Greetings!

Here’s one nuke plant that won’t be built. Even with being able to bill customers before the plant was even started, they still couldn’t make money. Now the ratepayers will have to pay for the work that’s already been done. Don’t worry about the Duke shareholders, they won’t take a loss. See, Duke has a legislatively guaranteed profit margin!

At Fukushima, they built a wall to keep the groundwater from the sea.  Perhaps somebody should have pointed out that groundwater would still have to  go somewhere, in this case up.  Think about trying to work that site when the entire place is soft mud made with radioactive groundwater. In theory, they have pumps which could remove the water, but to where? Their tank farm is getting full, they can’t build new ones fast enough, and there are growing questions about tank construction and tank life.  UPDATE: Japan has now declared a “State of Emergency” as the water IS over the wall.

Meanwhile, climate change speeds up due to our use of carbon. We’re now at about 10x faster than at any time in detected history. And our congress reacts to this crisis by putting this man in charge of the house climate subcommittee.

New water splitting technique that could lead to a hydrogen fuel source. This is entirely solar powered.

Hubble proves that one cause of short duration Gamma ray bursts is two small, massively dense objects colliding. Somebody needs to explain why we don’t get these bursts when congresscritters debate. Surely they are smallminded and dense enough!

The Thirty meter telescope reaches another milestone.  For most of my youth  (since 1949) the Hale telescope at roughly 5 meters  was the largest telescope available.

A comet graveyard!

How to turn glass into super glass. Coming soon to a windshield or cellphone near you. Just plain cool how they did it.

Ever wonder how living bodies make the complicated minerals we need to grow? Turns out we use sugar. And now science can use the same techniques!.

A practical supercapacitor. Made of graphene, yet! One of the gripes of the electric car is the recharge time. This would reduce the recharge time to under 5 minutes. Ditto cellphones. And no nasty heavy metals!

New cavefish species discovered. Named for the horrible illness the expedition members got when diving for it.

Latest on Dark Matter.

The Discovery Institute is upset because Intelligent Design won’t be taught as part of a SCIENCE class at Ball Sate U.  I’m kinda upset that the professor who wanted to do I.D. is keeping his job. I’ll call it a compromise and move on.

The Tardigrade prefers extreme environments. This is an example of the sort of thing we should look for on Mars.

Boxturtle (I found Twice Upon a Time on Youtube!)