On the Origin of Circuits

In a unique laboratory in Sussex, England, a computer carefully scrutinized every member of large and diverse set of candidates. Each was evaluated dispassionately, and assigned a numeric score according to a strict set of criteria. This machine's task was to single out the best possible pairings from the group, then force the selected couples to mate so that it might extract the resulting offspring and repeat the process with the following generation. As predicted, with each breeding cycle the offspring evolved slightly, nudging the population incrementally closer to the computer's pre-programmed definition of the perfect individual.

The candidates in question were not the stuff of blood, guts, and chromosomes that are normally associated with evolution, rather they were clumps of ones and zeros residing within a specialized computer chip. As these primitive bodies of data bumped together in their silicon logic cells, Adrian Thompson– the machine's master– observed with curiosity and enthusiasm.

Dr. Adrian Thompson is a researcher operating from the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, and his experimentation in the mid-1990s represented some of science's first practical attempts to penetrate the virgin domain of hardware evolution. The concept is roughly analogous to Charles Darwin's elegant principle of natural selection, which describes how individuals with the most advantageous traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This process tends to preserve favorable characteristics by passing them to the survivors' descendants, while simultaneously suppressing the spread of less-useful traits.

Dr. Thompson dabbled with computer circuits in order to determine whether survival-of-the-fittest principles might provide hints for improved microchip designs. As a test bed, he procured a special type of chip called a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) whose internal logic can be completely rewritten as opposed to the fixed design of normal chips. This flexibility results in a circuit whose operation is hot and slow compared to conventional counterparts, but it allows a single chip to become a modem, a voice-recognition unit, an audio processor, or just about any other computer component. All one must do is load the appropriate configuration.

The informatics researcher began his experiment by selecting a straightforward task for the chip to complete: he decided that it must reliably differentiate between two particular audio tones. A traditional sound processor with its hundreds of thousands of pre-programmed logic blocks would have no trouble filling such a request, but Thompson wanted to ensure that his hardware evolved a novel solution. To that end, he employed a chip only ten cells wide and ten cells across– a mere 100 logic gates. He also strayed from convention by omitting the system clock, thereby stripping the chip of its ability to synchronize its digital resources in the traditional way.

He cooked up a batch of primordial data-soup by generating fifty random blobs of ones and zeros. One by one his computer loaded these digital genomes into the FPGA chip, played the two distinct audio tones, and rated each genome's fitness according to how closely its output satisfied pre-set criteria. Unsurprisingly, none of the initial randomized configuration programs came anywhere close. Even the top performers were so profoundly inadequate that the computer had to choose its favorites based on tiny nuances. The genetic algorithm eliminated the worst of the bunch, and the best were allowed to mingle their virtual DNA by swapping fragments of source code with their partners. Occasional mutations were introduced into the fruit of their digital loins when the control program randomly changed a one or a zero here and there.

For the first hundred generations or so,


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Atom Facts
An atom is made of 200 or more than 200 subatomic particles because it is told that in an atom there is so much space and electrons take only 1/1000th volume of it so there left very much space. That space may have more subatomic particles in it and according to the calculations there may come more than 200 subatomic particles. Array




Numbers And Words
If you spell all the numbers and try to find letter \"A\" you will have to count to thousAnd. Did you know that: 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 Weird huh?

The Age Of The Universe!!!

After several debates, astronomers have determined the age of the universe by using a Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. By examining the microwave background radiation that WMAP provided, astronomers were able to pin down the age of the universe, accurate to 1%, to 13.7 billion years old.

Broken Speed Of Light!!

The speed of light was broken by two physicists, Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, in Germany from the University of Koblenz. This seriously questions Einstein's theory that no object or information can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. An example of what could happen with this is time travel, but not like you imagine: If you went for a car trip faster than the speed of light, you'd arrive at your destination before you'd even leave, theoretically, of course. As Dr Guenter Nimtz said: "The effect cannot be used to go back in time, only to reduce the time between cause and effect a little bit."

