ADAMANT

Annals of Anthraxophobia

Good King Coal
Editorial
National Review
Dec 13, 1993
  by Russell Seitz

IN JUST over two centuries coal has descended from being the lifeblood of the Industrial Revolution to the environmental movement's foremost bugbear. But the world's cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel should not be allowed to come under the guns of carbon taxation without a little representation beforehand.

The glittering anthracite prized by the railways until recent decades was and remains a villain of the darkest hue smokeless and therefore apparently clean, but actually carbon dioxide incarnate, the harbinger of global warming. Anthracite is distinguished by a dearth of hydrogen, the abundance of which in natural gas is what commends the latter mightily to the environmentalists. For the heat from burning hydrogen is accompanied not by carbon dioxide, but by innocuous water vapor.

Yet curiously, almost no one advocating carbon taxes has noted that there is more hydrogen locked up in the hydrocarbon content of bituminous coals than in all the world's oil and gas combined. The best of these high-hydrogen coals contain in excess of three hydrogen atoms for every four of carbon--a distinction important enough to make possible a roughly 5 per cent reduction in global [CO.sub.2] emissions without any reduction in the amount of thermal energy derived from the coal. Such high-volatile bituminous and sub-bituminous coals are as abundant as anthracite is rare their reserves are reckoned in trillions of tons.

But the anthraxophobes have three other arrows in their quiver--sulphur, ash, and toxic metals. Some coals are burdened with all three, while others are all but free of them. Sulphur, the previous enemy number one, was laid low a decade ago by the mandated retrofitting of scrubbers to every powerplant smokestack. Most environmentalists were too busy celebrating that victory to note that the retrofit was typically accompanied by a reduction in thermodynamic efficiency that added 10 per cent to the [CO.sub.2] emitted per kilowatt hour.

Today, enjoined to reduce sulphur emissions by 90 per cent, regardless of their starting point, power plants are being denied the opportunity to reduce both their [CO.sub.2] and sulphur emissions by burning a newly discovered class of coals so clean that they do not need sulphur control. Billion-ton reserves of a new benchmark coal very high in hydrogen and startlingly low in sulphur, metals, and ash have recently been found in Indonesia. Its analysis reads like a wish-list from the Green Party. Similar deposits are avidly sought elsewhere in the tropics.

We hold no brief for strip-mining Central Europe or subsidizing the antique collieries of Wales and the Ruhr. But international free trade, by moving the best coals globally, can contribute to reducing not just environmental burdens, but the crippling effect on economic development suffered by those nations hard pressed to pay for oil. To thoughtful conservationists the worst of all possible worlds is the one in which underdeveloped nations, denied access to coal by carbon taxes, can afford only enough petroleum to run their chain saws. In a more enlightened regulatory environment, the pursuit of environmental quality via the carrot of a hydrogen-promoting rebate rather than the big stick of punitive carbon taxes could do much to help the good coals drive the bad out of circulation.

Parboiled Penguins Of The Punic Wars

Nobody in Rome or Carthage Seems to have noticed  the catastrophic meltdown of a large patch of  Antarctic ice cap in the third century BC, but the evidence is staggering - a 23,000 square kilometer  field of volcanic fallout from a crater that punched a hole in a half mile of overlying ice.

Nature Geoscience

A recent volcanic eruption beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet

Hugh F. J. Corr & David G. Vaughan

... radar data from the Hudson Mountains, West Antarctica⁵... had previously been interpreted erroneously as the ice-sheet bed. We show that the reflections are present within an elliptical area of about 23,000 km² that contains tephra from an explosive volcanic eruption... which we term the Hudson Mountains Subglacial Volcano. The layer depth dates the eruption at 207 BC240 years, which matches exceptionally strong but previously unattributed conductivity signals in nearby ice cores. The layer contains 0.019–0.31 km³ of tephra, which implies a volcanic explosive index of 3–4.

Production and episodic release of water from the volcano probably affected ice flow at the time of the eruption. Ongoing volcanic heat production may have implications for contemporary ice dynamics...

FISH STORY

What a pleasant change of pace      from  Vanity Fair  covers !

Reminds one of the publisher of The Nation's grandfathers grandfather's cousin, the mariner.

Enterprising young man, given charge of a New York sloop in 1802, when he was but 19.

Took her down east to Halifax to load salt herring and was hailed by a revenue cutter as he returned to American waters

"What Vessel are You ?"
" The Flying Fish!"

'What's your cargo?"
"Pickled Fish!"

"Who's your Captain?"
"Preserved Fish"

They boarded him and were greatly chagrined to find his papers in order.
No one could approach the  reputation for  probity  that arose from the business sign displayed outside his South Street premises in later years

Captain Preserved Fish
    Dealer in Whale Oil
        Good and Bad

Things Glow Better With Coke

A new history of the Manhattan Project records a 1943 incident  that may alarm the professionally paranoid.

Newly minted PhD. Isabella Karle's first job at the Project's University of Chicago Met Lab was  purifying  "crude plutonium dioxide in the form of greasy yellow flakes... from Oak Ridge." Close to her laboratory door was a Coca Cola machine ,of the sort that dispensed  Coke syrup and carbonated water into wax paper cups.

"The man who came to service the machine at our lunch hour forgot to bring his hose for filling the syrup reservoir. He walked into a neighboring laboratory  and borrowed a rubber hose from an aspirator, filled the the reservoir with syrup , returned the hose and left."

The transfer of plutonium to the coke machine was detected  hours later by a thirsty  technician who happened to be carrying a geiger counter.  How many  paused to refresh themselves before him remains a mystery of the atomic age.

The 100 Billion Years War

What in Hades?

