As an undergraduate student at Ohio State (I studied Geology) I was intrigued to find that hydrogeologists were indirect fans of the era of nuclear weapons testing. By “indirect” I mean that they didn’t really approve of the testing itself, but they loved the fact that the radioactivity put into the environment could be quite [...]
First we got the bomb and that was good, ‘cause we love peace and brotherhood. Then Russia got the bomb, but that’s OK ‘cause the balance of power’s maintained that way. Who’s next? From the song “Who’s Next” by musician, satirist, and mathematician Tom Lehrer An early American nuclear submarine, the USS Scorpion, [...]
Say a dirty bomb goes off in your city – say contamination is spread over a few billion dollars’ worth of property. Government buildings are contaminated. Parks are contaminated. So are trendy restaurants and gentrifying apartment buildings, subway tracks and cars and busses. Tens of thousands of people are contaminated as well as are many [...]
As the grandson and nephew of dentists I was probably the only kid at school who actually enjoyed going to the dentist. In fact, it wasn’t until I joined the Navy that I understood why my classmates never shared my enthusiasm for practitioners of the dental arts – having my wisdom teeth removed in preparation [...]
Fissile materials have been in the news a lot in recent years – Iran’s uranium enrichment program, North Korea’s continuing nuclear weapons program, the on-going nuclear security summit, and so forth. Given all of this attention this seems like a good time to talk about what fissile materials are and how they’re produced – and [...]
Growing up intermittently Catholic, I was taught about Limbo – a sort of antechamber to heaven that holds the souls of those who were never baptized by who had not committed a sin of their own. Those souls in Limbo aren’t admitted to Heaven, but neither are they sent to Hell – they are simply [...]
Over the weekend Earth was slammed by the biggest solar storm in about a decade. Days earlier a huge x-class solar flare (the most powerful category) had blasted millions of tons of hydrogen into space, with Earth in the cross-hairs. The eruption – called a coronal mass ejection – blasted through space at more than [...]
Consider a hypothetical world in which there are four equally possible causes of death – cancer, heart disease, infectious disease, and accidents. Now imagine that, through a miracle of medicine and public health we were to eliminate all deaths from infectious disease – what would happen to our causes of death? All else being equal, [...]
Recent discussions in the media about various “existential threats” have got me to wondering exactly what this term means – and as what you might call a “recovering professor” I’m also wondering whether or not this term is being used correctly or consistently by all of those bandying it about. And for those of you [...]
I am a health physicist. And no, this is not the first admission in a 12-step program – more like a statement that means very little to most of the people in the US. If I tell the person next to me on a plane, for example, that I am a health physicist they usually [...]