Why do onions make you cry?

Who has never cried while cutting an onion? (well, apart from those who have never cut one hehehe). This is a little explanation in easy terms.

Inside the onion cells there are some chemical compounds which contain sulfur. When you cut an onion its cells are broken and those chemical compounds then undergo a reaction that transforms them into a more volatile sulfured products, which are released into the air.

These sulfured compounds react with the moisture in your eyes forming sulfuric acid, which produces a burning sensation. The nerve endings in your eyes are very sensitive and so they pick up on this irritation. The brain reacts by telling your tear ducts to produce more water, to dilute the irritating acid. So you cry to keep your eyes protected from the acid.

There are some tricks to make onion-dicing less problematic:
- Chop the onion under cold water. The volatile sulfured compounds will be released but then they react with the water, instead of reaching your eyes.
- You can freeze the onion for 10 minutes before cutting it. The cold temperature of the onion will slow down the chemical reaction which forms the volatile sulfured compunds.

AN EXTRA SECOND!

A leap second, to be exact. This leap second is not a unique event – in the last 40 years, there have been 22 leap seconds. The last one occured in 1998.

The reason for the leap second is because of disputes between astronomers and physicists. Traditionally, our time scale is based upon the rotation of the Earth on its axis, as well as its rotation around the sun. However, this time is not a constant – that is, the length of a day has been ever-so-slowly increasing for many years. Physicists would rather have time be a constant, and thus invented the atomic clock and an exact time measurement. In order to keep the atomic clock in sync with the rotation of the Earth, leap seconds are added to the clock every few years.

How will you spend your leap second?

THE DOOMS DAY CLOCK!

There is a clock at the University of Chicago called the Doomsday Clock whose time perpetually lingers just shy of midnight. On this clock, midnight metaphorically represents full nuclear war bringing an end to all civilization, and the clock is meant as a gauge to constantly indicate humankind's proximity to this horrific event.

When it was introduced in 1947, it was set for seven minutes to midnight. Since that day, its minute hand has wandered around on the upper-left quarter of the clock face, inching closer to 12:00 when the threat of nuclear war grows, and crawling away as the risk fades. It has been as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953, and as far as seventeen minutes in 1991. If its caretakers ever set it for midnight, it will probably be the last thing they ever do.

The custodians of this clock have been the men and women of the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Bulletin is a publication which was founded in 1945 by many former Manhattan Project physicists, and over the years contributors have included Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Carl Sagan, Wernher von Braun, Al Gore, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke to name but a few.

Today it stands at seven minutes to the hour. Whenever you're curious how near humanity is to destroying itself, you can check the status on the Doomsday Clock homepage. It's good to stay abreast of this sort of thing so you can plan your schedule around it.


FOR FURTHER READING CHECK OUT DOOMS DAY CLOCK TIMELINE

Life Without the Moon

Life is a tenuous thing. Earth is just within Sol's habitable zone, and constantly pelted with solar radiation and cosmic rays. Rocky scraps of cosmic afterbirth constantly cross Earth’s orbit, threatening to eradicate all terrestrial life. In point of fact, it is almost certain that countless Extinction-Level Events would have sterilized the surface of our plucky planet had it not been for our constant companion and benefactor; a body which unwittingly wards away many of the ills that could befall us: the moon.

Luna is unique among the observed celestial bodies; there is no other satellite closer in size and composition to its mother-planet (if one discounts the dwarf-planet Pluto), and the Earth/moon system is the only tidally locked pair. Furthermore, it also happens to be the only moon in the solar system which is circling an intelligent civilization– a factor which may not be a mere coincidence.

