Honorable Mentions: October / November 2013

I have been quite busy both at home and at work, and as it might be apparent, I have not been able to write as much as I would have liked to.  I even missed last month's Honorable Mentions, and because of that I am combining October with November.  Because of my busy schedule I was not able to collect as many interesting articles as I normally do, so this post will be relatively brief, but hopefully future months will be more robust.  No more excuses, here are the interesting articles and science news I have come across in the last couple months that I did not get the chance to write a full-blown post about.

3 'Modern' Inventions That Existed Millions of Years Ago: Nuclear Reactor, Telescope, Clothes

This article really irked me because this is a classic example of pseudo-science masquerading as real science.  The author tries to grab a grain of truth and expand it into a massive conspiracy theory of sorts that implies either that there was some super sophisticated human civilization around almost two billion years ago, or that aliens inhabited the Earth around that timeframe.  The first third of this article is dedicated to the only known natural fission reactor ever found in Gabon, Africa.  This is actually a very interesting phenomenon that produced a sustained nuclear fission reaction in the ground due to a combination of factors, including presence of uranium ore, geometry, groundwater permeation, and time.

The last one, time, is vitally important for this process to work naturally, because unlike today, where natural uranium contains around 0.72% Uranium 235 (what is used in today's thermal nuclear reactors), natural uranium 1.7 billion years ago contained 3.1% Uranium 235, a level that is regularly seen in enriched uranium in nuclear reactors today.  Because of this "high enrichment" of natural uranium a couple billion years ago, along with the geologic and chemical processes that concentrated the uranium ore, all it took was some groundwater to act as a moderator to set off and sustain the nuclear reaction.  In fact, it is estimated that the reactor averaged around 

It is really a fascinating bit of history, that is easily explained through natural processes, but the article tries to insist these reactors could only be produced through man-made processes based on unsubstantiated assertions and unreferenced quotes from a man that has been dead for almost fifteen years.  Anyone with any sense of science will probably dismiss this article right away, but for those who rely on science writers to do their fact-checking for them, they could easily take the information presented here as reasonable and compelling.  This is a garbage article that should never have been written and now I am only providing more links to it.

Watch LG's new flexible phone heal itself after a knife scratch

This is just simply awesome.  If you haven't heard, LG has recently released a new Android smartphone that not only has one of the world's first production curved screens, but it also is flexible and the back is made of a nano-plastic that actually heals itself when scratched lightly.  It is really a sight to be seen.  It isn't perfect, as only light scratches disappear, but still, it is a self-healing material in a mass-produced consumer product.

Unavoidable Answer for the Problem of Climate Change

I am a strong proponent of using more nuclear power as both a safer and cleaner way to generate electricity, but as a nuclear engineer myself in the industry, I know my opinion appears biased, so I try not to proselytize  too much.  The New York Times recently published an interesting article advocating nuclear power as the only viable source of large-scale, clean, and safe form of energy production, citing the situations in Germany and Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  I highly recommend you read it.

For 20 Years the Nuclear Launch Code at US Minuteman Silos Was 00000000

Minuteman Missile and Silo

This article was a bit unnerving.  Recently released government documents have revealed that for about twenty years, the Minutemen nuclear missiles stationed throughout the United States all had launch codes set to 00000000.  Not only that, but part of operating procedure at the silos was to ensure this code was always entered into the computer so that a missile launch could be executing simply by turning a key, saving precious seconds if a nuclear war ever broke out.  The Permissive Action Link, or PAL, was a small device that was designed to ensure a nuclear missile launch only happened on direct authorization from the President of the United States, rather than by some warmongering US Commanders or by a rebel group at silos stationed in foreign countries.  The Strategic Air Command in the US apparently was insulted by this order, and as soon as they were installed, changed the codes in all Minuteman silos to eight zeros.  The fear was that Washington DC would get wiped out and there would be no way to get the correct code to the silos in order to launch.  A valid concern, for sure, but it is still eerie to think how on the edge of nuclear war we sat for decades during the Cold War.

Scientists Discover Planetary System So Similar To Our Own, It's Uncanny

Extrasolar planets, or exoplanets for short, are being discovered in larger and larger numbers every day.  News has been coming out for the past year or so about planets that are closer and closer to Earth, either in size, orbit, rotation, or location within the habitable zone of its host star.  Now an entire solar system has been discovered that is similar to our own, with the large, gaseous planets in the outer orbits, and the smaller, rocky planets in the inner orbit.  One planet, though it is one of the gas giants, orbits within it's star's goldilock's zone, and has an orbital period of 331 days.  This is one of thousands of planet candidates discovered by the now shutdown Kepler mission that are still in the process of being confirmed by ground-based observations.  Even though Kepler is no longer discovering new planets, the data it has collected will provide astronomers years worth of data to pore over.