests of general relativity
General relativity makes some trippy claims about the universe that, to say the least, are not intuitively obvious. The idea that gravity can bend and distort the color of light, slow the passage of time, and disturb the orbits of planets all by itself seems out of whack with our casual observations, but like any good scientific theory, relativity made specific quantified predictions about these odd phenomena. That left the door open to experimental verification.
In a sense, the first experimental test of general relativity was the motion of Mercury. As astrometry became more and more accurate during the 1800s astronomers noticed something odd about Mercury's orbit. Every century the location of Mercury's closest approach to the Sun (or perihelion) backtracks by about 43 arc-seconds more than it should according to the laws of Newton. The reason for this, Einstein explained, is that as a planet approaches its parent star and speeds up, its mass increases and time slows down just a little bit relative to the rest of the cosmos. This action combines to alter the orbit a hair each revolution, and since Merucry's orbit is closer to the Sun and more elliptical than the other planets, the effect is most noticeable there. Right out the gate, relativity looked good, but the error bars were large in those days before radar, and physicists wanted more evidence of the machinery of relativity in action.
Since the Sun contains almost 99% of the solar system's mass in a circle of the sky less than half a degree wide, it's the most obvious choice for looking for gravity's bending effect on light. Typically looking at stars within a few degrees of the Sun is problematic due to the intense glow of sunshine, but as luck would have it a new Moon is almost exactly the same apparent size as the Sun when viewed from Earth's surface, and makes a natural sunshade for a few minutes a time or two a year if you know where to look for it. In 1919 simultaneous observations of a solar eclipse from Brazil and Sao Tome and Principe showed that gravity seemed to do just what Einstein thought it did. The results were sensational, but also ambiguous due to the possibility of systematic error, and it wasn't until the 1950s that eclipse observations were widely accepted as a verification of relativity.
Over the years the tests have become more specific to narrow down the range of uncertainty on the empirical factors that remain in our picture of physics. Astronauts have placed lasers on the Moon to more closely track its position, extraordinarily sensitive space telescopes have observed the gravitational twinkling of stars, and ever-more-accurate clocks have shown the quirky relationship between speed, gravity, and time. It's an odd universe we live in, but one remarkably amenable to understanding.
During World War II the United States Army Air Forces and Navy developed a combined gyroscopic stabilization platform and analog computer to allow unprecedentedly accurate bomb targeting from aircraft. This device was known as the Norden bombsight, and you can read more about it here: Norden bombsight
In testing the Norden bombsight could reliably place bombs within 75 feet of their intended target, allowing targeting of ships and individual buildings from altitude, a remarkable feat for the time. This was accomplished by the combined efforts of a gyroscope faithfully tracking the true direction of up and down, an analog computer which took into account the airplane's airspeed, altitude, attitude, and the winds aloft, and a control system which allowed computer control of the bomber's flight and the bombs' release. The bombsight was a gem of engineering for the time, and each was equipped with a small thermite package allowing its immediate destruction to keep it out of enemy hands in the event of a forced landing.
In reality the Norden bombsight was never able to achieve what it did in testing. Typical circular error probable for bombs dropped with Norden guidance was more than 1,000 feet, limiting its practical utility for precision bombing. Operating the gadget was a pain, and required meticulous attention to the mechanical and programming needs of the computer. In practice cloudless days in Europe are rare enough to prevent reliable target acquisition, and without clear sighting its computer was stuck in a cycle of garbage-in-garbage-out. Eventually the Army Air Forces gave up on the idea of precision bombing for the time being, and resorted to saturating the cities of Germany and Japan with fire and high explosives. It's a shame good ideas don't always work out.
