The exact numbers on "doing something about the Sun" are null. Long before the Sun becomes a problem, we should have comprehensive management of living in space. If only because bringing new supplies of $SUPPLY$ will cost more than recycling it. (Asserted, but I suspect true.) And once you can live in space, the possibility of generation ships becomes real.

WHEN the Sun goes red giant, most of the Solar System population of hominids will just be able to move orbits. Unless some nostalgic people decide to bring in a replacement star.

Now, how to do that without violating Newton? I'm working up a plan ...

That's pretty much the former of Lake I'd envisioned. The ground level would hardly have been changed by the lining of the bed (around 8 million tonnes of soil per metre change). Whether they'd actually line it .... I don't know. Big job for what benefit. The berms (EN_US = levees ?) would be about 12km long by 14sq.m per 1m of height (I allow a 10m roadway and 1:4 soft banks)... I make that 168000 cu.m of soil per metre of berm height. Building storage lakes ON a surface is hugely easier than digging INTO a surface. To dig in by 1m you need to move 5,000,000 cu.m of soil; to build up berms to 1m height you need to move 168,000 cu.m

(I don't do this for a living. But when we've had operational issues I've had to do this sort of ball park to determine if we need to mobilizations another 1 or 2 earth moving machines to site, and operators. Before doing the numbers, I was sure of the answer. )

To return to the original point, the storage pond will have been built ON the flood plain, and when full it WILL have pushed it's base DOWN into the flood plain. So the base of the storage lake will be at or below the flood level of the river. And that makes it pretty hard for it to dry out (this being temperate Europe, not a desert somewhere). Unless someone deliberately disturbs the lake, it is unlikely to dry out for a substantial time. The area has more urgent problems.

There is an alternative way of arriving at the construction decisions above. Start to dig your pit: it starts to fill with water : you pump and continue to dig : the hole continues to fill with water. Joy and happiness do not follow...

Well you've moved the goalposts from the entirely feasible problem of encountering a single rabid wolf (or domesticated dog, or a vodka-enraged chelovik (spelling?, criminal nutter)) to a very unfeasible circumstance of a pack of such. The literally insane aggression of the infected animals has them being driven out of the pack (dog or wolf) as soon as symptoms start. According to our Russian security people, you would be incredibly unlucky to meet two, separate rabid animals in one 8 week work trip. But on general principles, they'd shoot any single canine anywhere near a workover rig or seismic crew. A dog pack just needs an eye kept on it. Even then, keep the problem in perspective: none of our security crew had seen an animal they were sure was rabid.

The trouble that would be caused by things like giving the ex-pat workers a gun each were far greater than each crew having a translator and a security guard.

The biggest danger remained being shaken-down by the police though. Hence the translator. Get a receipt for agreed bribes, and call the Chief of Police if any of his boys were going freelance.

Well played sir!

Your job in line-cleaning for BR (or whatever they're called since the unmitigated lunacy of breaking up the system) awaits. Free bucket of opprobrium included for the next time that the line-cleaning system fails to perform adequately. It won't be long before it fails - they never last long.

Sony staff - or at least the ones I've met - are required to use Sony equipment left, right and centre. So their family members have been at risk of harm from the use of Sony equipment for years in the past, and will remain at risk for years in the future. Until several years after the final demise of Sony Corporation.

Hmmm, it might be worthwhile logging into my Facebook account this month. Or maybe not. But it's several years since I friended anyone, so I can't claim to be a particularly intense user.

I should go back and delete all my old posts too. Standard hygiene ; nearly 6 months since I did that.

What the fuck are you talking about "wooshed"? Why did you think it appropriate to introduce humour into a perfectly serious topic of discussion?

As for which paper, do try to keep up.

The goldfish-like attention span of the average Slashdotter is ... "pathetic" would be too-high praise. I check my mail most days for replies to posts, and things do carry on with a back and forth for up to a few weeks before the thread gets archived (any idea what the criteria are for that?). But that's still pretty pathetic : when I was on Compuserve (before it was destroyed by AOL) we had one thread beating down a rabid creationist running for about 5 years and exceed 100,000 posts.

Keep up on the submissions though. I get several through a year. I'd have to check if the one that I posted a couple of days ago has been taken up. (No: I don't have any idea how this "promote your submission" thing is meant to work. Why would I want the average Facebook retard to come here and lower the tone of the place even further.)