It was 4.5 billion years ago last week that the young planetesimal Earth was forming from the sun's accretion disk of dust and boulders. Several other aspiring planets were building up nearby. One particularly promising young protoplanet was making some exemplary progress by loitering in Earth's Lagrange point, allowing it to share Earth's orbit by staying at a gravitationally neutral distance. As the mass of both young Earth and her smaller rival, Thiea increased, the gravitationally stable Lagrange point was insufficient to keep the worldlets apart, and the proto-worlds were drawn together. Theia, approximately Mars-sized by now, accelerated toward and slammed into Earth at an oblique angle. The heavy core of the smaller world didn't have the velocity to escape Earth, but a large swath of the lighter mantle material of both were flung into orbit. Within the year, the moon we know was well-under construction–or so goes the popular theory. No one bothered to record for us the the rate of Earth's spin before the incident, but like a glancing shot off a billiards ball, the Giant Impact certainly made sure it was spinning afterward.

In that era, the moon was much nearer Earth, and would have looked much larger–several times the size of the sun. For a long time the moon retained a molten core and the accompanying magnetic fields which left geological marks on our world. When things were almost settled down, there was an era called Late Planetary Bombardment when both Earth and its companion were pelted by impacts that blew planetary debris around, and left some of Earth's ancient geology on the moon. Over the eons, erosion has scrubbed away all evidence of that ancient time from the Earth, but some of the chunks that were blasted to the moon were preserved in a frozen, unchanged state. Ultimately these remnants of the Earth's violent youth would be found by enterprising humans, such as the infamous Genesis rock collected by the Apollo 15 astronauts.

Observations of the solar system show us that the moon's birth was rather unusual. All of the other worlds either lack satellites or have captured them from other places. Of course the moon isn't Earth's only unusual resident; its surface crawls with all manner of strange and delicate carbon-based life forms. Adherents of the Rare Earth Theory postulate that a large moon such as ours is not merely a benefit for life, but essentially a requirement.

Although our planetary neighbor Mars also technically lies within Sol's habitable zone, there is reason to speculate that life never could get a foothold there because of its axial tilt. Mars' axis can wobble from 10 degrees up to the current 25 degrees, and maybe more. This has sometimes leaned one of the poles so sharply that the ice melted, filling the meager atmosphere with water vapor that froze again on the next season. By introducing such extremes to the weather, the planet would potentially go through phases where sheets of ice were laid on the surface for epochs, then melted away when the axis tilt became more favorable. When the Phoenix Lander lands near a Martian icecap in May, we may get a chance to see evidence of this ice age cycle on the surface. While Earth has had its share of ice-ages, the gravity of the moon has acted as a gyroscope, keeping the Earth's axis steady at 23.5 degrees and sparing us the wild environmental changes Mars faced. This long-term stability has given life a chance to arise amidst a cycle of regular seasonal changes.

A case can also be made that the tides have been invaluable to the evolution of life on our world. The sun alone would cause some tides to occur, though they would be far less than those the moon creates. The surfing would suck, and for many that wouldn't be a life worth living. The higher tides afforded us by Luna have made long swaths of coastline into areas of that are regularly shifted between dry and wet. These variable areas may have been a proving ground for early sea life to reach out of the oceans and test the land for its suitability as a habitat. Areas farther from shore are only dry at the peak of low-tide, and the period of exposure to air increases as one nears shore, allowing for a subtle progression toward a waterless environment. Early life could have taken advantage of this gradual change to adapt to the wildly different demands of surviving outside the ocean.

It's not only water being tugged by the moon's gravity. Perhaps the moon helps keep Earth's core and seas warmer than they would otherwise be. Since the moon circles the Earth once a month, and the Earth is spinning a full turn at a much quicker 24 hours, the moon's gravity is creating drag, hence friction, as it pulls at Earth's surface. This causes several things to happen: first is a perpetual morphing of the crust–like the amateurish kneading of bread–that contributes a clumpy, broken mess that we call plate tectonics. The WolfmanEven Earth's rotation is slowed by virtue of the Moon's pull.
Without the moon, the Earth might rotate much faster, causing a more turbulent atmosphere, and thus unending gales of life-hostile, skirt-blowing winds. As Luna's orbit slowly creeps away from the Earth at 1.5 inches per year, her gravimetric drag will eventually slow the Earth's rotation to match the pace of the moon's orbit. One day will be 9,600 hours long, and the moon will only be visible from one hemisphere, fixed in the sky. Of course, by then the sun should be in an expanding red-giant phase, slowly engulfing its planets. The sun's coronal atmosphere could be creating drag against the moon, slowing it toward an eventual breakup as Earth's gravity tears it apart. The remnants of Luna will fall back to Mother Earth as meteorites, and while it may be a pretty show, it ought to prove bad for property values, and worse for the surf.

