Isegoria

Polonium, discovered by Marie Curie and named after her native Poland, is A Rare Material and a Surprising Weapon:

Polonium 210 is highly radioactive and very toxic. By weight, it is about 250 million times as toxic as cyanide, so a particle smaller than a dust mote could be fatal. It would also, presumably, be too small to taste.
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Polonium 210 does its damage by emitting alpha particles, which have enough energy to tear apart the genetic machinery of cells, killing them outright or causing them to mutate into tumor-producing forms. It gives off 5,000 times more alpha particles than does the same amount of radium.

Alpha-emitters are not picked up by normal radiation-detection devices, a British expert said, so it would be relatively easy to take the substance across a border.

The particles disperse through the body and first destroy fast-growing cells, like those in bone marrow, blood, hair and the digestive tract. That would be consistent with Mr. Litvinenko’s symptoms, which included hair loss, inability to make blood cells and gastrointestinal distress.

It is also a better match than the symptoms caused by thallium, a heavy metal that was first suspected when Mr. Litvinenko fell ill after eating at a sushi bar on Nov. 1. Polonium is so radioactive that it gives off heat, and tiny amounts have been implanted in satellites to make heat and electricity. It was also used in the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod moon rovers.

The Columbians are Putting the Coca Back in Cola:

An ad featuring the slogan “Coca Tea — the Holy Leaf of the Sun Children” hangs above a colorful, cloth-draped sales booth in the Santa Barbara shopping mall in Bogotá. As recently as 10 years ago, any mother would have yanked her child hastily to the side if they had passed such a stall. But things have changed: Coca tea, coca wine, coca cookies and a variety of similar products have become an integral part of every street festival and flea market in the Colombian capital.

Such products are also beginning to become standard on store shelves. David Curtidor and his wife Fabiola Acchicvé started selling coca tea to students at Javariana University seven years ago. Their product was such a hit that marketing and packaging it more professionally seemed the logical next step. Now, Curtidor can point to the boxes of teabags stacked in the corridors of the Nasa Esh building — the headquarters of the company Curtidor and his wife founded on behalf of the Nasa, one of more than 60 indigenous tribes in Colombia.

But Curtidor’s spacious store room features more than just teabags and crates full of Mate de Coca: Other boxes contain coca wine and the small company’s latest product, Coca-Sek — a yellowish cocaine-based soft drink. The invigorating drink hit the market at the end of last year and has made headlines far beyond Colombia’s borders.

The soft drink has a fresh, slightly sour taste, like lemonade. Curtidor says he and his wife spent six years developing the flavor. The drink is natural, he says, just like tea — and, unlike cocaine, it’s completely harmless.

Doctors believed that Navajo Neuropathy was a rare genetic disorder, until they realized that the oases in the Navajo desert contained “a witch’s brew” of dangerous substances — like uranium:

In the mountains and mesas of the Navajo reservation, mining companies drilled tunnels in the sides of cliffs to extract uranium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program during the Cold War. But in the red and ocher sands around Cameron, where deposits were shallow, the ore was blasted out of the plains, creating pits.

As demand for uranium eased in the late 1950s, the U.S. government allowed the companies to leave without filling in the craters. The pits collected snowmelt in the winter and runoff from summer torrents. The holes, some as deep as 130 feet, soon formed oases in the desert.

Lois grew to depend on them as she ranged far from home, covering as much as 10 miles in a day. At dusk, she often camped for the night. She got in the habit of filling and refilling a small container with her drinking supply as she moved from one “lake” to the next, watering her herd.

Every few weeks, the Neztsosies butchered one of the sheep. They ate each one down to the bones, which they sucked around the fire. They destroyed the lambs that could not walk.

Deformed animals were showing up in other sections of Dine Bikeiyah, Home of the People, as Navajos call their homeland. In areas around old mines, lambs and cattle developed shaking limbs, yellow eyes and white patches on internal organs that were discovered after slaughter.

Word of these strange developments did not reach the Neztsosies. Navajo families tend to live miles apart from one another. They prize their privacy. Local officials heard occasional complaints about damaged animals, but no one discerned a trend.

This is where it gets “messed up”:

Laura Neztsosie, now 36, is the oldest surviving patient from the Indian Health Service registry.