I'm not Malcolm Gladwell; I just pretend to be him on the internet sometimes. Here's Malcolm Gladwell talking about the Norden bombsight (understanding Gladwell's pronunciations and factual errors is left as an exercise to the reader):
In all vertebrates immune system action is regulated by a set of molecules woven into the surface of an individual's cells. In humans this mediating complex determines or at least influences a range of factors from disease immunity to organ transplant compatibility to sexual attraction to the probability of miscarriage. You can read more about it here: Major histocompatibility complex
Other than the nervous system, the immune system is probably the most complex organ system in the human body. White blood cells are effective at destroying harmful bacteria and viruses that enter the body, but need guidance to do their job, which is where the molecules encoded in the MHC come into play. No two people have exactly the same MHC, and since a more cosmopolitan mix of histocompatibility molecules can better thwart the menagerie of threats that exist in nature, it's clearly favorable to inherit very different complexes from each parent. Though the exact mechanism is unknown, research has shown that people with more different MHCs tend to be more attracted to each other, and that early pregnancy loss is less likely between couples with well-differentiated complexes. For all of our intelligent dreaming and scheming, nature seems to guide us toward what's good for us even when we can't quite define what that is.
In 1914 a team of explorers lead by Ernest Shackleton left Plymouth aboard the vessel Endurance, with the objective of completing the first crossing of Antarctica. While the crew failed to achieve its initial objective, Shackleton successfully led all of his party back to civilization after spending a year and a half trapped in pack ice, then marooned on Elephant Island. The voyage that began as one of the most ambitious exploration programs up to that time remains one of the most remarkable successful failures, and you can read more about it here: The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
Shackleton had been to Antarctica twice before, first on the Discovery expedition at the turn of the century, and then three years later on the Nimrod expedition. On that second expedition Shackleton closed to within 100 nautical miles of the south pole, closer than anyone had ever come to either pole in history, but chose to turn back rather than continue to the pole in the face of certain starvation on the way home. His dream to become the first to reach the pole was dashed when Amundsen and Scott planted the first flags at Earth's farthest south in the Antarctic summer of 1911-1912, but the great survivor of British Antarctic exploration sought to reach the pole while crossing the continent two years later. This feat of derring-do would remain unaccomplished until 1958 in part because the Endurance became trapped in surprisingly thick sea ice on her way to the continent's coast.
Unable to continue, Shackleton rationed supplies and elected to winter over on the ice, but when pressure from the pack began to open Endurance's hull to the sea, the need to abandon ship and mission in the interest of preserving the crew became clear. The crew lived for a time off their rations, seals, and penguins, but knew that no rescue party would be coming. When the weather warmed up enough to allow the crew to set sail in three tiny open boats, they proceeded to Elephant Island, a remote speck of real estate off the coast of the Antarctic peninsula. Here the crew was safe for the time being, but Shackleton knew that they'd need to alert the outside world to ever return to the north.
In one of the most epic feats of sailing and navigation the world has ever seen, Shackleton departed Elephant Island for a whaling station on South Georgia with five of his crew in the open boat James Caird. This required an 800-mile trek across the wildest, most unforgiving stretch of ocean in the world aiming for a small island with zero chance of return should the crew miss South Georgia. They were clearly fixin' to get themselves killed, but the voyage of the James Caird successfully notified the world that the Endurance's crew was alive and well. Once the rough seas of the Southern Ocean allowed a rescue ship to approach Elephant Island, every man there was rescued. They may not have done what they set out to do, but this is still one of the most incredible and inspiring stories ever to hail from Earth's southern continent.
While most of the elements we see in abundance on Earth were created during stellar fusion, no elements heavier than iron can be produced by the nuclear reactions in stars' cores. Extremely fast nuclear reactions are required to continue binding protons and neutrons to nuclei heavier than iron-56, and supernovae are the only places in the universe where such conditions occur. One of the processes that creates heavy elements during supernovae is driven by rapid neutron capture (hence the r in r-process), and you can read more about it here: r-process
Human imagination can't make much of a dent in understanding what happens when big stars die. Other than gamma ray bursts and the Big Bang itself, there's nothing that happens in the universe that approaches the violence of a core-collapse supernova. What boggles my mind about these events isn't so much that the flux of neutrons is so intense that the mass of radiation in motion is on the same scale as the winds of a hurricane, it's that these events happen all the time. Billions, possibly hundreds of billions, of supernovae have happened in the Milky Way since its formation, making these explosions commonplace in the scheme of things. It's a good thing, too. If such violence wasn't common throughout the universe the gold, silver, and platinum of jewelry, the uranium and thorium of nuclear power, the copper of electrical wiring, and the nickel and neodymium of small efficient motors would be scarcer still than they already are.
