JUST WHAT the archaeologist ordered: thousands of randomly buried tablets, each with a message in one of seven languages. Nearby, there’s a huge roofless granite structure with words inscribed on it, surrounded by two circles of 20-tonne megaliths. You can be sure that whoever excavates this site isn’t going to stop at the first tablet, nor even the first stone circle. But if they don’t stop eventually, they risk an agonising death.
The stones and tablets are the US Department of Energy’s way of warning people that below this site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, lie 70,000 tonnes of plutonium and radioactive waste that will be dangerous for 100,000 years.
Feedback spotted the article explaining how archaeologists are helping to set up this warning for future generations in the May/June issue of Archaeology. But although we appreciate that every written word and every image on every stone will warn off future investigators, we can’t help remembering the dire warnings on Egypt’s tombs and pyramids. The Egyptians believed that death lay in store for anyone who disturbed the corpses. Modern archaeologists treat the remains with respect—but they do investigate them, ignoring the priestly death threats.
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Will our descendants believe the Yucca Mountain warnings?
ONE RESPONSE to the phenomenon of globalisation, covered in this and recent issues of New Scientist, is anti-capitalist activism. If that response attracts you, you’ll be interested in , which details a range of campaigns against big corporations and state authority.
Not everyone will approve, of course, but for our part we admit to being intrigued by parts of the “new projects” section, with its ideas like: “A reward is being offered to any lacrosse, tennis or jai alai team that defends people’s right to gather at major protest events by catching and returning tear-gas canisters before they even hit the ground.”
THE PUBLIC perception of science still has some way to go, if the advertisement for Discovery Foods in the May issue of the Waitrose supermarket magazine is anything to go by. “Scientists should not be allowed to make food. All our chefs failed chemistry O-level,” it begins, and continues: “It was a chef who discovered that adding spices to the meat or fish before cooking infuses a depth of flavour sauces alone cannot produce. A scientist would have abandoned our two-step process in favour of something easier and cheaper to produce. We don’t like scientists.”
Oh well. Can’t win ’em all.
FEEDBACK HAS been reading a new book on Philo Farnsworth, the forgotten American pioneer of electronic television (The Boy Genius and the Mogul, by Daniel Stashower, reviewed 11 May, p 51).
Like Edwin Howard Armstrong, the inventor of FM radio, Farnsworth found himself fighting David Sarnoff, the much-feared mogul who headed electronics giant RCA. Reading the book reminded us of a horse’s mouth story once told by a PR man who worked for RCA in the 1950s.
A newsreel film crew had come to Sarnoff’s penthouse office in the Rockefeller Center, New York, and the camera was ready to roll. But the sound recordist was still doing sound checks and trying to get rid of a warbling hum that continually moved up and down the audible band.
Everybody was getting panicky, while Sarnoff was glowering at the incompetents and getting ready to storm out. Then, suddenly, the great man jumped up, slammed his hands on his desk and, for the first time in living memory, apologised.
He had just remembered, he explained, that his own RCA boffins had recently installed a sound-jamming system in his office to prevent industrial espionage. Sarnoff was so thrilled to have independent proof that the system worked that he was only too happy to do the interview in a humble minion’s office where no one had thought it worth installing a jammer.
ANOTHER ONE of those strange product warnings telling you not to do something it would never occur to you to do in the first place. It comes with Fujifilm Finepix camera: “Do not place heavy objects on the camera. This can cause the heavy object to tip over or fall and cause injury.”
IT SEEMS there is nothing new about “economy-class syndrome”, or more properly deep-vein thrombosis. According to a recent Institute of Chemical Engineers newsletter, Count Leopold Berchtold had this to say about the subject in 1789: “Travellers in carriages are very liable to have their legs swelled; in order to prevent being thus incommoded, it will be advisable to wear shoes rather than boots, to untie garters, to alight now and then, and to walk as often as opportunity permits, which will favour circulation.”
Sound advice, except that people travelling in aeroplanes should probably ignore the bit about alighting now and then.
INTERESTING information on a packet of Carr’s table water biscuits: “Carr’s Table Water in their original form first appeared in the late 19th century as a refinement of the ship’s biscuit. Water instead of fat was used to blend the dry ingredients in order to keep the biscuits fresh on long voyages…Still baked today in the proud tradition established by Jonathan Dodgson Carr.
“Ingredients: flour, vegetable oil and hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt.”
DOUBTFUL overprecise claim of the week in a spam for an unnamed herbal medication: “Simple pill can increase your ejaculation by 581 per cent!”
FINALLY, “Many of New Zealand’s species of wildlife are unique to this planet,” says the magazine for tourists put out by The Guardian in association with Tourism New Zealand. How do they know?
