Finland's GDP was US$189.4 billion in 2010 v's Apple's revenue of US$156.508 billion in 2012. Hard to compete when you rival's revenue exceeds your own countries' GPD.

Also, the Germans are increasing imports of electricity, from France, who generate most of their electricity via nuclear power. So the Germans are keeping French nuclear reactors in business while they decommission theirs. And they will continue to do so unless they ban the cross boarder importation of electricity generated via nuclear power. Utterly crazy.

In the 1980s, Dublin gas network had 100s km of cast iron pipes, some 100 years old. The cast iron pipes were connected together by waxed joints, these joints were stable when moist Town Gas (coal gas) flowed through the pipes but when the city changed over to natural gas, which is dry, the wax dried out and the gas leaked. Town Gas was generated by passing superheated steam over coal, creating a gas containing hydrogen, methane and notoriously, carbon monoxide.

In the late 1980s I could not walk more than 100 feet along suburban street before coming across an overpowering stench of leaking gas. One of the temporary fixes was to drill holes into side-walks to reduce the concentration of gas underground. I don't remember any gas explosions or accidents caused by leaking cast iron pipes then the leaks happened, given the number of leaks we were very lucky.

By the way, almost half of the water supply in Dublin in lost through leaks (worst in Europe).

Maybe they detected carbon, nitrogen and sulphur with an unusual light isotopic signatures. Terrestrial life preferentially accumulates lighter isotopes. Isotopic biomarkers in ancient terrestrial rocks have been used to support the exitance of terrestrial life, 3.8 billion years ago, when Earth and Mars were very similar.

It would be a historic result, quite robust evidence supporting life on an early Mars.

Zuilen, M. van 2008. Stable Isotope Ratios as a Biomarker on Mars. Space Science Reviews 135(1-4), 221–232.

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." - Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).

Agreed!

There was 30 people (with pitch forks in hand) in the court's public gallery applauding (shaking their pitch forks) as he was led to prison.

Regardless of what or where he posted his joke, the BBC reports that 50 angry people turned up outside his house and he was arrested at a different address for his own safety.

That's not right.

1. The risks of internal radiation are reasonably well understood from observations of patients given injections of ‘Thorotrast’, Radium dial painters exposed to 226 Ra and 228 Ra & patients given 224 Ra for medical conditions, occupational exposure of uranium miners to radon, and residential radon exposure etc.

Harrison, J. & Day, P., 2008. Radiation doses and risks from internal emitters. Journal Of Radiological Protection, J. Radiol. Prot., 28, 137–159.

2. Nuclear plant workers consistently have much better health (e.g. a lower cancer rate) then the general population (McGeoghegan et al. 2008). It's called the Healthy Worker Effect, it's one of the reasons why detecting elevated risks amongst nuclear workers is difficult. However, the few exceptions are subset of rare blood cancers e.g. Leukaemia, possibly lung cancer and heart disease. Even then, the detection of a statistically significant increases are limited to a few workers in the highest dose categories, >100 mSv for rare types of cancers & >300 mSv for Heart Disease. Note that cancer risk varies ~40% due to non-radiation effects (lifestyle and environment) and overwhelm the subtle effects (if any) of very low level radiation (below 100 mSv).

"Even a study of millions of workers exposed to very low doses (below 100 mSv), no matter how carefully conducted, would be inadequate to produce precise and uncertain estimates of risk in part because of the dominating influence of any subtle biases or unknown confounding factors" (UNSCEAR 2008, Land 1980).

The last and biggest study into Nuclear workers, "The 15 country Study" by Cardis et al. 2005 tracked the heath of up to 407,391 workers over 5.2 million person years, was revealed to be flawed by erroneous data in the Canadian cohort (involving 11,907 workers). Cardis et al. claimed, oddly, that all cancers except Leukaemia were elevated due to radiation (and there didn't even seem to the a threshold!). But when the erroneous Canadian data was identified and removed, there was no statistically significant increase in cancer. This fiasco highlights the sensitivity to confounding, bias and error in studies of low statistical certainty. Furthermore, Boice 2010 explained that there may never be another study of nuclear workers of this size, because the permitted exposures to workers are now far more stringent and few workers will ever be exposed to >100 mSv (or even >300 mSv) to detect the effects of radiation with statistical certainty (even considering the recent events in Japan).

So we have no direct evidence that a dose below 100 mSv causes cancer, that's why laboratory studies are so important, where we can investigate cellular repair and defence mechanisms that may cause radiation risk to depart from LNT i.e. threshold or hormesis.

Ashmore, J. P., Gentner, N. E. & Osborne, R. V., 2010. Incomplete data on the Canadian cohort may have affected the results of the study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer on the radiogenic cancer risk among nuclear industry workers in 15 countries. Journal of Radiological Protection 30, 121–129.
Boice, J. D. 2010. Uncertainties in studies of low statistical power. J Radiol Prot 30, 115–120.
McGeoghegan, D., Binks, K., Gillies, M., Jones, S. & Whaley, S., 2008. The Non-Cancer Mortality Experience of Male Workers at British Nuclear Fuels Plc, 1946–2005. Int. J. Epidemiol. 37, 506–518.

Interesting. But while there were very many experiments carried out in the 1960-70s, the radiation doses applied were generally much higher then the background levels we are interested in now. People are worried over a few extra MiliSieverts a year.