Despite its name, the Immovable Ladder is a ladder that has been moved twice since it was first considered worthy of mention in 1757. It's located beneath a window at the Chruch of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and has become something of a symbol of the the longitudinal rift in Christianity since the Great Schism. You can read more about it here: Immovable Ladder
Wikipedia's entry omits the indefinite article, implying that unlike Highlanders there can be more than one immovable ladder. In the event, the only claimed immovable ladder has moved twice in the last two decades. Nominally the ladder is immobile since any changes to the exterior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre require the approval of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Roman Catholic Christian orders, and Pope Paul VI declared in 1964 that the ladder shall not move until the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches is reconnected. Despite this order, the ladder briefly went missing in 1997 and was moved again in 2009 to help facilitate renovations to the church. Before anyone feels like cracking any jokes about Papal infallibility, the reader is encouraged to actually read what that particular dogma actually entails, and remember that nobody actually thinks that Popes are magical red-shoe'd oracles.
Chalk this one up to people forgetting that words have meaning.
In 1967 Leonard Nimoy starred in a music video summarizing the adventures of J.R.R. Tolkien's character Bilbo Baggins. This really happened. If you're wondering "Why?" there isn't strictly speaking a definitive answer, but the question "How?" can be answered by visiting the Wikipedia page here: "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins"
This isn't a fact of great significance, but I think people should be reminded every once and a while that this really happened:
While many cruisers, aircraft carriers, and submarines have been powered by nuclear reactors since the 1950s, only a handful of civilian ships have ever been powered by the fission of uranium. The first of these was the NS Savannah, a joint project of the Atomic Energy Commission and the US Maritime Administration launched in 1959. You can read more about her here: NS Savannah
Savannah was officially a cargo-passenger merchant vessel, but looked more like an oil baron's oversized yacht. The exterior was designed to be sleek, pretty, and imposing, the shape of things to come, although it did nothing to help Savannah's economics. In principle moving large amounts of cargo with nuclear power makes sense due to the long-term savings in fuel costs, especially now in the post-peak oil era, but loading and unloading cargo from Savannah's low-drag bow was a pain and the lines limited usable volume. It would've made more sense to use the Babcock & Wilcox reactor's 74 megawatts to plow through the waves with the stubby practical bow typical of true merchant ships, but the AEC let the Maritime Administration get away with a little indulgence for the demonstration project.
Over the years the novelty of moving cargo and passengers with the decay of heavy metal wore off, and when the subsidies dried up in 1972 Savannah was decommissioned. She didn't show that nuclear power was uneconomical for ships, only that it's uneconomical when combined with impractical design choices. After all, the Soviets and Russians have found much to like running their icebreakers on nuclear energy, and I suspect that this is an idea whose time will come again, when the era of cheap oil oozing from the ground is a fading memory. Until we go back to that future, we'll have the newsreels to remind us of what it was like there:
Wrangel Island is the easternmost of the archipelago of large islands in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Siberia. The island straddles the 180th meridian of longitude, is probably the last place where woolly mammoths lived, and has had an odd history of competing sovereignty claims between the United States, Canada, and the former Soviet Union. You can read more about it here: Wrangel Island
When the last Wrangel mammoth died some time between 2500 and 2000 BC, the Great Pyramids of Giza had already been built and the last Ice Age had been over for thousands of years. Though they never faced human hunting during their millennia on the island, food was always scarce, and the Wrangel mammoths were pygmies compared with the great mammoths of Siberia and the Pacific coast of North America, and they eventually died out without human intervention. The first people to set foot on Wrangel Island landed there shortly after the mammoths disappeared, but a lack of evidence of hunting indicates that human lives never crossed paths with the mammoths while they were alive. The island is a rough place to make a living and even to travel to, and it wasn't until 1881 that the first modern explorers, an American expedition led by Calvin L. Hooper, landed there and claimed sovereignty. Nuclear icebreakers make things much easier today.