If the unlikely set of circumstances which brought forth our moon are as rare as they seem, perhaps ours is the only such planetary system in the entire, vast galaxy; or perhaps in our unfashionable limb of the universe. But every once in a great while, when the time is right, two protoplanets who love each other very much can touch each other in a special way, and make life together. Without that magic, astronomical ritual, we certainly would not be here.

The Pit of Life and Death

Just outside Butte, Montana lies a pit of greenish poison a mile and a half wide and over a third of a mile deep. It hasn't always been so - it was once a thriving copper mine appropriately dubbed “The Richest Hill in the World.” Over a billion tons of copper ore, silver, gold, and other metals were extracted from the rock of southwestern Montana, making the mining town of Butte one of the richest communities in the country, as well as feeding America’s industrial might for nearly a hundred years. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Anaconda Mining Company was in charge of virtually all the mining operations. When running underground mines became too costly in the 1950’s, Anaconda switched to the drastic but effective methods of “mountaintop removal” and open pit mining. Huge amounts of copper were needed to satisfy the growing demand for radios, televisions, telephones, automobiles, computers, and all the other equipment of America’s post-war boom. As more and more rock was excavated, groundwater began to seep into the pit, and pumps had to be installed to keep it from slowly flooding.

By 1983, the hill was so exhausted that the Anaconda Mining Company was no longer able to extract minerals in profitable amounts. They packed up all the equipment that they could move, shut down the water pumps, and moved on to more lucrative scraps of Earth. Without the pumps, rain and groundwater gradually began to collect in the pit, leaching out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. The water became as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. No fish live there, and no plants line the shores. There aren’t even any insects buzzing about. The Berkeley Pit had become one of the deadliest places on earth, too toxic even for microorganisms. Or so it was thought.

In 1995, an analytic chemist named William Chatham saw something unusual in the allegedly lifeless lake: a small clump of green slime floating on the water's surface. He snagged a sample and brought it to biologist Grant Mitman at the nearby Montana Tech campus of the University of Montana, where Mitman found to his amazement that the goop was a mass of single-celled algae. He called in fellow Tech faculty Andrea and Don Stierle, experts in the biochemistry of microorganisms. The Stierles had recently been trekking about the northwest, looking for cancer-fighting compounds in local fungi with great success. Coincidentally, the Stierles’ funding had just run out, and they needed a new project. They leapt at the opportunity to study these bizarre organisms.

After examining the slime under a microscope, the researchers identified it as Euglena mutabilis, a protozoan which has the remarkable ability of being able to survive in the toxic waters of the Berkeley Pit by altering its local environment to something more hospitable. Through photosynthesis, it increases the oxygen level in the water, which causes dissolved metals to oxidize and precipitate out. In addition, it pulls iron out of the water and sequesters it inside of itself.
xtremophiles are organisms that can tolerate and even thrive in environments that will destroy most other living things. Some can even repair their own damaged DNA, a trait which makes them extremely interesting to cancer researchers. The Stierles reasoned that where there’s one extremophile, there may be others – most likely blown in by the wind. Given their previous successes with strange microorganisms, the researchers believed that the Berkeley Pit and its fledgling extremophile population could produce some medically useful chemicals.

