A Brief History On March 12, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan was devastated by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, causing a reactor to explode and release radiation into the environment. Digging Deeper To this day a 12 mile radius “no-go” zone is imposed around the disaster site, with only scientists and technicians with appropriate protection allowed to visit. Radioactive water will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean for a period of 3 decades. Far from the only nuclear plant disaster, other disasters have cast a pall on what has been touted as “clean”…
Browsing: Nature
A Brief History On February 17, 1600, Italian polymath and philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Papal States of Rome for the crime of heresy. Digging Deeper Bruno had the nerve to believe in the Heliocentric model of the solar system as taught by Polish astronomer Copernicus, and that the stars in the sky were really distant suns that had their own planets. Further, Bruno opined that unlike the Catholic belief, not only was our Sun not the center of the universe, the universe is infinite and therefore could have no center. As he was led…
A Brief History On February 14, 2000, the American spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker orbited asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft from Earth to orbit an asteroid. Digging Deeper NEAR Shoemaker had been designed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and was launched in 1996. Not only did the spacecraft make history with its orbit, a year later it made space history again by being the first spacecraft to touch down on an asteroid, the same 433 Eros. The spacecraft was named after Eugene Shoemaker, an American geologist that studied impact craters on the Earth, but also studied…
A Brief History On February 6, 2023, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 hit Turkey in the area of Gaziantep in the South-Central part of the country. Major aftershocks ensued, and then, 9 hours later, a second quake measuring 7.5 struck the already devastated region at Kahramanmaraş. Update: As of February 13, 2023, the death count has sadly reached over 36,000 people. Some remarkable stories of survival have also emerged, such as a lady well into her 80s that was pulled alive from the rubble after more than 5 days being buried. Update #2: As of February 15,…
A Brief History On January 26, 2009, a single California woman gave birth to 8 babies at one time, becoming the first mother of octuplets that survived infancy. Digging Deeper Nadya Suleman was born a native Californian to parents of Lithuanian and Palestinian descent, and while she was married from 1996 to 2008, she was single when she underwent fertility treatments prior to having her 8 babies. She attended Mt. San Antonio College and earned a BS and a psychiatric technician license, applying her education to a job in a mental health facility for 3 years. Prior to the record…
