scientists discover radiation-absorbing mineral

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Found this on Slashdot:
RussiaToday : News : Russian scientists discover radiation- absorbing mineral

Russian scientists in the Khibinsky Mountains in the Arctic Circle have made an important scientific discovery. They’ve found a new mineral which absorbs radiation…. It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste.

After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe. Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different, as both accidents resulted in contamination from radioactive water.

However, it is not as simple as it sounds. Scientists say they need tonnes of it and so far they have only discovered a few grammes. But they are confident that they can chemically reproduce it on a much larger scale.

And here I am trying to justify the value of curiousity and inquiry in early childhood education. “Look! It’s a rock!” “Cool, let’s see if it absorbs nuclear radiation?” “Sure, lets!”

Sounds strange to me though. Perhaps the mineral blocks the damage of radiation, but the radio active material is still a function of decay of the atom, and that’s not going to stop just cause you dump some rocks inside.

The dangers of techies running the show. And the horrors of doing it yourself.

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

I just found this paper that I wrote for some conference back in 2000: The dangers of techies running the show. And the horrors of doing it yourself. I’d completely forgot about it. Though perhaps that’s a good thing.

Method of Reading Discovered

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Something else i found on Slashdot:
The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists.

Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case.

In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously.

At the BA Festival of Science in York, the researchers also revealed that our brain can fuse two separate images to obtain a clear view of a page.

Rather than the eyes moving smoothly over text, they make small jerky movements, focusing on a particular word for an instant and then moving along the sentence. Periods when the eyes are still are called fixations.