The Stierles were so intrigued by the possibilities that they started work even before securing funding. A squadron of expert researchers was recruited from the undergrads at Montana Tech, and even from a local high school. They collected water samples, isolated microorganisms, and cultured them. The team eventually identified over 160 different species, but they lacked the equipment needed to isolate the interesting chemicals from the microorganisms. Shlepping around western Montana, the Stierles begged and borrowed time at other facilities while they doggedly processed the cultured organisms. Their tenacity led to the discovery of a number of promising chemicals. Three of these, berkeleydione, berkeleytrione, and Berkeley acid, came from species of the fungus Penicillium that had never been seen before, and were therefore named after the Berkeley Pit.

The next step was to see what effect these chemicals had, if any, on other living cells. Thanks to modern biochemical assay techniques, dozens of chemicals can be tested against one organism– or one chemical against dozens of organisms– in a single pass. For reasons that are not entirely clear, many compounds which attack cancer cells are also harmful to brine shrimp, therefore most modern assay tests include the brine shrimp lethality test as a standard procedure. The Stierles exposed swarms of tiny crustacean volunteers to the Berkeley Pit chemicals, and to their delight, five of the chemicals showed anti-cancer properties. Further tests revealed that berkeleydione helped slow the growth of a type of lung cancer cell, and Berkeley acid went after ovarian cancer cells. All five were passed along to the National Cancer Institute for further study.

Other researchers are looking into the Pit as well - not for cancer-fighters or other drugs, but simply for ways to help clean the place up. In 1995, a flock of migrating snow geese stopped at the massive pond for a rest, and at least 342 of them died there. Authorities now use firecrackers and loudspeakers to scare away migrating waterfowl, but there have been a few smaller die-offs nonetheless. Also, on certain mornings, a sinister mist creeps out of the Pit and wraps its tentacles around the streets of Butte. Citizens are understandably anxious about this potentially poisonous fog of doom. The water level is rising at a rate of several inches a month, and if unchecked it will spill over into the area’s groundwater in twenty years. Biochemical assayThat danger has earned the area the ubious distinction of being one of the EPA’s largest Superfund sites. Normally such water is treated by adding lime to the water to reduce the acidity and remove much of the metal, however the Berkeley Pit is so saturated with undesirables that this process would produce tons of toxic sludge every day. Other methods are safer, but are prohibitively expensive. Currently, the EPA's plan is to focus on containment.

Grant Mitman believes that the best way to clean up the Pit is to use the algae that already live there. E. Mutabilis, for one, tends to grow in clumps. These clumps clean up their neighborhoods enough for other extremophiles to move in. These organisms would collect the metals within their own cells, and upon dying they would sink to the bottom and drag the metals with them. To Mitman, it’s all a matter of finding the right mix of extremophiles for a self-sustaining algal colony. Once the right mix is found, there are many other mine-contaminated waters awaiting treatment that could use a similar biology-based cleanup.

With metals concentrated at the bottom, and cleaner water at the top, the Pit could conceivably be reopened. The bottom sludge could be collected and processed for its ever-more-valuable metal content, and the water could be used for industry or agriculture. While it might not be safe to drink, the water could still be worth a quarter million dollars a year in a water-hungry West. In the meantime, the Pit has become a popular tourist attraction. There's a small museum and gift shop located well above the water level. A number of National Historic Landmarks related to mining are in the area, which has prompted some people to call for the creation of a National Park centered on the Pit. With luck, what was once the Richest Hill in the World could eventually provide riches of a different sort.

Mediterranean be Dammed

In the 1920's the people of Europe feared the future as a dark, despairing place. Despite the loss of over five million Europeans in the Great War, the region was still plagued with the social maladies which had led to the conflict. The humans were maladjusted to the Industrial Age and the changes in labor which it spawned. To make matters worse, both scholars and soothsayers of the day postulated that world's fluxing economies would congeal into two economic blobs: the Americas would unify into a wealthy super-state in the west, while the east colluded to become an enormous pan-Asian power. Europe would be left economically isolated, with a limited range of climates for farming and fewer resources at hand. Nowhere was the gloom thicker than in Germany where the terms of the Treaty of Versailles led to poverty and hunger for much of the population. It was in the midst of that dark time that an architect named Herman Sörgel devised a plan to preserve Europe through this daunting new worldscape.

