Thursday, February 18, 2016

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

DDT and the 100 Million

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-truth-about-ddt-and-silent-spring
"In the last days of September 1943, as the U.S. Army advanced to the rescue of Italian partisans — some as young as nine — battling the Germans in the streets of Naples, the enraged Nazis, in a criminal act of revenge against their erstwhile allies, deployed sappers to systematically destroy the city’s aqueducts, reservoirs, and sewer system. This done, the supermen, pausing only to burn irreplaceable libraries, including hundreds of thousands of volumes and artifacts at the University of Naples — where Thomas Aquinas once taught — showed their youthful Neapolitan opponents their backs, and on October 1, to the delirious cheers of the Naples populace, Allied forces entered the town in triumph."

"But a city of over a million people had been left without sanitation, and within weeks, as the Germans had intended, epidemics broke out. [read on]"

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Gravity Waves

http://www.space.com/31922-gravitational-waves-detection-what-it-means.html

The news says gravity waves have been discovered. The headlines say "Einstein proven right" though really, the physics world was not all that apprehensive. The excitement is that we now have a new way to look at the world.


Space.com has a good news release with a video on the implications. Ricochet explains the experiment for an adult layman audience. This Verge video has the background, like how Einstein's concept of gravity is like bending space instead of Newton's idea of a force.