She and her mother live in two-stoplight Tuba City (population 8,000). Laura drinks protein shakes and takes a periodic table of vitamins, as recommended by Rosen. Her mother dresses her every morning. Nearly blind in one eye, she flips her Bible open with one gnarled hand to find her favorite verses, highlighted in pink.

She also cares deeply about the healing ceremonies held under the wide dark skies outside town. Lois parks her truck close so Laura can watch the dancing from the front seat.

Later, at home, Lois lights a pipe packed with dried mint and mountain flower and holds it to Laura’s lips. Lois waves the sacred smoke toward her daughter.

After years of firelight and kerosene lamps, they have electricity. Treated water runs from kitchen and bathroom taps.

But old habits hang on. One day, on her way to visit Linnie’s grave on the sagebrush plain, Lois pulled over at a familiar spot. While Laura waited in the truck, the mother walked a short way from the dirt road and lifted boards that had been placed over a natural watering hole to keep coyotes away.

Lois was thirsty and didn’t hesitate. She leaned down and drank deeply from the spring.

Altered cottonseed could feed millions:

Scientists have found a way to use the cotton plant, long a source of fiber for clothing but inedible by humans, to feed potentially half a billion people a year.

Texas A&M University plant biotechnologist Keerti Rathore and colleagues reported on Monday they have genetically altered the plant to reduce the levels of the toxic chemical gossypol in cottonseed, making it fit for human consumption.

“It actually tastes pretty good. It reminds me of chickpea. It’s a fairly good-tasting seed,” Rathore said in an interview.

“It tasted better than soybean, I can tell you that,” added Rathore, who admitted he had not tasted it until being asked repeatedly about its flavor in the days before the research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new-and-improved cottonseed could be ground into a flour and made into bread and other foods, Rathore said.

Rathore and his team turned to a technique also being used in cancer and AIDS research — so-called RNAi or RNA interference technology that can “silence” a gene — to cut the amount of gossypol in the cottonseed, home to significant amounts of protein. When eaten by people, gossypol can damage the heart and liver.

The researchers left gossypol intact in the remainder of the plant because it guards against insects and disease.

“So the trick is not to affect the levels of these compounds in the rest of the plant, but eliminate it from the seed only. And that’s what we have done,” Rathore said.

This cottonseed could serve as a high-protein food for the world’s hungry, and falls well within the criteria set by the World Health Organization and U.S. Food and Drug Administration for food consumption, the researchers said.

“Potentially, if all of the cottonseed today which is produced can be utilized for human nutrition directly, it can meet the protein requirements of 500 million people on an annual basis,” Rathore said.

Damascus sabres may get their famed pattern and strength from nanotubes in the steel:

Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.

Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.

Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.

The tubes were only revealed after a piece of sword was dissolved in hydrochloric acid to remove another microstructure in the swords: nanowires of the mineral cementite.

Wootz’s ingredients include iron ores from India that contain transition-metal impurities. It was thought that these impurities helped cementite wires to form, but it wasn’t clear how. Paufler thinks carbon nanotubes could be the missing piece of the puzzle.

At high temperatures, the impurities in the Indian ores could have catalysed the growth of nanotubes from carbon in the burning wood and leaves used to make the wootz, Paufler suggests. These tubes could then have filled with cementite to produce the wires in the patterned blades, he says.

Carol Sarler discusses Ephebophilia:

Given the fussing and carrying-on, you would think the poor man had advocated massed orgies with infants. He hadn’t. All that happened was that Terry Grange, the Chief Constable of Dyfed-Powys and spokesman on child protection for the Association of Chief Police Officers, suggested greater clarity in the labelling of sex offenders: for instance, he says, it is incorrect to say that those who have sex with underage teenagers are paedophiles — and if we say they are, we risk overestimating the scale of the problem of paedophilia.

With predictable fury, Michele Elliott, the director of the children’s charity Kidscape, rounded on the policeman’s wish to reclassify those who have sex with youngsters between 13 and 16: “He is saying they are not paedophiles and they bloody well are.”

If Miss Elliott would care to borrow my dictionary, she would discover that they bloody well aren’t. A paedophile is defined as one who is sexually attracted to children; children are defined as those between birth and puberty. What our teen fanciers are, in fact, is ephebophiliacs: adults attracted to postpubescent adolescents.

Galactus is Coming is “the long rumored, but never confirmed, collaboration from 1983 between Marvel’s Chairman Emeritus Stan Lee and religious comic tract creator Jack Chick.”