If ever there is war in heaven , the armorers will head for the stockroom in search of bars of samarium 147. Because  while nowhere near as strong or keen as steel, weapons forged from it are guaranteed  to last-  the rare earth metal has a half life of 106 billion years, about eight times the age of the known universe.

This factoid  is good for more than tweaking the noses of those who take the works of John Milton literally , or base their chronology on the Begats in  Genesis. Samarium 147  has a companion isotope , Sm146, with a half life a thousand times shorter , and science  has used the two to forge the tools for dating the oldest rocks on Earth.

The oldest rocks we know, which originally crystallized  about 3,850,000 years ago , making them  less than a billion years younger than the solar system itself, come from  near the oldest Viking settlements in the New World, in Southwest Greenland, edging out those from western Australia by a hundred million years or so. Both date to a geological epoch when the Earth was indeed void and without form.

3.85 Giga-Years ago, most of  it was still bloody molten, with the first solid rock just beginning to solidify , lumps left from the earth's nebular coalescence still underfoot, and protocontinental islets   bobbing about like incandescent icebergs in a frequently asteroid-blasted magma ocean . Some think they  rafted together like white-hot  pack ice into the first masses of something resembling land, under conditions so  hellish that this first and worst of times on planet Earth is  called "The Hadean Era"

Things are a thousand degrees or so cooler now, but as climate has regained a degree in the last century, glacial retreat in Greenland has yielded better access to a wider variety of the oldest rocks .  These are beginning to shed light on a very basic qustion- how sell stirred was this hellish cauldron ?

In Science (21 December 2007:  Vol. 318. no. 5858, pp. 1907 - 1910)   Vickie C. Bennett, Alan D. Brandon, and Allen P. Nutman  report on  two rare earth element  isotopes resulting from samarium decay in the the oldest rocks.  It appears there is a  coupled  excess of neodymium-142 excesses (from decay of now-extinct samarium-146; half-life, 103 million years) and neodymium-143 excesses (from decay of samarium-147; half-life, 106 billion years), relative to chondritic meteorites, that distinctively date the formation of silicate magma reservoirs in the Earth's  first 30 million to 75 million years.

This differs enough from   the oldest rocks in Australia  to  reveal that despite  the high temperatures and all the pummeling by asteroid impacts, the  primordial lumpiness of the  early Earth's mantle persisted for at least the first billion years of Earth history:" Temporal variations in 142Nd signatures track the incomplete remixing of ...domains  formed in the Hadean mantle."

It should take the usual idiotarians less than an eon to  proclaim that all this really means is that Greenland is not so hot after all, and that any warming there is the devils work and not an act of God or man.

Very Boring How?

Something New Under The Gun

The Field reports an improbable and welcome novelty , which may appeal to upland shooting and astrophysics aficionados alike.

Low angle of incidence focusing applies to shotgun pellets as well as other energetic quanta, and the mandated switch to steel pellets now that shooting lead at waterfowl is quite illegal  carries an order of magnitude shift in Young's  modulus, necessarily entailing  a subtle switch in barrel geometry, as would a move to harder x-rays in a space telescope or synchotron collimator.  High pheasant hot shot Mike Yardley says an Italian arms firm has addressed the matter intelligently:

The barrels of the Fabarm Beta are rather unusual... bored on what the firm describe as the Tribore system. Apparently, this is patented (though... there is much precedent - over 200 years' worth - for the over-boring and taper-boring of guns).

Essentially...it - involves a barrel with an extended forcing cone leading into a wider than average bore... For some 20cm behind the choke area, moreover, the bore gradually tapers down to 18.4mm before leading into a choke which itself has a 40mm cone leading into a final, parallel section of 10mm. Fabarm claims the arrangement increases penetration and...I have no reason to doubt that based on my shooting tests...The test gun certainly shot impressively...at long range. www.vikingarms.com.

A Mammoth Headache

The Northern Lights have seen strange sights, but nothing weirder than what befell a gaggle of woolly mammoths lumbering across the Siberian tundra some 30,000 years ago-- the sky lit up with a bang as they were struck by a hail of micrometeorites  the size of shotgun pellets.

How many were struck dead  by larger fragments, or blind  by lesser ones is problematic, but nickel iron pellets have been found, only on the skyward side , of seven Yakutian  fossil mammoth tusks and a horned  bison skull found in Alaska according to a paper researchers Allen West and Richard Firestone  presented on 11 December at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"We think that the micrometeorites came from an air-burst of a meteor 30,000 to 34,000 years ago,"  Firestone, a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  told Nature "We think a wave of meteoric material sprayed the region."

Some of the tusks are peppered with hundreds of the  2 to 5 millmeter nickel-iron  fragments, which  burned  grooves into the bone. Strangely, the  damage to the tusk was first noted  not by the fearless mammoth hunters of Yakutia,  but an observant  rockhound at a fossil sale in a motel in Arizona.

According to Nature :

Allen West,[ who lives in Arizona]  was looking for evidence of a meteorite that he and his colleagues hypothesize  caused the megafaunal extinction and decline of  the Clovis people in North America some 13,000 years ago. Recalling previous visits to the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, West says, "A bulb went on in my head; I remembered seeing a room full of mammoth tusks there."  So he went to a motel that shows the fossils, and sifted through the tusks.

"I spent two or three hours looking at dirty old tusks, when suddenly there was a burnt hole," he says. He tested it with a small magnet, as he knew many meteorites were mostly iron. "Bang; it stuck right to the hole," he says.

West bought the 60-centimetre tusk for about US$200, and later headed to the warehouse of the company that he bought it from: Canada Fossils.

After three days of searching through the company's collection of some 15,000 tusks, West started to find more evidence of micrometeorites in a batch from the Yukutia Peninsula in eastern Siberia. His magnet again repeatedly hit the mark on tell-tale burn holes.