Despite Hooper's claim, the United States did little to back up its ownership of the island, and the then-new Soviet government evicted the dozen or so settlers to Vladivostok, then Seattle aboard the vessel Red October in 1924. Russia still claims Wrangel today, but has mostly left it alone as a nature preserve. Wrangel Island is now one of the largest breeding grounds in the world for polar bears since they can reliably make homes there without human interference regardless of ice conditions in the Arctic. The Soviet Union's environmentalrecord can best be described as "troubling," so it's nice to see some of the outback Russia inherited has managed to stay pristine over the years.
On Cinco de Mayo, 1961, three weeks after the Soviet Union launched the first manned spaceflight in human history, Alan Shepard became the first American to venture beyond the edge of Earth's atmosphere. Shepard was a Navy test pilot at the time, would go on to serve as chief of the astronaut office during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and to this day is the only person to practice his golf swing on the Moon. You can read more about him here: Alan Shepard
Shepard is legendary mainly for drawing assignment of the big first all the Mercury astronauts pined for, although Gagarin's April flight muted the sweetness of the milestone. Though no one west of the Iron Curtain had traveled above the somewhat arbitrarily-defined edge of space before Shepard's first flight, Gagarin completed a full 90-minute orbit of Earth while the first Mercury astronauts took on suborbital missions that spent less than 15 minutes at a time off Earth, and never came close to achieving orbital speed. Shepard wanted more, but would spend most of the 1960s sidelined from the space race when Meniere's disease destroyed his sense of balance and left him prone to attacks of vertigo. Since vertigo is close to the top of the list of things that are unacceptable during spaceflight, Shepard was grounded and vented his frustration upon devoted his energy to managing the astronaut office until a cure could be found.
As luck would have it, Shepard's case of Meniere's was treatable by a surgical technique developed around the same time as the Gemini program, and after undergoing successful surgery he was once again cleared for flight status. Initially he demanded command of the first available unassigned flight, which happened to be Apollo 13, but NASA headquarters refused it, rightfully stating that he was too inexperienced to train for the flight in time. Shepard proceeded to assign himself to Apollo 14 with two rookies, allowing him to be the most veteran member of the flight without having orbited Earth a single time, and Shepard, Roosa, and Mitchell left for the Moon as the least experienced crew during the Apollo program. Despite a series of bizarre failures in the command module's docking probe and the lunar module's onboard computer and radar altimeter that three times came very close to ending the mission in failure, the crew of Apollo 14 redeemed the program after the near-disaster of Apollo 13. On top of that, Shepard managed to hit a few golf balls around on the Frau Mauro highlands. Not a bad legacy:
In 1978, about six million dollars in cash and jewels was stolen from a vault at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. At the time it was the largest heist in American history, and you can learn more about it here: The Lufthansa heist
Such a heist is unthinkable at a modern airport, and the fact that it was possible 35 years ago shows that the current aviation security environment has grown almost exclusively out of reactionary measures. At the time, millions of dollars of American currency was flown to New York from West Germany on a monthly basis after being spent by tourists and military personnel stationed in Europe. Large sums of cash don't weigh very much, so each month's shipment easily fit in the available cargo space of a Lufthansa flight. After arrival on the west side of the Atlantic, the money was stored in a vault at JFK overnight before being shipped to New York's banks the net day. There was security around the vault, but clearly it didn't pose enough of a challenge to the thieves.
