Google Celebrates Robert Bunsen’s 200th Birthday with Doodle
BY: RICHARD LONGPUBLISHED: MARCH 30, 2011
"Robert Bunsen's 200th Birthday Doodle," by Google.
SAN FRANCISCO (Politically Illustrated) – Google celebrated Robert Bunsen's 200th birthday on Thursday with a new doodle on their homepage.
LATEST NEWS
U.S. Fires 16 Tomahawk Missiles on Libyan Defenses
U.S. fires 16 Tomahawk missiles on Libyan defenses.Canada Government Collapses on No-Confidence Vote
Canada government collapses on no-confidence vote, will hold elections in May.
Mr. Bunsen is most notable for developing the Bunsen burner, an improvement on burners used in laboratories.
The Robert Bunsen Google doodle captures several Bunsen burners forming the infamous “Google” logo.
“It’s interesting to see the different sketches and illustrations Google puts together,” Bill Richardson, a resident of San Francisco, told Politically Illustrated. “It’s their way of competing with Bing’s daily eye candy.”
Mr. Bunsen also discovered caesium and rubidium with Gustav Kirchhoff. He was one of the most successful chemists in Germany during the 1800s.
“I wonder how each new Google doodle improves traffic,” said Mr. Richardson. “I love viewing new Google doodles!”
Here is your news:
Crews 'facing 100-year battle' at Fukushima
By David Mark, Mark Willacy, staff
Updated 51 minutes ago
High levels of radioactive iodine-131 have been recorded in the Pacific off the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. (AFP: Air Photo Service)
- VIDEO: Japan nuclear plant woefully unprepared: report (ABC News Breakfast)
- AUDIO: Reactors continuing leaking radioactive water (AM)
- RELATED STORY: Radiation in sea off Japan hits new high
- RELATED STORY: Meltdown fears at Fukushima, radiation spreads
- RELATED STORY: Radioactive cabbages found in Singapore
A nuclear expert has warned that it might be 100 years before melting fuel rods can be safely removed from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
The warning came as levels of radioactive iodine flushed into the sea near the plant spiked to a new high and the Wall Street Journal said it had obtained disaster response blueprints which said the plant's operators were woefully unprepared for the scale of the disaster.
Water is still being poured into the damaged reactors to cool melting fuel rods.
But one expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have completely cooled and been removed.
"As the water leaks out, you keep on pouring water in, so this leak will go on for ever," said Dr John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation.
"There has to be some way of dealing with it. The water is connecting in tunnels and concrete-lined pits at the moment and the question is whether they can pump it back.
"The final thing is that the reactors will have to be closed and the fuel removed, and that is 50 to 100 years away.
"It means that the workers and the site will have to be intensely controlled for a very long period of time."
But Laurence Williams, Professor of Nuclear Safety at England's University of Central Lancashire and the former head nuclear regulator for the UK, is relatively comfortable with the situation.
"I have been monitoring it for the last couple of weeks and [the] three reactors seem to be more or less unchanged from initially when they got into the seawater flowing into them," he said.
"We don't know exactly the state of the fuel in those reactors but looking at the data, the pressures and temperatures look fairly stable over the last couple of weeks.
"My view is that as there hasn't been any sort of major catastrophic release of radioactivity, if they can continue to get the fresh water into the reactors and cool them, the decay heat is now fairly stabilising.
"It will take some time before it disappears but so far, so good. But it will take some time to bring under control."
Both experts agree capping the damaged reactors with concrete is not an option.
Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal says it has obtained disaster-readiness plans which show the facility only had one satellite phone and a single stretcher in case of an accident.
The blueprints also provided no detail about the possibility of using firefighters from Tokyo or national troops - both of which have been part of the response to the Fukushima crisis - to deal with any disaster.
Levels of radioactive iodine-131 in the Pacific off the plant have been recorded at a new high of 4,385 times the legal limit.
In 2002, the plant's operator TEPCO admitted to falsifying safety reports, leading to all of its 17 boiling water reactors being shut down for inspection.
TEPCO has already vowed to dismantle the four reactors at the centre of the world's worst atomic accident in 25 years, but now Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan says the Fukushima plant must be scrapped.
and your entertainment:
MOVIE REVIEW
Source Code (2011)
Jonathan Wenk/Summit Entertainment
Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Source Code.”