West bought these tusks too and took them to Firestone and his colleagues for geochemical analysis and radiocarbon dating

Jade Follows The Flag

Lingling-o: jade earrings   500BC-500AD

Hung, H.-C.  et al. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA (2007).Prehistoric  jade  merchants spreading  material from a single Taiwanese source may also have spread Austronesian languages throughout a huge area of Southeast Asia  Three-pointed jade ornaments called  lingling-o have been found in southeastern Taiwan, and also all the way out to the Philippines, eastern Malaysia, southern Vietnam, central and southern Thailand, and Cambodia.

Hsiao-Chun Hung, at the Australian National University in Canberra, and her colleagues used an electron microprobe  to determine elemental composition and found 116 of 144 jade ornaments from across the 3,000-kilometre-wide region came from the Fengtian jade deposit in eastern Taiwan.

They should check out Jalapa.

Gunpowdered Whigs

The first post Freedom Fries French President , M.Sarkozy enjoyed 15 minutes of Sixty Minutes fame yesterday, but this morning, a NYTimes oped asks if historians pondering the Neocon ascendancy: 

"may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism. Soon after the storming of the Bastille, pro-Revolutionary elements came together to form an association that would become known as the Jacobin Club, an umbrella group of politicians, journalists and citizens dedicated to advancing the principles of the Revolution."

Its French Canadian author leaves the NeoJacobin's role in the devolution of Republican science policy unexamined. Yet cautious palaeocons should recall that, condemned as member of the Ancienne Regime, modern chemistry's founder met an untimely end , guillotined by the Jacobin Terror.

Lavoisier's protege in the gunpowder business escaped the Terror by fleeing to America, to found a Delaware chemical dynasty, so it is no small irony that his present namesake should  elect the losing side in the science wars of today. Before Pete Du Pont fires off another WSJ fuelleton, or another half-cocked Global Warming Primer escapes quality control at his National Center for Policy Analysis, the Governor might take counsel of the scientifically astute  board of the firm that has so long  been instrumental in keeping our powder dry in all climes.

OPEN SESAME !

As if living in caves didn't present Islamotroglodytes like OBL with enough headaches, they are soon to be serenaded at their overhead doors with the Mother Of All Heavy Metal Band Props-

Ten tons or so of tungsten, depleted uranium, or tungsten carbide constitute the knocking end of this two part door opener of the rocket assisted,  6 m [20 feet] long Massive Ordnance Penetrator. The 15 ton weapon contains a  three ton explosive charge and is designed to penetrate up to 60 meters/200 feet of ordinary rock or concrete,and bury 8 meters/25 feet into reinforced concrete or even granite.

As if that's not enough, in less time than it takes to sing 'Rock of ages,cleft for me' along may come a scarcely smaller projectile, to 'ladder down' further into the ground through the rubble disrupted by the first. Northrop Grumman is working with Boeing, and they say " New more lethal defeat options for Hard and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs) like the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, that can overwhelm target uncertainties, are being developed ."

"The Direct Strike Hard Target Weapon... will make use of the JDAM interface under development for the B-52 & B-2 aircraft.The warhead will be a 20,000 lb. penetrator with dense metal ballast...an accelerometer ...allows control of the detonation point by layer counting, distance or time...The fuze can distinguish between earth, concrete, rock and air.

Performance predictions against targets were analyzed... experience has shown that 2,000 lb. penetrators carrying 500 lbs. of high explosive are relatively ineffective against tunnels, even when skipped directly into the tunnel entrance. Instead... the munition must be on the order of 20 to 30 klb. to couple a sufficient amount of energy to the tunnel. Optimized penetrators of this size ... may also be suitable for housing a clean, low-yield nuclear weapon..."

Sounds like Pinky Bhutto's chance to indulge the taste for underground testing Pakistan's military developed in her absence. Unless of course, Turkey calls dibs first on the prototypes of this NATO bolockbuster to deal with P P K die-hards holed up in what Baghdad's Deputy Prime Minister has called "the Tora Bora of Iraq."

Modern Art : The First 11,000 Years

From Jadet Moghara.       .  To.                . Piet Mondrian

Several thousand years older than agriculture, this painting on a plaster covered wall  French .   ..archaeologists  .discovered  while ......excavating a neolithic village in Syria may  equally disconcert postmodernists and conservatives, but those who think aesthetic sensibility, like the faculty of language, is hardwired into the human brain can only smile.

The walls of Jadet Moghara (or Djade al-Mughara, depending on your taste in other people's  transformational grammar) may be an eon older than Mondrian's Composition A,  but the Caves of Lascaux were already older still when the residents of suburban Aleppo took up interior decor.

What Goes Down

May not last long enough to come up

The gas business is often focused on  getting fuel out of the ground as quickly as possible. Hopes for using underground nuclear explosions as a cheap means of stimulating natural gas production in "tight ' formations were dashed a generation ago when tests revealed detectable traces of radioactivity in the nuked wells gas production for years after . Most of the activity was tritium, which takes decades to decay away, making the cost of embargoing production until isotopes cool down prohibitive.You might as well look at coal bed methane instead.

The needs of CO2 sequestration are very different-the object is to stuff the greenhouse gas into a hole the ground and keep it there almost forever -- centuries at least. It therefore matters less if it traverses some radioactive rock on the way down , and out of circulation. CO2 is physically and chemically very different from methane too. It  liquefies easily when pressurized at room temperature , and the liquid is a fine solvent for all manner of things- it can extract and dilute nuclear explosive debris and also deposit it as insoluble carbonates throughout a vast volume of porous rock far underground.

