Fault discovered beneath nuclear waste dump

Ontario-geofish blog points out that at Yucca Mountain in the U.S., construction of a nuclear waste dump is being moved because a geological fault isn’t where the engineers thought it was. There’s a link to an article:

Bob Loux, head of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects and the state’s chief anti-Yucca administrator, said he was not reassured by what he called “just-in-time engineering.”

“This represents a complete lack of understanding about the site’s characteristics,” Loux said. “They’ve been out there for 25 years or longer. And they get surprises like this. This is basic geology, stuff they should have known all along.”

There may be faults more or less everywhere, but it’s nice to keep track of them.

India is almost free of polio

One of the scourges of humankind, polio, may soon be gone from the world’s largest democracy. Last year, cases were limited almost entirely to two states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Polio is transmitted only from person to person, so it can be wiped out by inoculating people against it. It is a viral disease that causes paralysis, muscle weakness, or death.

New book: Microcosmos by Brandon Broll

This new book from Firefly Books is a beauty. It is modest in size but has more than 300 pages of luscious photomicrographs of everything from protozoans and pollen grains to nerve cells and carbon nanotubules. Brandon Broll edited it, which I suppose means selected the pictures. They are all from the Science Photo Library of London. It’s a late birthday present from my stepdaughter the scientist.