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BOILING WATER REACTOR SYSTEM: The system’s inverted lightbulb primary containment vents below through pipes to a pressure suppression torus. Once that torus breaches due to overpressure, the secondary containment is all that separates the released radioactive steam from the outside environment.
Image: http://www.nucleartourist.com/

Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima Power Plant
The type of accident occurring now in Japan derives from a loss of offsite AC power and then a subsequent failure of emergency power on site. Engineers there are racing to restore AC power to prevent a core meltdown.
By Steve Mirsky

Read the article in Scientific American.

It’s genetic. Read the explanation here.

Saffy is not pleased to hear that she is normal.

Koosi has always known she is rare, which explains why she’s so snooty.

That’s news??

The bond between cats and their owners turns out to be far more intense than imagined, especially for cat aficionado women and their affection reciprocating felines, suggests a new study.

Cats attach to humans, and particularly women, as social partners, and it’s not just for the sake of obtaining food, according to the new research, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Behavioural Processes.

Read Cats adore, manipulate women, in Discovery News.

Thanks to stellalehua for the alert. (I know what you’re thinking: Does this mean James Franco is a girl?)

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P.S. from Patrick: Cats Quote Charlie Sheen (verbatim!).

In Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

We will sniff out the slightest trace of Pinoy-ness in a foreign celebrity, and claim them as one of us. But there are Filipinos outside of the entertainment industry who deserve the kind of recognition we only give celebrities. I mean the people whose work helps us to understand why the world is the way it is, who make the universe seem a little less vast and mysterious.

I asked my friend Michael Purugganan, the Dorothy Schiff Professor of Genomics at New York University, a recent Guggenheim fellow, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to make a list of famous contemporary scientists who are Filipino or of Filipino descent.

“That’s actually a difficult list,” Michael said. “No Filipino has won the Nobel and few scientists make it to the public consciousness (there are very few Stephen Jay Goulds or Richard Dawkinses). This would be my personal list, but only because I have heard of them or know them.”

In the Philippines we begin with the late Leonard Co. Our premiere botanist and plant conservation biologist was killed in an alleged military encounter last November in Leyte. There are at least four species named after him by his colleagues abroad. He was well-loved and is greatly missed.

Cora de Ungria, head of the DNA Analysis Laboratory at UP, almost single-handedly built up the DNA forensics database in the country. Her work has been crucial in tracing the genetic evolution of the Filipino people.

Photo: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a swirling storm seen for over 300 years, since the beginning of telescopic observations. But in February 2006, planetary imager Christopher Go noticed it had been joined by Red Spot Jr – formed as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the remarkable reddish hue. This sharp Hubble Space Telescope image showing the two salmon-colored Jovian storms was recorded in April. About half the size of the original Red Spot, Red Spot Jr. is similar in diameter to planet Earth. Seen here below and left of the ancient storm system, it trails the Great Red Spot by about an hour as the planet rotates from left to right. While astronomers still don’t exactly understand why Jupiter’s red spots are red, they do think the appearance of Red Spot Jr. provides evidence for climate change on the Solar System’s ruling gas giant. Photo from the NASA APOD Archive.
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Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies…

Read Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated in NYT.

Did Galileo get his ideas from disproving the measurements of Dante’s Inferno?

Gustave Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy.

In 1588, when Galileo was a 24-year-old unknown, a medical school dropout, he was invited to deliver a couple of lectures on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Many in Galileo’s audience would have been shocked, even dismayed, to see this young upstart take the stage and start poking holes in what they believed about the poet’s meticulously constructed fantasy world.

Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno — the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture — such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth — would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. . .

Read Measuring Hell by Chris Wright in the Boston Globe.