Watching the World
Hiroshima Bomb Rebuilt
A precise replica of the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima has been built by researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The reason? To solve the mystery that still remains over the effects of the radiation from that explosion 40 years ago. While the Nagasaki bomb and other bombs tested were plutonium weapons, the Hiroshima bomb alone was a uranium bomb. In the early 1980’s, a reevaluation of its explosion showed previous calculations to be flawed, and that rather than neutron radiation, the bomb’s output was mostly gamma rays. A joint effort of some 60 scientists from the United States and Japan is currently being made to settle the question of which calculations are correct and to establish data that will help set safety limits for human exposure to radiation. “The lesson is that we have no real idea of the extent of the biological effects of nuclear weapons used in wartime,” said Dr. Hugh DeWitt, a physicist at one of two United States facilities where nuclear weapons are designed. “The consequences may be much worse than anybody in the Department of Defense believes.”
African Distress
“The 21st meeting of the Organization of African Unity ended . . . after the adoption of a declaration that most countries on the continent were near ‘economic collapse,’” reports The New York Times. “About 150 million Africans face food shortages, and nearly half of Africa’s countries depend on food aid.” Among measures recommended to alleviate the problems were increased investment in agriculture, a more profitable pricing policy for farmers, and the adoption of incentives for industrial growth. “The question now is whether these recommendations will actually be implemented,” said an East African official. While noting that some countries have already begun making reforms, he adds: “Others, quite frankly, seem to have different priorities.”
A House Divided
“The Department of Agriculture is spending $5.3 million a year on research to develop tobacco for ‘a safe cigarette,’” reports The New York Times, while the Department of Health and Human Services says such research is fruitless. “The conclusion that we reached some years ago is that there is no safe cigarette,” said Donald R. Shopland, acting director of the Office on Smoking and Health. “You are better off spending that money to discourage smoking rather than trying to change the engineering of the cigarette.” The Agriculture Department research has been going on for the last ten years. Tobacco-industry spokesmen denied that they are doing similar research. Said one: “We don’t know of anything that makes a cigarette unsafe, so how could we be working toward a safer cigarette?”
First Desire
“What do Japanese children want most?” asks the Asahi Evening News. “According to a recent survey, money. And parents, the survey found, aren’t discouraging them.” The survey of 1,244 primary- and junior-high-school students and their parents in Koganei, a city outside Tokyo, was commissioned by the city’s council on youth problems. Why do they want money? “For the pleasure of having it,” said 57 percent of the youngsters surveyed, while 43 percent said they needed money “to buy something.” States the newspaper: “The council concluded that the fact that more than 50 percent of the children are interested in money for its own sake suggests that their world is not much different from the adult world where the yen is almighty.”
Hidden Again
God’s name, Jehovah, recently came to light during the renovation and repair of the 200-year-old church of Kuhmoinen, Finland. As the old paint was being removed, the word “Jehova” (Finnish spelling of the divine name) in capital letters was clearly discernible on the wall right above the altar and underneath a large wall-painting. The future of “this slightly confusing word, as well as that of the large wall-painting,” said the local newspaper Kuhmoisten Sanomat, “has been considered in its various aspects inside the congregation, and they have decided to hand over the decision to the parish council.” The curator of the museum of Central Finland, Janne Vilkuna, thought the painting “so valuable that it should without delay be renovated with professional skill,” the newspaper reported. But the parish council voted unanimously to cover the painting with panelwork and thus hide the “confusing” name of God.
Unstealable Art Display
When some 150 priceless art objects from the Soviet Union were recently shipped for display in London, “there was no convoy of crate lorries or armoured vans, no massive insurance, and no temperature-controlled environments,” reported the Observer. Why? Because all the objects came in holographic form. This enabled the inclusion of objects that were too old and delicate to be moved, as well as making it possible for them to be displayed in several places at the same time. “Just one of the ‘pieces’ on display, a fourth century BC Scythian gold pectoral, was insured for $10 million and had to have a permanent armed escort when it travelled to the United States a few years ago,” the newspaper said. The full-color holograms, said to be the best quality yet achieved, were made with a “powerful, seven wavelength pulsed laser.”
Dead Sea
“The North Sea will be biologically dead in 25 years at the latest, and maybe within three,” states The German Tribune, reporting on a survey undertaken by Professor Konrad Buchwald of Hanover University. According to Buchwald, the best that can be done is to keep the pollution to its present level. He sees no hope of restoring the North Sea to its former state of relative purity.
Endangered Elephants
The Central African Republic is one of the elephant’s last strongholds in Africa, say wildlife conservationists. But an aerial survey team reports a “catastrophic reduction” in the elephant population there in the last four years, according to Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a member of the survey team and a leading expert on African elephants. Poachers from the Sudan and Chad have been killing the animals for their tusks. Additionally, local people have been killing them for both ivory and meat. The survey team estimates that the elephant population in the republic has dropped from 80,000 to 15,000 in the last decade.
Canadian Abortions
A federal study by Statistics Canada reveals that the number of teenage abortions is more than double that of abortions for women over 25. There are 16 abortions performed per 1,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19. This compares to 7 per 1,000 for women 25 to 44, and 18 per 1,000 on women 20 to 24. “Of the 17,725 abortions performed on teen-agers in 1981, 7 per cent were repeat operations, up from 5 per cent,” says The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada, in reporting the findings. “Women 20 to 24 increased their repeat abortion rate to 16 per cent from 11 per cent.”
Thinking Babies
“The prospect that a 2-day-old infant may actually be doing some rudimentary thinking has set the child development specialists abuzz,” reports The Toronto Star. Until recently, says the report, experts believed that infants younger than 8 or 12 months were incapable of coordinating data from more than one of their senses. But at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington reported that infants 12 to 21 days old are observed imitating facial gestures. He concludes that a baby is capable of “relating information it receives from separate senses right from birth, and it has psychological mechanisms for forging links between itself and other human beings right from the beginning.”
Drinking on TV
Parents who are concerned about what their children see on TV have one more thing to worry about: drinking. According to a survey of prime-time TV broadcasts in the United Kingdom, 71.7 percent of all fictional programs feature scenes of alcohol-drinking, and there are an average of 3.4 such scenes per hour. Of greater concern, however, is the finding that “there are very few portrayals of alcohol consumption with more specific outcomes, such as assaults, car accidents, fires, homicides, family abuse, or ill health,” said Anders Hansen, the University of Leicester research fellow who did the study. On the contrary, such programs give viewers the impression that drinking is part and parcel of the good life or the life-style of the rich and well-to-do.
Money Talks!
In an effort to help the blind, Carleton University’s Science-Technology Work Shop in Canada is developing a portable, low-priced unit that can “read” the value of a bill and “announce” its value in French or English by means of a voice synthesizer. A minute microprocessor can detect the value by scanning a series of dark and light bars, similar to those found on many products in many countries. Proponents of the invention are hoping the bars will be included on Canadian bank notes the next time they are redesigned.
Vodka for a Tank
When four Soviet soldiers in a combat tank got lost while on maneuvers in Czechoslovakia, they traded the tank for two cases of vodka. According to the report in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, they drove into a village and parked their tank behind the only tavern there. Authorities found out later that the tavern owner bought the tank for 24 bottles of vodka, dismantled it, and sold the pieces to a metal-recycling center. The soldiers were found two days after the incident, sleeping in the forest.