A lot may be learned about the geophysics and geochemistry of related processes as work in Iceland and elsewhere proceeds  on injecting CO2 into physically  hot strata of  volcanic ash and tuff to see how well it binds to form new and stable minerals. This was discussed by Iceland's President in his speech here at Harvard yesterday.

So as green carbon sequestration enthusiasm proliferates, don't be surprised if common cause arises between those scratching their heads about the safe disposal of Cold War stockpile  surplus warheads and weapons grade nuclear materials ASAP, and those anxious to take CO2 out of circulation. Some of the loose nukes may yet be benignly, and  perhaps profitably , disposed of the old fashioned way.

By detonating them.

Zap Gun 101:

Gamma Ray Lasers Get Closer

Many have tried and failed to stimulate isomeric isotopes into emitting  high energy photons enough  to serve as a gain medium and produce a coherent gamma ray  beam  that might serve as a laser for purposes civil and military. Princeton's Richard Wheeler surfaced the idea of matter-antimatter annihilation  in positronium serving this purpose decades ago, but only now have electron-positron molecules been observed to condense into quantum states of technological use in applications as diverse as space propulsion and medicine.

Spin exchange quenching of molecular species containing antimatter may lead to stable  Bose-Einstein condensates of  materials like Dipositronium, making possible stored energy densities vastly higher than today's, and coherent emission at wavelengths short enough to image -- and 'optically' pump-- nuclear quantum states, yielding  advances comparable to those stemming from the discovery of x-rays or nuclear magnetic resonance : Nature 449, 195-197  13 September  2007  

The production of molecular positronium

D. B. Cassidy¹ & A. P. Mills, Jr¹

It has been known for many years that an electron and its antiparticle, the positron, may together form a metastable hydrogen-like atom, known as positronium or Ps (ref. 1). In 1946, Wheeler speculated² that two Ps atoms may combine to form the di-positronium molecule (Ps₂), with a binding energy³ of 0.4 eV. More recently, this molecule has been studied theoretically⁴; however, because Ps has a short lifetime and it is difficult to obtain low-energy positrons in large numbers, Ps₂ has not previously been observed unambiguously⁵. Here we show that when intense positron bursts are implanted into a thin film of porous silica, Ps₂ is created on the internal pore surfaces. We found that molecule formation occurs much more efficiently than the competing process of spin exchange quenching, which appears to be suppressed in the confined pore geometry. This result experimentally confirms the existence of the Ps₂ molecule and paves the way for further multi-positronium work. Using similar techniques, but with a more intense positron source, we expect to increase the Ps density to the point where many thousands of atoms interact and can undergo a phase transition to form a Bose–Einstein condensate⁶. As a purely leptonic, macroscopic quantum matter–antimatter system this would be of interest in its own right, but it would also represent a milestone on the path to produce an annihilation gamma-ray laser⁷.

9/11 101

The destruction of the World Trade Center and the assault on the Pentagon may well represent an effort to overcome Western media speed and diffusion, and to do so by staging a startling cataclysm involving potent national symbols.

But more than that: It would represent an adjustment of the scale of potential terror to the scope of available media.

That is, it would not merely have overcome a diffused and quickly distracted media, it would have used the real-time abilities of the new media to stage an epic of murder and destruction, immersing a worldwide audience in horror and confusion as the events occurred. In the end, it would not merely have used media as a tool to disseminate an idea and demoralize an enemy, it would have used the media as one of its primary weapons, and made the audience participants in the apocalypse itself.

--Charles Paul Freund, September 11, 2001

Illegally Blonde

Germany's Peroxide Explosives Plot represents a long standing  problem--witness this 2006 Wall Street Journal--piece

In The Heat Of The Nitrate

             OpEd -BYLINE]

By Russell Seitz

      As the War on Terror enters its fifth year, the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration and their Canadian counterparts spend billions sniffing for nitrogen-based explosives ranging from reeking TNT to odorless ammonium nitrate. But you can't detect what's not there.

The explosives that killed more than 50 Britons last summer and made Zacarias Moussaoui's pal the Shoe Bomber infamous were nitrogen free. No English beauty-counter cashier thought to ask : "does he, or doesn't he?" as the London subway bombers bought cases of Clairol and nail polish remover to turn into a homebrew explosive with an all but self-explanatory name: tri-acetone peroxide, which the villains used to shattering effect. Now word comes from Canada not of another peroxide bombshell, but of the interdiction of three tons of terror's old standby, ammonium nitrate. What about the megaton that got away?

Yesterday, Canada's new Conservative minister of natural resources , Gary Lunn, told me that while the system is working-- witness the arrests in Toronto, his new portfolio includes examining such possibilities as establishing retail logs of explosive fertilizer sales. He has reason to be concerned. From a terrorist's perspective, the Canadian wheat belt looks like Pandora's cornucopia.

Our northern neighbor last year produced over 50 Hiroshima's worth of ammonium nitrate, along with a million tons of sodium chlorate. Besides providing the newsprint you read, that commonplace wood pulp bleach furnished the match head bombs the Unibomber used to go postal. Even if the Mounties guarded every ounce of these compounds, there'd still be enough urea and nitric acid to pack every van north of the border with the equivalent of a ton of TNT.

Here as in Canada (the Toronto suspects were visited by cronies from Georgia), explosive fertilizers continue to be used by the literal megaton, not just down on the farm, but by millions of suburbanites. Each spring home and garden centers turn into explosive buffets.

What is truly terrifying is how little has changed since the Oklahoma City bombing led to the (supposedly) Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995. Ten dollars still buys all the NH4NO3 a strong man can carry, and you can load an SUV for a $100 or so, no questions asked. Not in Europe. Decades of IRA and ETA bombings led authorities there to halt pure ammonium nitrate sales, but gardens stayed green with blends bulked out with inert lime to render them difficult to explode without a dynamite primer. America considered such steps in the aftermath of the 1993 World Trace Center attack, but explosives lobbyists argued successfully that blending fertilizer molecules cannot change the thermodynamic facts-- they remain unstably packed with energy awaiting detonation .It doesn't take rocket science to harvest  powerful explosives from all but inert  blends. So though fertilizers fell under increased scrutiny, bomb ingredients have remained widespread.