Don’t Know Who You Are, but Don’t Know Who I Am
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: March 31, 2011
It doesn’t take long for “Source Code,” a science-fiction thriller with a contemporary twist, to hook you. A smooth diversion directed by Duncan Jones that bats around a few big ideas, the movie opens with a succession of overhead images of Chicago and its environs gleaming in the bright day. Again and again the camera swoops and soars above the doll-like houses, rushing past ribbons of freeway and nearly skimming the tops of silver skyscrapers. And again and again, and closer and closer, it returns to a speeding commuter train, a recurrence that artfully foreshadows the story’s nifty repetition compulsion.
More About This Movie
Multimedia
Related
Arts & Leisure Preview: Strangers on a Train, With Explosives (April 3, 2011)
In this case, the returnee in question isn’t reliving his own tragic past but someone else’s. When, after a few minutes, the nearing camera enters the train, it settles its sights on a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) who jerks awake as if from a nightmare. No wonder. While he knows himself to be Capt. Colter Stevens, an Army helicopter pilot who has recently been running sorties in Afghanistan, Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan), the woman with the pretty smile opposite him, knows (and sees) him as Sean (Frédérick De Grandpré). Leaping up, Stevens insists that he isn’t who she believes him to be, even if the man looking back at him in a bathroom mirror (Mr. De Grandpré) suggests otherwise. Before Stevens has time to ask whozat, he and everyone else are blown up.
A few flashy, mind-trippy moments later, Stevens is wearing a military uniform and strapped to a seat in a dark capsule as a woman’s voice murmurs something about “beleaguered castle” (the name of a solitaire game and a nod at the movie’s narrative design). The voice belongs to the crisp, impersonal Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga, spot on), an officer who takes orders from Dr. Rutledge (an amusing Jeffrey Wright). They explain that Stevens has zapped in from another time and space through a software program called Source Code and will keep returning to the train — where he’ll continue to blow up — until he finds the bomber. Stevens’s face quavers in the darkness, here richly captured in digital, like a fading light.
What is it about our times (or cinema) that provokes existential crises in some of the more interesting action heroes? Like the running men in the Bourne movies and in “The Adjustment Bureau,” Stevens doesn’t just jump through action-flick hoops, he also confronts some Big Questions — Are we alone? Are we free? Do we have free will? — the importance of which become clear as the outlines of Stevens’s true circumstances are revealed. In classic films noirs, the characters rarely have real choices; their paths are riddled with bullets and preordained. “Build my gallows high, baby,” Robert Mitchum says to the femme fatale (Jane Greer) in the glorious “Out of the Past.” She and her co-conspirator, fate, comply.
“Source Code” depends on something other than fate, which makes it a thematic (if lesser) cousin to “Groundhog Day,” the great 1993 Harold Ramis comedy about a dyspeptic weatherman (Bill Murray) who reaches enlightenment after he repeats the same day until he gets it right. Each morning he shuts off a clock radio playing Sonny and Cher (“I Got You Babe”) and ventures into a day that only changes because he does. As the Buddha says, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” In “Source Code,” thinking is doing, which makes it a nice respite from standard action fare with its guys, grunts and guns (though there’s some of that here too).
Mr. Jones did lose me at the messy finish, if only on the level of logic (rarely a deal-breaker for me in science fiction), but he makes it easy to follow Stevens as he toggles between realities. Better still, he makes you want to do so. In crucial ways, “Source Code,” written by Ben Ripley, recalls “Moon,” Mr. Jones’s accomplished feature debut about a solitary astronaut played by Sam Rockwell. “Source Code” is bigger, shinier, pricier. Yet both movies hinge on isolated, physically constrained men who are not what they seem, including, importantly, to themselves. And in each Mr. Jones creates a sense of intimacy that draws you to the characters, so that the tension comes from your feelings for them and not purely from plot twists.
This intimacy makes the movie feel more personal than industrial, and that’s also part of its appeal. Other than during the jolts of action when Mr. Jones cranks the volume, the performers speak rather than shout their lines, the default setting in too many thrillers. Just as you lean in to someone talking quietly, you lean in to Stevens and Christina as their chatter gives way to flirtation. The actors are nicely matched, and what a relief to like a new movie with Mr. Gyllenhaal after a run of groaners. In a sympathetic turn, he hits the dark and light notes right, bringing subtle differences to his performance, whether Stevens is questioning reality or riding that train of life and death and angling for what everyone wants: the chance to get it right.
“Source Code” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Bomb violence and gunplay.
