It’s been 24 years since the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl exploded. Garret linked to an article on Wired: This day in Tech – April 26, 1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Suffers Cataclysmic Meltdown.
I wrote about it four years ago.
Category Archives: Physics
“Houston, we’ve had a problem…”
Forty years after the Apollo 13 mission, Universe Today takes a look at the missions, the accident and how the astronauts got back to earth safely: 13 Things That Saved Apollo 13 (Link via MetaFilter: Surviving a Space Scrape 40 years Ago.)
So far, nine of the 13 parts have been posted. (I’m going to add the other links as the pages become available.)
- Part 1: Timing
- Part 2: The hatch that wouldn’t close
- Part 3: Charlie Duke’s measles
- Part 4: Using the LM for propulsion
- Part 5: Unexplained shutdown of the Saturn V center engine
- Part 6: Navigating by Earth’s terminator
- Part 7: The Apollo I fire
- Part 8: The command module wasn’t severed
- Part 9: Position of the tanks
- Part 10: Duct Tape
- Part 11: A Hollywood movie
- Part 12: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous
- Part 13: The Mission Operations Team
- Plus: Never before published images of Apollo 13 recovery
Gene Kranz was the flight director for NASA‘s Gemini and Apollo Missions. Here’s a Discovery Channel Video of Kranz talking about his experiences with the Apollo 13 mission. I’m reading Kranz’s book Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond right now and enjoy it immensely.
Your daily dose of science
Chad Orzel is a physics professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY, and has written How To Teach Physics to Your Dog, which will be published later this month. He’s also the author of a weblog called Uncertain Principles, where he published an 18 minute long video called The Bohr-Einstein debates, with Puppets. It’s well worth watching and really entertaining, although I have to agree with Orzel that the fake German accent of Albert Einstein really is atrocious (compare to the real Albert Einstein‘s accent). I’m sure I could fake a German accent better than Chad Orzel. ;-)
Science links
Trailblazing – three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing.
“Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS – it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary in 2010.
Trailblazing is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.”
Link via MetaFilter: Selected Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
More science links in this MetaFilter thread: Math education – how should math be taught?
Sad and disturbing news
Today there was another shootout at a German school. A former student killed nine students and three teachers, then fled the school (possibly because the police were entering the scene) in a kidnapped car, finally killing himself during a shooting with the police some 40 km (25 miles) away.
It’s the first shootout at a German school in which people were killed since the one in Erfurt in April of 2002.
Deutsche Welle: Teenage Gunman Takes Own Life After German School Shooting.
“Police in Stuttgart have confirmed the death of a gunman in a school-shooting incident that left at least 15 victims dead and several injured near Stuttgart in the southwest of the country.”
Spiegel: Germany Shocked by Teenager’s Killing Spree.
“Germany was in shock on Wednesday after a 17-year-old youth killed 16 people in a shooting rampage that began at his school, where he shot dead 10 pupils and three teachers. He later took a gun to his own head during a shootout with police. His motive remains a mystery.”
I’m not only concerned because I’m a teacher myself and the school where this happened today is quite similar to my own but also because it happened in a town where a friend of mine works. A lot of his colleagues have children in the school, and the town is small enough that many people know each other. At his company they were told to shut the gates and the window shutters, and for hours many of his colleagues didn’t know how there children were.
Update:
BBC News: German school gunman ‘kills 15’.
“Fifteen people have been killed by a teenage gunman who went on a rampage in south-west Germany, officials say.
Among the dead were nine pupils, eight of them girls, and three teachers at the Albertville secondary school in the town of Winnenden, north of Stuttgart. “
New York Times: Teenage Gunman Kills 15 at School in Germany.
“Winnenden, Germany — A teenage gunman killed 15 people, most of them female, on Wednesday in a rampage that began at a school near Stuttgart in southern Germany and ended in a nearby town, where he then killed himself after the police wounded him.”