In a nation of basement tinkerers, black-powder rifle clubs and nitromethane-fueled stock cars, abolishing explosives belongs where it remains,atop the too hard pile of policies democracies can undertake only at risk of being branded totalitarian. But abolition and control are very different things. The ethnic profiling of peroxide purchasers in melting pots like New York or Toronto remains as absurd as expecting transit cops to distantly eyeball the difference between Hajjis and Hasidim or Salafis and Sikhs.

Yet a case exists for restricting bulk acetone and peroxide sales along with those of decongestant tablets prone to end up in illicit crystal meth labs. But while ephedrine is rare, it takes a great deal of cheap fertilizer to feed the world. Ammonium nitrate, literally made out of air and water, is dirt cheap. Last year four billion pounds was legally sold in the United States. Europe learned what these enormous numbers mean the hard way, starting in 1921, when a stockpile detonation obliterated the Rhineland town of Oppau. America found out in 1948, as 1,260 citizens of Texas City died in a shipload explosion.

Despite concerted efforts to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the International Atomic Energy Agency has no conventional explosives mandate. With oil prices high, conventional explosives cost less than gasoline, and only constant vigilance keeps terrorists --denied nukes-- from turning aging supertankers into virtual H-bombs.and at ground zero, all kilotons, nuclear and conventional, are created equal. Before those with Toronto or New York harbor views laugh off that novelistic notion, they should check the shipping news. Thousands of barge- and train- loads of ammonium nitrate still ply the nation's waterways and rails every year.

This is as true of the Mississippi as the Saint Laurence -- or the Indus and the Rhine. These dangerous cargoes are better guarded today than in 1995, but they remain at risk of meeting up with the miles of detonating cord still stolen annually from ill-secured mines and quarries. Sept. 11 is supposed to have changed everything. But what about the objections that explosives industry spokesmen voiced to Congress in 1995 about complicating commerce by ordering the use of tracers to link explosive fertilizer ingredients to terrorists? Today, radio frequency tags aid in detecting inventory theft and magnetic resonance and X-ray fluorescence promise undreamed-of sensitivity in detecting bombs in transit. Will the explosives and agrochemical industries rise to the challenge or deny the opportunity these new technologies pose?

Like Pearl Harbor or The Trojan Horse, 9-11 is a hard act to follow. Hollywood's capacity to inflict computerized terror on the popular imagination grows with every advance in animation, yet it still cannot deliver anything transcending the Twin Towers fall. But that act s very enormity pales when we realize that while we have a fighting chance of stopping hijackers or stemming nuclear proliferation, fanatic groundlings still have nearly universal access to all the explosives they could ever desire  As long as they do, we must exercise the imagination of disaster or endure unending surprise.

 

[SHIRT] Mr. Seitz lives in Cambridge Massachusetts; as an Associate of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, he testified to Congress on The Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995.

 

Big Guns And Smoking Bullets

Nature has reported a 90% sure conclusion to the Great Dead Dinosaur Whodunit--

. An asteroid breakup 160 Myr ago as the.probable source of the K/T impactor

William F. Bottke¹, David Vokrouhlický^1,2 & David Nesvorný¹

The terrestrial and lunar cratering rate is often assumed to have been nearly constant over the past 3 Gyr. Different lines of evidence, however, suggest that the impact flux from kilometre-sized bodies increased by at least a factor of two over the long-term average during the past 100 Myr. Here we argue that this apparent surge was triggered by the catastrophic disruption of the parent body of the asteroid Baptistina, which we infer was a 170-km-diameter body (carbonaceous-chondrite-like) that broke up Myr ago in the inner main asteroid belt. Fragments produced by the collision were slowly delivered by dynamical processes to orbits where they could strike the terrestrial planets. We find that this asteroid shower is the most likely source (>90 per cent probability) of the Chicxulub impactor that produced the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) mass extinction event 65 Myr ago.

Here's a piece of the lethal <<weapon
Found in 1998, and now entered into evidence -- this split-open  2.5 mm clay-encrusted bit of carbonaceous chondrite, found in a deep sea drill core, may indeed be a fragment of the Baptistina parent body  asteroid that gave rise to the meteor responsible for the Yucatan impact crater.

Here also is the Nature article's diagram of the post breakup orbital  pattern of the asteroidal buckshot  that turned the inner solar system into the shooting gallery we inhabit today

 

Very Distant Early Warning

Gravity's Rainbow Comes Full Circle

Nature reports that pulsars were first discovered not by astronomers, but a US Air Force radar technician maintaining the lonely  Distant Early Warning Line vigil against Soviet ICBM attack. Bound by a strict Cold War security oath, he kept silent for half a century, until  Alaska 's Clear Station was recently decommissioned :

"Earlier this month, 81-year-old Charles Schisler came forward to tell the story of how he used a military radar to identify around a dozen radio sources, some of which were pulsars. Astronomers who have seen Schisler's meticulous logs believe that he spotted a bright pulsar in the nearby Crab Nebula months before the first scientific observation of a pulsar was published in Nature (A. Hewish et al. Nature 217, 709-713; 1968). Although Schisler never knew exactly what he was seeing, the story should be counted as an early pulsar spotting, says Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the authors on the original paper. "He happened to be a very observant person," Bell Burnell says

Britannica Blog 's Robert McHenry notes that :

"This anecdote makes a nice companion to the story of Karl Jansky, who went looking for the sources of static in 1933 and invented radio astronomy."

