Friday, October 22, 2010
One of the great mysteries of the Cold War was that throughout the 1960s
the US Embassy on Tchaikovsky Street in Moscow was subjected to intense
microwave bombardment from a building across the street. The rumor was that
the radiation was meant to induce mental illness and injure the embassy
staff. Scientists were dubious, but the staff was given hazardous-duty
pay. This strange story was picked up by Paul Brodeur, a writer for the
New Yorker covering the cold war. Despite his lack of scientific training,
Brodeur shifted his attention to the microwave conspiracy and collected his
New Yorker articles in The Zapping of America: Microwaves, Their Deadly
Risk, and the Coverup (Norton, 1977). In a debate on CBS radio, Brodeur
once accused me of using quantum mechanics to hide the truth. Personally
innocent of any such scientific bias, Brodeur made no distinction between
900 MHz cell-phone radiation and 60 Hz power-line fields; it's all EMF.
Currents of Death: Power Lines, Computer Terminals, and the Attempt to
Cover Up Their Threat to Your Health (Simon and Schuster, 1989)created a
near panic. Wower lines did not stop causing cancer until the National
Academy conducted its own lengthy and expensive epidemiological study.
Epidemiology found what science already knew; power-line fields, like
microwaves, are not cancer agents. Sadly, science never mattered. With
Devra Davis, it still doesn't.
"The moon has water," gushed the Wall Street Journal, "and plenty of it."
You can't penalize the authors of the five papers in Science magazine this
week for a little end-zone taunting; it was a difficult experiment, and
they found what they were looking for in a deep crater near the pole. The
implications for the future, however, were not quite as clear. Kenneth
Chang, the NYTimes science reporter who covers space, says the estimate is
that it costs $100,000 to send 1 kg to the moon (that would be 1 liter of
water). Perhaps I will ask my freshmen physics class to run-the-numbers
comparing the cost of making rocket fuel from lunar-crater water to
shipping it to the moon on a rocket.
Three weeks ago, a NASA press release announced the discovery of the
first "Goldilocks" exoplanet. The announcement was complete with a lovely
color portrait of Gliese581g, which is another first for an exoplanet.
Alas, this week, according to Richard Kerr in today's Science, there is
word from a conference of exoplanet hunters in Turin, Italy that questions
are being raised about the existence of Gliese581g. Other researchers
studying the Gliese581 system reportedly found no trace of a fifth planet.
I'd be upset if I traveled that far and found its imaginary.
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