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Oldest Weapons Grade Plutonium Found
The dirtiest place on Earth is not the most promising one for finding historically significant artifacts, but WW II and atomic buffs will be interested to know that just such a place yielded a milestone of a find. The place: Hanford, in the state of Washington, where a nuclear reservation was established in 1943 to support the United State's then-fledgling nuclear weapons program. The find: weapons-grade plutonium from the first batch ever made.
The plutonium-239 was found in an intact glass jar in a beat-up safe at the bottom of a waste pit. It turned up during clean-up work on the site in 2004. Believed to be part of the batch that was used for Trinity, which was exploded in the first-ever nuclear weapons test in July 1945, it's almost amazing that the 400 milliliters of plutonium in the jar wasn't used as part of that historic bomb. Records show that the safe in which the plutonium was stored was contaminated (not by the plutonium), and therefore discarded, at which time it disappeared and remained lost for the next 50 years.
Tests conducted at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, were able to date the sample to 1946, give or take 4.5 years, thanks to plutonium's natural rate of decay. The team conducting the tests used the sample's age to determine that it must have come from one of four different reactors. A close look at the isotopes in the sample revealed the specific reactor from which it came; as it turned out, it wasn't from a Hanford reactor at all, but from the X-10 reactor at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. A close examination of the records at Hanford finally clinched the sample's place in history. But you won't find this artifact in a museum any time soon; instead, because of its extreme purity, plans are afoot to create a standard reference sample for plutonium-239 from the material.
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Getting the Lead Out
Lead ingestion is toxic to humans; children are particularly vulnerable and may suffer brain damage as a result, among other symptoms. While regulations have limited lead exposure in developed countries, finding safe, cost-effective ways to get lead out of the blood still remains a priority. Now, scientists in South Korea think they have a solution.
The scientists use specially designed magnetic receptors to bind strongly to lead ions in the blood. They, and the lead to which they bind, can then be removed from the blood with magnets. Using this technique, the scientists were able to remove 96 percent of lead ions from blood samples in the lab.
Getting it to work in vivo is a different matter, but it may not be too difficult. The scientists on the project think that "Detoxification could theoretically work like hemodialysis: the blood is diverted out of the body and into a special chamber containing the biocompatible magnetic particles," according to a statement they made. Such a process could lead to commendable improvements in health, especially for children exposed to lead.
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Obama Inauguration Draws Huge Online Interest
Are you more connected now than you were four years ago? If all
of the buzz surrounding Barack Obama's inauguration as president
of the United States is any indication, the answer is a resounding
yes! Millions of Americans watched the inauguration through video
streaming on their computers. And many others blogged, vlogged,
and tweeted about it. Contrast this online interest with the fact
that four years ago, at the time of the last inauguration, YouTube
didn't even exist.
Practically all of the major news outlets provided live feeds at
their web sites. You could find these feeds at Yahoo, CNN, MSNBC,
AOL News, The New York Times, ABC, CBS, Fox and WashingtonPost .com,
just to name a few. Akamai Technologies, a deliverer of Internet
video, said the inauguration set a record for them, with 7.7 million
people viewing video streams at the same time.
As you might expect, this much bandwidth demand slowed some sites down; the top 40 sites were reportedly slowed by as much as 60 percent when the ceremonies started at 11 AM; many news sites were hit even worse. But there seemed to be little sign of the disasters predicted, perhaps because many companies and social networks scaled up for the projected increase in demand. All of this is more than fitting for the inauguration of the most tech-savvy president the US has known to date. He even issued a tweet just before he took the oath of office: "We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you."
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