A decade later, in the depths of World War II, a British radio astronomer had the bright idea of warning his nation of the silent approach of supersonic  V-2 missiles by  listening for the whistling radio noise reflected by the Vergetungswaffen ionization trails as they transited  the ionosphere. This tale of Sferic glitter atop gravity's rainbow was not lost on a Cornell literature student with a scientific bent by the name of Thomas Pynchon.

There's no stopping astrophysicists. Some hit the stars even when they aim for London

Cold Fear In Orbit

Few things come colder than fear.

Liquid hydrogen is one of them. Four years after the disastrous crack-up of space shuttle Columbia, NASA's flying flatiron has suffered another self-inflicted wound,apparently for the same stone cold reason. Little wonder astronauts have been known to have a few stiff drinks,  but here's a sober account  of the present problem from one in training . And-- my  Op-Ed account of  what was supposed to be the last shuttle autopsy; click the image at the left to see the result of the current launch damage .

Too Strong is Never Wrong

The Wall Street Journal  28 August 2003

   By Russell Seitz                                                       copyright 2003 the author & Dow Jones Inc.

Seeing is believing, but whether it's 9-11, or the Columbia disaster, it can take months to comprehend what takes seconds to witness .The more you replay the slow motion video of NASA's test gun shooting a hole in a space shuttle wing, the harder it is to accept what a chunk of glorified Styrofoam did to Columbia. It's as though one of the Titanics lifeboats rammed and sank the iceberg. But watch we must--to avoid future disasters it is vital to understand past ones.

The space shuttle may look like a flatiron clad in firebrick, but it's really a flying soufflé. Its wing tiles have the density of Balsa wood, and the insulation on its liquid hydrogen tank makes cork look heavy. What punched a hole in the wing weighed in at just two pounds per cubic foot- so light that the 1,600-mile an hour air stream screaming by stopped it almost cold. Whereupon the oncoming wing hit it at 500 miles an hour.

When physics happens, tragedy can unfold with the bizarre internal logic of a Road Runner cartoon.It is easy to forget that the weaker things are, the denser they can get.

The Great Triumvirate

LEST WE FORGET

Will California Be Blown Into The Gulf Of Mexico?

Wired reports the DOE's bureaucratic death-wish has morphed into an Aggie Joke:
Awarding the security contract for   
the nation's premier atomic weapons lab to
Texas Agricultural & Mechanical

What happened to the bid from Perdenales College of Thermonuclear Knowledge ?

Nanomaterials And Megabombs

What could a checkerboard of satellite reflections in the diffraction pattern of a nanostructured lithium perovskite ion conductor have to do with thermonuclear proliferation risks ?  Iteration is a powerful concept in all kinds of physics, and nuclear reactions are no exception. Like most other technologies, nanotech often has dual-use  potential.

If  fissionable actinides were substituted for lanthanide ions in the  periodic two-dimensional nanoscale phase separation  of (Nd 2/3-x Li)TiO 3,as reported by Guiton and Davies in  Nature  Materials, the resulting lithum enriched superlattices could become  something more than templates for nanostructure  fabrication. They might host a new regime of boosted fission- fusion reactions.   Nanoworld notes  :

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) with the electron beam parallel to [001] of several (Nd 2/3-x Li)TiO3 powder samples (range 0.047 < x < 0.151) reveal two distinct contrast patterns with identical periodicity: a nanoscale chessboard and a diamond design.

Higher resolution TEM images show the two patterns simultaneously, suggesting that they represent aspects of the same structural feature. Z-contrast imaging shows that the diamond patterning is a result of the oxide undergoing phase separation into Li-rich squares and Li-poor boundary regions. By varying the ratio of Nd to Li in the bulk, the periodicity of the patterns can be controlled. Estimates of the composition of the two phases, made from TEM images, were verified using multislice simulations.

“Spontaneous phase separation with such long range periodicity has not, to our knowledge, been observed previously in any inorganic material,” says Beth S. Guiton.

“It is particularly interesting in this case because it occurs both on the nanometer length scale and two dimensionally.” The range of ordering and the ability to tune unit cell dimensions implies that inexpensive standard ceramic processing methods could be used to engineer nanostructures with great precision.

PROLIFERATION & TERRORISM 101

' Interesting Times ' Is Now Available Online
" Daddy, what did you do in The Gulf War?"
" My duty , child- I gave fair warning about the next one."

In 1993 Harvard's Center For International Affairs published four "Working Papers" outlining the "Project On The Changing Security Environment And America's National Interests" of its John M.Olin Institute For Strategic Studies.

You may have heard of Number Four, " The Clash Of Civilizations " , by then director Samuel Huntington.  I wrote Number Two " Interesting Times ",  explaining why I expected Bad Things to happen as the globalization of high tech gave villains, terrorists and failed states  ever greater access to the Wrong Stuff.

The Pentagon think-tanks and the War Colleges snapped up most of the hard copies, and Tom Clancy used one as a backgrounder for Sum Of All Fears, and a Washington Post Op-Ed we coauthored entitled "Nuclear Ubiquity ."  Only now have Harvard's belabored librarians got around to rendering the whole thing in electronic form. Here it is, as a PDF.

In the grim light of how Dpl.Ing Muhammad al Atta applied his newly acquired engineering skills to the late World Trade Center, it seems almost sufficiently pessimistic about the potential blowback from  America and Europe furnishing thousand of advanced degrees to all comers from the Middle East-- Download seitz_harvard_terrorism_report_q6hx29v.pdf

The Iceman Cometh From Montreal

Do Explosive Refrigerants Count As 'Environmental Protection' ?