Sörgel spent years promoting his scheme to save Europe: the construction of vast hydroelectric dams spanning the Mediterranean. The massive turbines would furnish a surplus of power, and the re-engineered sea would turn the life-hostile Sahara desert into a fertile wetland. In an era when it seemed technology could do no wrong, a considerable segment of the population supported Sörgel's ambitious plan.

Herman Sörgel was born 2 April 1885 in Regensburg, Germany. Just after the turn of the century Sörgel began studying architecture in Munich. He submitted his doctoral thesis in 1908, but it was rejected. Five years later he turned in a fantastically similar paper. This time it was accepted, and so well received that Sörgel successfully expanded it into a book. From such events Sörgel learned a valuable lesson of persistence–it was a lesson that served him well though the rest of his life. He was working as an architect and journalist in 1914 when World War I broke out across Europe. His country engaged in hostilities, but Sörgel professed himself a pacifist, and did not participate. In the aftermath of the First War to End All Wars, Sörgel looked around at war-ravaged Germany, and worried for the future. Not just his future, nor his country’s. Sörgel worried for all of Europe. The forecasted Super-America and Pan-Asia economies prompted more fear: since the Americas spanned all the latitudes and climates, they would always be able to farm, and would eradicate hunger. With their legendary abundance of resources, the Super-America would need import nothing from Europe. The predicted Pan-Asian union presented the same problem with a distinctly oriental lilt. Europe would be helplessly sandwiched between these two behemoths–small, underfed, and under-powered.

RIVER THAT CONTAMINATES HUMANS!

In late 1945, along the banks of the Techa River in the Soviet Union, a dozen labor camps sent 70,000 inmates to begin construction of a secret city. Mere months earlier the United States' Little Boy and Fat Man bombs had flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving Soviet leaders salivating over the massive power of the atom. In a rush to close the gap in weapons technology, the USSR commissioned a sprawling plutonium-production complex in the southern Ural mountains. The clandestine military-industrial community was to be operated by Russia's Mayak Chemical Combine, and it would come to be known as Chelyabinsk-40.

Within a few years the newfangled nuclear reactors were pumping out plutonium to fuel the Soviet Union's first atomic weapons. Chelyabinsk-40 was absent from all official maps, and it would be over forty years before the Soviet government would even acknowledge its existence. Nevertheless, the small city became an insidious influence in the Soviet Union, ultimately creating a corona of nuclear contamination dwarfing the devastation of the Chernobyl disaster.

By June 1948, after 31 months of brisk construction, the first of the Chelyabinsk-40 "breeder" reactors was brought online. Soon bricks of common uranium-238 were being bombarded with neutrons, resulting in loaves of pipin'-hot weapons-grade plutonium. In their haste to begin production, Soviet engineers lacked the time to establish proper waste-handling procedures, so most of the byproducts were dealt with by diluting them in water and squirting the effluent into the Techa River. The watered-down waste was a cocktail of "hot" elements, including long-lived fission products such as Strontium-90 and Cesium-137–each with a half-life of approximately thirty years.

In 1951, after about three years of operations at Chelyabinsk-40, Soviet scientists conducted a survey of the Techa River to determine whether radioactive contamination was becoming a problem. In the village of Metlino, just over four miles downriver from the plutonium plant, investigators and Geiger counters clicked nervously along the river bank. Rather than the typical "background" gamma radiation of about 0.21 Röntgens per year, the edge of the Techa River was emanating 5 Röntgens per hour. The village of MetlinoThe village of Metlino on the Techa RiverSuch elevated levels were rather distressing since that the river

was the primary source of water for the 1,200 residents there. Subsequent measurements found extensive contamination in 38 other villages along the Techa, seriously jeopardizing the health of about 28,000 people. In addition, almost 100,000 other residents were being exposed to elevated-but-not-quite-as-deadly doses of gamma radiation, both from the river itself and from the floodplain where crops and livestock were raised.