Scientists in the 1960-70s were were not able to observe subtle cellular effects, typical defence and repair mechanisms, that operate at and just above background levels of radiation (20 mSv). They were mostly crude LD50 and cancer frequency tests. Very few experiments investigated doses 0.1 Gy (about 100 mSv & 0.8% increase in human cancer risk). And the few experiments that did involve low doses gave confused results because of poor statistical certainty (some even suggested Radiation Hormesis, as you alluded to).

That's why these resent experiments are so important and interesting, they're finally investigating how organisms cope with low level radiation, and indeed they suggest the risks are grossly overestimated.

Crump, K. S. et al. 2012. A Meta-Analysis of Evidence for Hormesis in Animal Radiation Carcinogenesis, Including a Discussion of Potential Pitfalls in Statistical Analyses to Detect Hormesis. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B 15, 210–231.
Tubiana, M., Feinendegen, L. E., Yang, C. & Kaminski, J. M., 2009. The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data. Radiology, 251, 13 –22.

Sophisticated molecular and genetic analyses were not available in 1950s - 70s when many experiments investigating the effects of radiation on plants and animals took place; most were crude LD50 and cancer frequency tests conducted at moderate to very high doses, few were conducted at low doses (0.1 Gy) where cells could potentially repair the damage caused. This has all changed in the last ~20 years.

Sophisticated laboratory techniques now detect and observe the defence & repair mechanisms that operate in cells and whole organisms at low doses (100 mSv, ~0.8% increased risk of cancer in humans). For example, healthy people's cells repair all radiation induced DNA Double Strand Breaks (DSBs) within 24-hours after a CAT scan, indicating little or no additional risk of cancer. It is clear from resent experiments that living organisms are not passive accumulators of radiation damage but they actively combat and repair the damage done. After all, life involved with radiation and 3.5-3.8 billion years ago radiation levels were many times greater then now, it was necessary to evolve sophisticated error correction mechanisms. Indeed, it is likely that radiation is far less harmful or harmless below a certain threshold, possibly ~ 20 mSv year.

Crump, K. S. et al. 2012. A Meta-Analysis of Evidence for Hormesis in Animal Radiation Carcinogenesis, Including a Discussion of Potential Pitfalls in Statistical Analyses to Detect Hormesis. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B 15, 210–231.
Neumaier, T. et al. 2012. Evidence for Formation of DNA Repair Centers and Dose-Response Nonlinearity in Human Cells. PNAS 109, 443–448.
Löbrich, M. et al., 2005. In vivo formation and repair of DNA double-strand breaks after computed tomography examinations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102, 8984 –8989
Tubiana, M., Feinendegen, L. E., Yang, C. & Kaminski, J. M., 2009. The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data. Radiology 251, 13–22. (Paper available without subscription).

And it's therefore ironic that the development of Skype on Linux has been abandoned, it's been stuck at version 2.2 Beta for over a year now.

Looks like Tanya Steele is still at it, now on Youtube...

"Blackfella's Guide to ..." This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Tanya Steele.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLTZgqSAjQs

Recent re-analysis of lunar volcanic samples shows the interior of the Moon is allot wetter then we thought. Some parts of the Moon interior, at least, contain as much water as the Earth's upper mantle, far wetter than predicted by the Giant Impact Hypothesis (the water should have boiled off).

Less sophisticated analysis in the 1970s indicated the Moon is very dry (less than 50 parts per million water). But water was lost to the vacuum of space during lunar volcanic eruptions, giving a false impression the Moon was dry. New techniques detected water trapped inside fluid inclusions (bubbles) in olivine crystals, showing the interior of the moon is quite wet. Zhang at al. 2012 is one of several resent studies that calls the Giant Impact Hypothesis into question.

Hauri et al., 2011. "High Pre-Eruptive Water Contents Preserved in Lunar Melt Inclusions" 333(6039), 213-215.

Mantle plumes and mantle processes in general are integral to continental break-up and the development of sedimentary (rift) basins, within continents and along continental margins. Petroleum companies are very interested in mantle processes and basin development (it's a branch of geology called Basin Analysis); some of the worlds largest oil and gas fields are found in sedimentary basins along rifted continental margins.

Near me to the west of Ireland, there's the Corrib, Slyne, Porcupine & Rockall Basins to name a few, these were formed when the North Atlantic opened up in the last 60 million years. That break-up was caused in large part by the Iceland Plume and furthermore, it appears that fluctuations in the strength of the Iceland Plume over time caused land uplift and erosion (and thus production of sediments into those basins i.e. oil/gas trap rock). The reason why there was uplift is poorly understood.

Mantle plumes definitely exist (Iceland would be underwater without it's buoyant plume impinging on and lifting up the crust). The question is, what depth do plumes start? At the core-mantle boundary ~2900 km or near the upper/lower mantle boundary ~660 km depth? The Iceland plume has been imaged to ~400 km depth using seismic tomography. This new project will extend the depth imaged beyond the crucial 660 km boundary.

An Iceland hotspot saga by Ingi orleifur Bjarnason

However, diamond exploration companies will.

Torsvik et al., 2010. Diamonds sampled by plumes from the core-mantle boundary. Nature 466(7304), 352–355.