Everything went relatively smoothly with the robbery itself, but afterward driver Parnell "Stacks" Edwards made the poor life choice of parking in a clearly-labelled no-parking zone and getting high with his girlfriend rather than taking the getaway van to a New Jersey junkyard. After examining the impounded van, police found Edwards's fingerprints on the steering wheel. This concerned fellow perpetrator Jimmy Burke, who proceeded to systematically murder 10 people capable of implicating him in the robbery over the next six months, Edwards first among them. As DB Cooper learned seven years earlier, even the best-case outcome from a heist often isn't very good.
Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with the Lufthansa heist, but here's a Pink Floyd song that goes with today's post nicely anyway:
Since 1882 a cathedral in Barcelona known as the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (which translates roughly into "Basilica and Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family") has been under construction, aside from a two-decade-long interlude between the Spanish Civil War and the 1950s. Designed by Antoni Gaudi and expressing Gothic and Art Nouveau architectural styles, the cathedral is a UNESCO heritage site, though its estimated completion date remains more than a decade away. You can read more about it here: Sagrada Familia
The reader is encouraged to look through Wikipedia's gallery. Like an architectural counterpart to The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," the Sagrada Familia is at once sublimely beautiful and offensive to the senses. "Ornate" is the best word that comes to mind to describe the cathedral, but seems too limited in scope to adequately capture the richly detailed Gothic design etched into the facades, spires, ceilings, and columns. Like one of the great medieval cathedrals, Sagrada Familia is so horrendously complex in design that it's been under construction for over a century and won't be finished until 2026. I won't be too surprised if the schedule slips.
I'm not sure quite what I think of the church's design. Generally I prefer elegant simplicity to baroque complexity, but it's difficult to look at the photos of construction on Sagrada Familia so far and not be struck by a sense of genius in the newness of the place. In some places, brand-new stonework sits next to 19th-Century bricks. There's something oddly alluring about a place unified in form but so diverse in provenance. Gaudi's genius took a bizarre turn, but surely the world will be richer for it when the last brick is laid in Barcelona.
Bernard Morin is a blind topologist who helped the mathematical community figure out how to invert a sphere according to the rules of topology. His Wikipedia writeup is terse, and I'm really writing this as an excuse to show these mildly mind-blowing videos about topology, which better explain the significance of what Morin did:
Remember, this was discovered by someone who was blind. To say the least, I find this impressive, and pretty,
Elbert "Burt" Rutan is an aerodynamicist and entrepreneur famous for designing and building, among other things, some of the most-produced homebuilt airplanes, the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling, the longest-range airplane ever developed (not the same as the previous entry), and the first privately-developed manned spacecraft. You can read more about him and his career here: Burt Rutan
One fact that gives some perspective on how much Rutan's done during his career is that five Rutan-designed airplanes currently reside in the National Air and Space Museum. Throughout his career Rutan viciously attacked the status quo in the aerospace industry, possibly the most conservative high-tech industry in modern civilization. Unhappy about the efficiency and performance of light aircraft, he designed the VariEze and Long-EZ, proving that airplanes can achieve the same fuel economy as the most efficient cars on the road while travelling three times as fast. Just to show a skeptical industry it could be done, he directed his company Scaled Composites to build twoairplanes capable of flying completely around Earth's circumference on one tank of fuel and a rocketplane capable of taking three people beyond the edge of Earth's atmosphere.
This Monday SpaceShipTwo, the successor to that rocketplane which now hangs next to Yeager's X-1 and Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, flew under her own power past Mach 1 for the first time. The SpaceShipTwo program has suffered numerous delays and a tragic engine-testing accident that claimed three lives in the 8 years since it got underway amid the post-X-Prize euphoria in Mojave. Since the program began, Rutan's influence at Scaled Composites began to wane, and he retired quietly a few years ago. Seeing this new spaceship, which will almost certainly be the first American machine to take people to space since Atlantis's retirement in 2011, in powered flight is a reminder of the long shadow Rutan continues to cast on aviation and space even in retirement. Truth be told, I just have a hard time not being jealous of a guy who made things like this happen, often, over a 30+ year career:
