Nuclear Weapon in Plastic Cow

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It was art:

A police report indicates Smith said he was a “special agent with the United States Illuminati, badge number 0931.”

His mission?

One from “Director Womack,” to “defuse and confiscate a Soviet-made MERV6SS-22AN warhead, with 14.5 kg of enriched uranium and a plutonium trigger, capable of delivering a 40-kiloton yield.”

Police say Smith believed the device was concealed in a blue, plastic cow sculpture in the basement of the museum.

It’s silly, of course.

Everyone knows that the Soviet Plastic Cow Warhead (SPCW) only had 7 kg. of uranium.

Props to Revkin

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Props to Andy Revkin, whose NYTimes work is the gold standard in climate coverage:

A staff writer for The New Yorker and a science reporter from The New York Times have won the 2008 John Chancellor Awards for Excellence in Journalism, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announced today. Jane Mayer won the award for the depth and detail of her reporting on the Bush Administration’s war on terror, and Andrew C. Revkin won for his decades-long coverage of the science and politics of climate change.

Mashey on GM Food

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John Mashey had some great comments on my post last week on GM foods. Since it seems unlikely that very many readers dig through old blog comments here, I thought it worth pulling them out and posting here in full. The setup is an argument between David King and Robert Watson over whether starvation in Africa is a product of political opposition to GM food, or whether there really is ample food, and it’s merely a distribution problem. Mashey:

But they’re both right…

Most starvation is from distribution problems.

However, especially given the likely problems we’re going to have with agriculture over the next few centuries, we’re almost certainly going to have to do more (carefully done) GM, especially as cheap nitrogen fertilizer disappears, and as we need to get more drought-resistant crops, etc.

People need to be careful of GM in various ways, but uncategorical rejection of it shows people don’t understand where their food comes from.

One might want to look at the opinions of the father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_E._Borlaug

More GM = less fertilizer or less pesticide, and sometimes more forest, all good things.

I especially recommend: “Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Food”, by Nina Federoff & Nancy Marie Brown. Nina is a professor of Biology at Penn State, and a NAS member.

A couple Q’s for people: (p16-21 above)

a) What do you eat that is natural? (I.e., never modified by humans).
Read about wheat, which comes from a bunch of weird mutations. And of course, modern corn is incredibly far removed from teosinte. Triticale (what/rye hybrid) is totally unnatural, being crated with colchicine (chemical).

[Some wild fish and game are more or less still natural. There might be a few plants around, but most human food comes from highly-bred plants and animals.]

b) How about seedless watermelons? How does that happen?
(Colchichine again).

c) Do you eat pasta from Creso durum wheat (esp. popular in Italy)? or beer from Golden Promise Barley? or California Calrose 76 rice?
OR BREAD?

Of the hundreds of varieties of bread wheat, ~200 were created using X-rays, gamma rays, neutrons, or various chemicals, and so were the others in that list. (p17).

For some reason, smashing genes with radiation and selecting mutations ifs fine, but actually *engineering* the same variation cannot be considered. Of course one needs to be careful.

When is “free” not really “free”?

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David Foster argues that free water for the poor in India comes with a significant cost:

Although water supply in virtually all Indian cities is heavily subsidized, very few BPL (Below Poverty Line) families have household connections. While upper income families benefit from those subsidies, the BPL families are often forced to buy water from private vendors or carry water from public stand posts, water tankers, or public fountains and wells. Unfortunately, even where this water is provided free of charge, we often underestimate the true cost incurred by the poor in obtaining it.

(via David Zetland’s blog)

Palm Oil Crashing Too

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It’s not only the price of black gooey fossil oil that’s crashing. Palm oil is tanking as well:

Palm oil prices have nearly halved after hitting a peak in March, when surging crude oil prices boosted interest in the biofuels derived from palm oil.

Analysts blame the rapid plunge on a supply glut and a prolonged period of unusually good weather, in addition to the strengthening dollar, crude’s drop to $100 a barrel and speculators fleeing from commodity markets.

GM Food and The Bottom Billion

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Ian Sample had an odd little bit of argument earlier this week in the Guardian about the role of GM crop politics in feeding the worlds’ hungry. First up to the lectern is Sir David King:

Sir David King, who left the job at the end of last year, says anti-scientific attitudes towards modern agriculture are being exported to Africa and holding back a green revolution that could dramatically improve the continent’s food supply.

Speaking for the defence, Robert Watson:

“You cannot argue that Africa has hunger because it doesn’t have GM today,” said Watson. “We have more food today than ever before but it isn’t getting to the right people. It’s not a food production problem, it’s a rural development problem.”

h/t Tim Haab