Some things get discovered before they are predicted. Once 19th century savants had explained that growing levels of carbon dioxide from the Industrial Revolution would trap heat from the sun, scientifically literate Victorians had no cause for  surprise as  temperatures rose in the 20th  century.

Ozone depletion was completely different. It came as a scientific shock. Its explanation could only follow its detection, for its cause turned out to be something new to science and industry alike. A novel class of chemical compounds called Freons, developed in the 1930’s, proved unprecedented in their long atmospheric lifetime and ability to catalyze stratospheric photochemical reactions. They were capable of destroying ozone faster than sunlight could create it, thinning the ozone layer that shields us from sunburn by soaking up ultraviolet rays far overhead. The increasing transparency of the stratosphere, first noted over Antarctica, was amplified by the high concentrations of Freon molecules swept into the vortex perpetually swirling around the South Pole.

What was seen beginning in the coldest reaches of the sky could clearly spread out over more temperate and populated regions if nothing were done , for  Freon releases into the atmosphere were growing as fast as consumer demand for  refrigerators, air conditioners and spray cans. Once this was realized, a universal desire to stave off harm gave rise to an international treaty for the control of ozone depleting substances. It was President Reagan who signed it.

In contrast to global warming, ozone depletion involved a clear and present

Bizarro World

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
,Yes, there is one.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,It has an extra 'Z'.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,............,,,,,You are on it.

The latest astrophysical news is that  it's  a whole bizarro solar system in fact, blown into  counterintuitive existence by an ultra-massive supernova explosion that waffle-stomped the pre-solar nebula out of interstellar gas with a  shock wave blow-off rich in radioactive Aluminum 26.

Then a million years later came the grand finale- the detonation of the still-massive dying star's core in a blaze of neutron-enriched iron 60. It happens rarely, and only in the gnarliest stellar neighborhoods, like the distant Eagle Nebula, above , leaving them scarred with weirdly legible isotopic graffiti forever.

That's the meteorite geochemistry skinny just published in Science , and the lead author is, who else , Martin Bizzarro, whose vocation was clearly written in the stars long before the war against cliche' began , let alone was lost -
Evidence for a Late Supernova Injection of ⁶⁰Fe into the Protoplanetary Disk

Martin Bizzarro,  David Ulfbeck, Anne Trinquier, et al.

High-precision ⁶⁰Fe-⁶⁰Ni isotope data show that most meteorites originating from differentiated planetesimals that accreted within 1 million years of the solar system's formation have ⁶⁰Ni/⁵⁸Ni ratios that are 25 parts per million lower than samples from Earth, Mars, and chondrite parent bodies. This difference indicates that the oldest solar system planetesimals formed in the absence of ⁶⁰Fe.

World War 2.0 ?

Following  lethal riots over the removal of a Soviet era Red Army  war memorial , Estonia has come under Cyber attack from within Russia . Phillip Ball reports in Nature :

The attacks on Estonian websites, triggered by the government's decision to relocate a Soviet-era war memorial, consisted of massed, repeated requests for information that overwhelmed servers and caused sites to freeze — an effect called distributed denial of service...

The attack is particularly serious for Estonia because of its intense reliance on computer networks for government and business. It boasts a 'paperless government' and even its elections are held electronically. Indeed, information technology is one of Estonia's principal strengths — which is why it was able to batten down the hatches so quickly in response to the attack. In late 2006, Estonia even proposed to set up a cyber-defence centre for NATO.

More on how the denial of use wave assaults are progressing and how the Kremlin is spinning it, at 

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070521/full/070521-8.html

Dryas Dust-Up ?

A mammoth debate looms over The American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco. Did a comet impact 13,000 years ago cause the last major Ice Age climate conniption , the Younger Dryas Period , which saw a huge temperature swing in a single century ?

The 2004 beta version of this , well, interesting , impact hypothesis relied on the claim, since withdrawn, that North America , then home to  Clovis Culture neolithic hunters,  was whacked by supernova debris instead of a gardenvariety Oort cloud comet. So fur may fly as Dos Equis, and the odd can of Velikovsky Lite flows in Acapulco--  Rex Dalton reports in Nature :447, 256-257 (17 May 2007)

"Around 13,000 years ago, North America was a busy place. Millennia of ice sheets had melted away, and humans crossed from Siberia to Alaska, spreading from the Canadian woods to the lush Carolina coastline. But after just two centuries of hunting mammoth, bison and horse, this 'Clovis' culture suddenly disappeared¹, posing one of the great anthropological questions of the peopling of the Americas: why did the New World's most sophisticated hunters of the time suddenly vanish?

Holding Up A Mirror To Vanity Fair

After decades of cheerfully submitting to Greenmail , some of Europe's more literate glossies are having second thoughts about Apocalyptic Earth Day covers. Instead of  more over-the-top Frankenstein spin on climate gone wild , Germany's Der Spiegel  has paid homage to Lichtenstein with this iconic wind-down from the ritual hysteria of past decades.

It's no coincidence that Greatest Living Horror Film Producer Roland Emmerich , who inundated Manhattan in The Day After Tomorrow , and vaporized the White House in  Independence Day ,  got his first really good table at Planet Hollywood after launching The Noah's Ark Principle at Berlin's Green Film Festival 25 years ago.

Very Interesting, its script is--an oil war in Iraq changes the Earth's climate, you see, so only the UN's weather satellites can save us from....

Hot Lead Type Once Headlined New York Times

The ghastly shootings at Virginia Tech have driven  The New York Times into an editorial snit. But though the  mantras of gun control drown out the paper's ancestral voices, its morgue hosts bloody accounts of Civil War Draft Riots raging on the newspaper's doorstep even as Confederate guns thundered within earshot of the District of Columbia.

