Affections Is Important

What happens when a bullet hits dynamite - If You Shoot a Bomb, Will It Explode?-

If You Shoot a Bomb, Will It Explode? - What happens when a bullet hits dynamite. - On Wednesday, air marshals in Miami shot and killed a man who was pretending to carry a bomb off a plane. According to an official account, the marshals ordered the man to get on the ground and then opened fire when he reached into his backpack. A government spokesman says the marshals acted properly and that "this was a textbook scenario." If he really had been toting a bomb, could bullets have set it off?...

Could a missile strike on Iran cause an accidental nuclear detonation? - How To Demolish an Atomic Bomb

How To Demolish an Atomic Bomb - Could a missile strike on Iran cause an accidental nuclear detonation? - President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both alluded to military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities at last week’s AIPAC meeting, and many commentators worry that war is becoming a more realistic possibility. With all that enriched uranium lying around, is there any chance a strike on one of Iran’s nuclear facilities could accidentally trigger a mushroom cloud? Could...

Who invented the tournament bracket? - A History of Bracketology

A History of Bracketology - Who invented the tournament bracket? - On Sunday, the NCAA unveiled the brackets for this year’s 68-team men’s basketball tournament. An estimated 45 percent of Americans fill out the brackets with their predictions of the results each year, and Barack Obama has referred to the practice as “a national pastime.” When were tournament brackets invented? In the mid-1800s or before. One of the first single-elimination tournaments in the modern era was the London 1851...

Superbugs! “Untreatable gonorrhea” joins the ranks of infectious bogeymen

Superbugs! “Untreatable gonorrhea” joins the ranks of infectious bogeymen. A recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine called “The Emerging Threat of Untreatable Gonococcal Infection” suggests that gonorrhea is set to join the superbugs, the elite circle of nightmarish infections (MRSA, XDR-tuberculosis, NDM-1) that some fear will sweep civilization off its pins. The new breed of sexually-transmitted infection, first spotted in Japan, is resistant to the cephalosporin class of...

Death to Word - It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor

Death to Word - It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor. - Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages. Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the...

The Best Reason Yet for Facebook To Stop Filtering Messages

The Best Reason Yet for Facebook To Stop Filtering Messages - When Anna Lamb-Creasy’s son Rickie went missing in January of this year, she called hospitals and jails to see if he had turned up. One place she didn’t immediately search for answers? Facebook. Weeks later, according to reports, Lamb-Creasy and her daughter discovered enigmatic Facebook messages from a user named Misty Hancock. Facebook’s software siphoned her message into the Other folder—virtual dungeon of notes from users...

Chemicals in plastics linked to early onset menopause

Chemicals in plastics linked to early onset menopause - Man-made chemicals found in a variety of everyday products – from food containers to clothes – may be causing early menopause in women, say scientists.A study of almost 26,000 – the largest of its kind – found those with high levels of PFCs (perfluorocarbons) were more likely to have gone through the change of life prematurely.Dr Sarah Knox, of the West Virginia University School of Medicine, said: "There is no doubt that there is an association...