Looking at my record for this year : pending, accepted, accepted, declined, a, d, d, d, d, d ... obviously had a run of differing interests at the start of the year. Average is about two accepted stories per year, and I put in maybe 8-10 per year

As I understand it, the "mitochondrial Eve" or "population bottleneck" hypothesis is based on a statistical circumstance that could be satisfied by a population of 1000 for one generation, or 2000 for 2 generations, or 4000 for 4 generations). But unless you've heard differently, it has always had fairly wide error bands on it - ten percent or more - which has never taken it out of the range of effects of Toba. Unless you know better, or have some recent review articles. (I'm don't really make an effort to keep closely up to date on these tropical questions. I'm more interested in the things that were happening through Siberia and Central Asia ; WTF with these Denisovians, and where did the Inuit and Americans come from?)

You might find it surprising, but I do actually have a sense of humour. And as a professional in the oil industry, I have no doubt what so ever that by injecting gigatonnes per annum of carbon into is in the process of doing to the global temperatures for the next few hundreds of thousands of years (the experiment has happened often enough in the past that denying these changes is simply perverse). I just don't find the topic amusing.

You seem to have missed the point that the paper does not claim that the organic matter is not rotting ; it is putting the decrease in 9 month decomposition at around 40% in 2007. So all your wishful thinking about the areas turning into anoxic coal swamps is not relevant : the vegetation would decay, but it would just take a bit longer (a couple of decades, maybe a half-century) to decay. That is a negligible period of time compared to the other processes involved.

My main reason for being cautious about quantities of mushrooms that I ate form the wild would be my known-poor ability at identifying them. If I had a competent mycologist on hand (I did when I lived with my parents ; I don't know anyone at this end of the country, apart form the mycology lecturer in the Soil Science department, and he moved away years ago when the department closed), I'd indulge in a "fungus foray" whenever convenient. I missed an organised one this year through being out of the country ; maybe next year.

Scotland did get lower radiation doses than Norway, but not by a huge amount. The amount of potassium in the bedrock might be an issue I'd pay a little attention to as well, but compared to the risk of misidentifying a mushroom, I don't consider it a significant risk.

yes, the vaccinations will prevent death from rabies.

Vaccination will not prevent death if you're exposed to rabies. The treatment is what prevents death. Being vaccinated before exposure to the virus considerable improves the effectiveness of the treatment both by helping the immune system fight back more rapidly against the virus, and also by extending by to a day or two the time that you can go between exposure (bite) and starting the injections that comprise the treatment. It's still not a perfect solution - the last time I read the patient information leaflets they were warning of about a 5-10% mortality amongst vaccinated and fully treated patients - but it's a lot better than for the unvaccinated and treated (barely 50%) or the vaccinated and untreated 20-30%. Those figures are quite old though - nearly 15 years - so modern formulations and adjuvants may produce a better response.

On the other hand, the vaccine (plus treatment) is pretty much as effective against bite wounds as non-puncture wounds such as sprayed saliva.

I still don't have any intention of doing anything against a suspiciously aggressive dog anywhere in the world apart from backing away slowly and maybe throwing any convenient crippled schoolchildren at the dog to distract it's attention while I escape. (I carry an emergency dehydrated crippled blind schoolchild with me at all times against this very event ; just add water, wait a couple of hours, et voila - a distraction!)

Also, where did you find any large lake upstream the Pripyat River from it? Or did you confuse it with the Kiyv Reservoir?

I think you misunderstood me. What you name as the Pripyat reservoir is about 10km upstream from a larger lake (I can't see a name for it - but it extends almost to the outskirts of Kyiv) ; that larger lake is downstream with respect to the Pripyat lake. Looking at the satellite views, the 10-odd km between the two lakes running past the Chernobyl plant itself, are filled with meanders and oxbow lakes, which develop on very flat-lying river flood plains. (Then again, the 100 to 104m altitudes you mention, hundreds of km from the river mouth also tells you that the slope of the river's long profile is very shallow.) So there is very little difference in altitude between the lakes, unless someone has literally moved hundreds of thousands of tonnes of soil to artificially raise the bed of the lake above the level of the flood plain (eyeballing it at 5km long by 1km wide, to raise the level of the bottom of the lake 1m above general ground level would take 5million cubic metres of soil, around 8 million tonnes ; lots. I can see them building earthworks to contain the lake (at which point you'd need a pumping station to pump water in), but not raising the level of the ground. and once you raise the water level several metres above the local land surface, then the pressure of that weight of water will compress the underlying ground over a period of years, so that your lake bed remains below local ground level.

IF you managed to drain the lake, and get the ground surface to dry out, then yes, you could have a dust problem. But those are some pretty big "if"s. If you really wanted to keep the problem buried for a useful period of time - like 2 half lives of caesium-137 - then embanking the Pripyat river so that it kept the lake full naturally would probably be the most economical method. That wouldn't do anything about non-radioactive pollution in the lake, but that's not exactly a problem that's unique to the area. The industrial world is full of lakes that have been used as dumping grounds for all sorts of industrial waste.

I'm a geoscientist.