In 1864, a gun toting mob sought to lynch the newspaper's Editor for a reason some 21st century  readers might approbate:
Henry Jarvis Raymond served as  Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

It did not greatly signify that Abe Lincoln was a bit of a Whig-- what made the mob howl was the rhetoric of  the newspaper's competitors. The New Yorker 's Horace Greeley smiled to see siege laid to his hated  rival at The New-York Times , but as armed thugs marched up Broadway,  Raymond, who had seen battle with General McClellan in Virginia, prepared a stern Editorial reaction.

He put himself the  on firing line by deploying a Gatling Gun in The New York Times newsroom window and another in the paper's front entrance , "commanding Park Row to the north", and the deterrent saved the day . 

How times have changed  since The Times appeared "in full mourning" after Raymond died of apoplexy in 1867.

In the newsroom where he invoked the Second Amendment in defense of the First 1n 1864,  his successors mostly plead the Fifth.

Indifferent to the Gray Lady's  pleas for disarmament in the Demon Nerd of Blacksburg's  wake  , Miss Venus Ramey of nearby Waynesburg  Ky. braced herself in her walker last Friday and shot the tires out from under a carload of escaping burglary suspects. Not having a Gatling to hand, the 82 year old former Miss America of 1944 used her trusty 38  Police Special.

THE HUNDRED YEARS' CLIMATE WAR

Consider the headline possibilities had Al Gore been FDR's running mate:

......'All We Have To Fear Is Air Itself ' ROOSEVELT & GORE
..............DECLARE NEW DEAL ON GLOBAL WARMING

.. League  of  Nations Scientists Warn Of  Meltdown
                   .  ..         If  Hoover Re-elected

............    Too corny for you ?  What about  :

..........'Fish Will Swim In Buckingham Palace'

.............................Wait a minute- that's not a parody-- 
........................It's a real quote from The New York Times !

Forget the 1938 Hurricane, the Dust Bowl or the climate destroying Niton Ray of art deco Eco-terrorist Ming the Merciless. In 1932 The Times rendered The Great Depression even more depressing with this forecast of the shape of things to come:

'The Earth is steadily growing warmer. As all the ice at the two poles melts a stupendous volume of water will be released.

Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace...New York will be marked by the...taller skyscrapers as they jut out of the water...the climate..as when dinosaurs roamed the earth and dense jungles...grew in...Canada.

Palms and alligators would flourish at the poles ...man's food supply will not ...it is a question if he will survive '

..................-- The New York Times..May 15, 1932

        Here's the whole thing , direct from The Times archive :

Not So Heavy Artillery

The U.S. Army has received the  first  of 273  M777A1 lightweight 155mm howitzers.  The  5 ton , 1.7 million dollar British designed gun replaces the M198.  Four tons lighter by virtue of extensive use of titanium, and  finite element design , the M777A1 can  be slung into battle by  existing Army helicopters. After landing, its crew of five can  ready the howitzer  to fire in under three minutes, and prepare it to move out  in under two . The gun's reduced weight is tactically critical, because  ten 155mm shells with propellant weigh about a ton, and the four ton savings equals enough extra firepower to chew up a battalion

What makes this development  scary is the GPS guided Excalibur shell , accurate to ten meters at a range of up to 40 kilometers.Eat your heart out,Annie Oakley- that's ten yards at 25 miles. 

Talked to Death

In today's Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchen's tells of recently visiting Robert Conquest , whom he calls "the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny."  Conquest , the  British  historian who is doyen of Stanford's Hoover Institution on War and Revolution ,  indeed did more to gently bring Soviet horrors into history's withering glare than any man save Solzhenitsyn.

Today , Conquest is finishing a new edition of The Great Terror , but  in 1970 , I witnessed  the improbable process  of its overthrow at work in London, where the foundations of Communist legitimacy  were slowly eroded , a week at a time, as  Conquest , Kingsley Amis , Tibor Szamuely Robert Brain and sundry Tory mandarins assembled for long and often heroically alcoholic lunches at an Italian restaurant in the Portobello Road.

The Soviets scoffed at these seemingly impotent literary proceedings for a decade  -did Literati who Lunch expect to laugh an empire to death ?  Yet each week they wobbled forth to nap off the  proceedings, and awoke to write , and publish , things newly learned from an unending stream of luncheon guests. By 1985, the title of one  exile work much discussed at that table, Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984 ?' no longer seemed comic to the Kremlin. Four years later, the Berlin Wall fell.

Throughout this time Conquest was too busy hammering out books to allow him to relate the rest of his witness to what was indeed a cultural revolution. That's where Hitchens has very good news about software giving Conquest's verbal fisking of recieved history a new lease on life--

"Starting tomorrow, when I'm finished with doing 'The Great Terror.' I'm going to try dictating them into this new machine . . . Liddie, what's it called?"

Mrs. Conquest--a scholar of English who first told me that Henry James always dictated his novels--comes up with the name of the new voice-activated software. "It's called 'Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine.'" Golly. "Well, my handwriting's pretty bad and my typing is worse," says Mr. Conquest apologetically. That's true enough, as I know, but I can't help thinking that if "Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine" really works, and if it had been available in the 1960s, then the Soviet Union would probably have fallen several years before it actually did."

OWEN HARRIES

The man who launched The End Of History is alive , well, and manifestly still worth listening to, as in this interview with Francis Fukuyama

And the winner is :

1st Place in the 2006 Darwin Awards has gone to a Brazillian garage employee who tried to disassemble a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) by driving back and forth over it with a car. When this technique proved ineffective, he tried pounding the recalcitrant RPG with a sledgehammer. Its explosion took out one other man, six cars and the repair shop .Finding 14 more RPG's nearby, police concluded the missile was being broken up for scrap metal.      It is now.