In an effort to avoid serious radiological health effects among the populace, the Soviet government relocated about 7,500 villagers from the most heavily contaminated areas, fenced off the floodplain, and dug wells to provide an alternate water source for the remaining villages. Engineers were brought in to erect earthen dams along the Techa River to prevent radioactive sediments from migrating further downstream. The Soviet scientists at Chelyabinsk-40 also revised their waste disposal strategy, halting the practice of dumping effluent directly into the river. Instead, they constructed a set of "intermediate storage tanks" where waste water could spend some time bleeding off radioactivity. After lingering in these vats for a few months, the diluted dregs were periodically piped to the new long-term storage location: a ten-foot-deep, 110 acre lake called Karachay. For a while these measures spared the Techa River residents from further increases in exposure, but the Mayak Chemical Combine had only begun to demonstrate its flair for misfortune.

By the mid 1950s the workers at the plutonium production plant began to complain of soreness, low blood pressure, loss of coordination, and tremors–the classic symptoms of chronic radiation syndrome. The facility itself was also beginning to encounter chronic complications, particularly in the new intermediate storage system. The row of waste vats sat in a concrete canal a few kilometers outside the main complex, submerged in a constant flow of water to carry away the heat generated by radioactive decay. Soon the technicians discovered that the hot isotopes in the waste water tended to cause a bit of evaporation inside the tanks, resulting in more buoyancy than had been anticipated. This upward pressure put stress on the inlet pipes, eventually compromising the seals and allowing raw radioactive waste to seep into the canal's coolant water. To make matters worse, several of the tanks' heat exchangers failed, crippling their cooling capacity.

The workers were aware of these faults, but the ambient radiation in the cooling trench forestalled any repairs. A flurry of calculations indicated that most of the waste water in the tanks would remain in a stable liquid state even without the additional cooling, so technicians continued to operate the plutonium plant in spite of these problems. Their evaporation calculations were in error, however, and the water inside the defective tanks gradually boiled away. A radioactive sludge of nitrates and acetates was left behind, a chemical compound roughly equivalent to TNT.

Unable to shed much heat, the concentrated radioactive slurry continued to increase in temperature within the defective 80,000 gallon containers. On 29 September 1957, one tank reached an estimated 660 degrees Fahrenheit. At 4:20pm local time, the explosive salt deposits in the bottom of the vat detonated. The blast ignited the contents of the other dried-out tanks, producing a combined explosive force equivalent to about 85 tons of TNT. The thick concrete lid which covered the cooling trench was hurled eighty feet away, and seventy tons of highly radioactive fission products were ejected into the open atmosphere. The buildings at Chelyabinsk-40 shuddered as they were buffeted by the shock wave.

While investigators probed the blast site in protective suits, a mile-high column of radionuclides dragged across the landscape. The gamma-emitting dust cloud spread hazardous isotopes of cesium and strontium over 9,000 square miles, affecting some 270,000 Soviet citizens and their food supplies. Over twenty megacuries (MCi) of radioactivity were released, almost half of that expelled by the Chernobyl incident.

In the days that followed, strange reports began to emerge from downwind villages. According to author Richard Pollock in a 1978 Critical Mass Journal article, residents of the Chelyabinsk Province became "hysterical with fear with the incidence of unknown 'mysterious' diseases breaking out. Victims were seen with skin 'sloughing off' their faces, hands and other exposed parts of their bodies." After the customary ten-day period of hand-sitting, the government ordered the evacuation of many villages where skin-sloughers and blood-vomiters had appeared. This mass migration left the landscape littered with radioactive ghost towns.

The facilities at Chelyabinsk-40 were swiftly decontaminated with hoses, mops, and squeegees, and soon plutonium production was underway again. The intermediate storage system had been partially compromised by the accident, but the factory was still able to squirt its constant flow of radioactive effluence into Lake Karachay. The lake lacked any surface outlets, so optimistic engineers reasoned that anything dumped into the lake would remain entombed there indefinitely.

Many locals were hospitalized with radiation poisoning in the weeks after the waste-tank blast, but the Soviet state forbade doctors from disclosing the true nature of the illnesses. Instead, physicians were instructed to diagnose sufferers with ambiguous "blood problems" and "vegetative syndromes." The Russian government likewise withheld the colossal calamity from the international community. Within two years, the radiation killed all of the pine trees within a twelve mile radius of Chelyabinsk-40. Highway signs were erected at the edges of the contaminated zone, imploring travelers to roll up their windows while traversing the deteriorated swath of Earth, and to not stop for any reason.
Ten years later, in 1967, a severe drought struck the Chelyabinsk Province. Much to the Russian scientists' alarm, shallow Lake Karachay gradually began to shrink from its shores. Over several months the water dwindled considerably, leaving the lake about half-empty (or half-full, if you're more upbeat). This exposed the radioactive sediment in the lake basin, and fifteen years' worth of radionuclides took to the breeze. About 900 square miles of land was peppered with Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and other unhealthy elements. Almost half a million residents were in the path of this latest dust cloud of doom, many of them the same people who had been affected by the 1957 waste-tank explosion.

Soviet engineers hastily enacted a program to help prevent further sediment from leaving Lake Karachay. For a dozen or so years they dumped rocks, soil, and large concrete blocks into the tainted basin. The Mayak Chemical Combine conceded that the lake was an inadequate long-term storage system, and ordered that Karachay be slowly sealed in a shell of earth and concrete.

In 1990, as the Soviet Union teetered at the brink of collapse, government officials finally acknowledged the existence of the secret city of Chelyabinsk-40 (soon renamed to Chelyabinsk-65, then later changed to Ozersk). They also acknowledged its tragic parade of radiological disasters. At that time Lake Karachay remained as the principal waste-dumping site for for the plutonium plant, but the effort to fill the lake with soil and concrete had halved its surface area.

Thirty-nine years of effluent had saturated the lake with nasty isotopes, including an estimated 120 megacuries of long-lived radiation. In contrast, the Chernobyl incident released roughly 100 megacuries of radiation into the environment, but only about 3 megacuries of Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. A delegation who visited Lake Karachay in 1990 measured the radiation at the point where the effluent entered the water, and the needles of their Geiger counters danced at about 600 Röntgens per hour–enough to provide a lethal dose in one hour. They did not linger long.

A report compiled in 1991 found that the incidence of leukemia in the region had increased by 41% since Chelyabinsk-40 opened for business, and that during the 1980s cancers had increased by 21% and circulatory disorders rose by 31%. It is probable, however, that the true numbers are much higher since doctors were required to limit the number diagnoses issued for cancer and other radiation-related illnesses. In the village of Muslyumovo, a local physician's personal records from 1993 indicated an average male lifespan of 45 years compared to 69 in the rest of the country. Birth defects, sterility, and chronic disease also increased dramatically. In all, over a million Russian citizens were directly affected by the misadventures of the Mayak Chemical Combine from 1948 to 1990, including around 28,000 people classified as "seriously irradiated."
Today, there are huge tracts of Chelyabinsk land still uninhabitable due to the radionuclides from the river contamination, the 1957 blast, and the 1967 drought. The surface of Lake Karachay is now made up of more concrete than water, however the lake's payload of fission products is not completely captive. Recent surveys have detected gamma-emitting elements in nearby rivers, indicating that undesirable isotopes have been seeping into the water table. Estimates suggest that approximately a billion gallons of groundwater have already been contaminated with 5 megacuries of radionuclides. The neighboring Norwegians are understandably nervous that some of the pollution could find its way into their water supply, or even into the Arctic Ocean.

Russia has long been fond of producing the most massive specimens of military might: the monstrous Tsar Cannon, the 200-ton Tsar Bell, the cumbersome Tsar Tank, and the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba. In that "biggest-ever" tradition, the Mayak Chemical Combine is now credited by the Worldwatch Institute as the creator of the "most polluted spot" in history, a mess whose true magnitude is yet to be known
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