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India To Build Neutrino Observatory
TeriMaKiChooth writes "Only the fifth in the world, the facility is being called one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken by India. About 90 scientists from 26 organizations will be involved in the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), organizers say. Neutrinos are elusive, nearly mass-less elementary particles, sometimes called 'ghost particles.'"
is a real bad swear word!
I'm a particle physics grad student, and I swear I have never heard anyone refer to them as ghost particles. This seems to be BBC science writers only...
xterm -n 8
I do not see how this type of project is sanctioned by the Indian government.
With money that is bookmarked for such projects. Believe it or not, third world countries have finance ministers who plan and reserve portions of funds for different causes and do not simply dole out cash to whoever asks for it.
Half the population is living in slums
Nonsense, unless you call the huts that a lot of tribes live in or cabins built in the mountains as slums too. People are fairly self-sufficient and are generally healthier than the average city yuppie. A very small number of people are actually in such a dire situation that they're dying from starvation.
Most parts of the country have only intermittant electricty
Rural areas do have this problem, but every place from small towns and cities have regular power supply. It is definitely not a problem in "most" of the country.
There is almost no safe water (by Western European standards)
There are almost no people with weak immune systems (by Western European standards)
The majority of the population is functionally illiterate.
Now where did you get that from? And what do you mean by that?
The roads are amongst the most dangerous in the world
They're definitely not as safe as the ones in the more developed countries.
Pollution (air, water, and waste) is a HUGE problem
in the entire world, not just in India.
I assume it's a reference to geoneutrinos, produced by nuclear decays/reactions in the Earth's core:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/22737
xterm -n 8
I liked the plane flying through crevice gag:
1. Taking off from LA(?), the family's small plane falls into the Earth as the runway falls into a sinkhole. The plane must avoid falling debris, but eventually climbs out.
2. Taking off from Yellowstone, the family's small plane falls into the Earth as the runway falls into a sinkhole. The plane must avoid falling debris, but eventually climbs out.
3. Taking off from Las Vegas, the family's large plane falls into the Earth as the runway falls into a sinkhole. The plane must avoid falling debris, but eventually climbs out.
Thank you for linking the article!
"The heat generated by uranium and thorium decay is the driving force for mantle convection, and hence plate tectonics and earthquakes. This result and future measurements using the same technique will provide useful inputs to Earth convection models."
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Enter cliche: Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day; set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
1. Half the population is living in slums. - Incorrect. According to J Urban Health. 2007 May; 84(Suppl 1): 27–34. , 28% of the Urban population, which is itself ~40% of total lives in slums. You have a roughly 200% error in your estimate.
2. India also has a educated middle class equivalent to the population of Central Europe.
3. India has a burgeoning economy with the second highest growth rate at about 8.5%
4. India has a developing science program, ranking in the top 5 countries with nuclear and space technologies.
5. You have an incorrect assumption that throwing more money at a problem solves it faster. Even if it did, the social disruption caused by solving a problem can create new ones. Sometimes, deep-rooted problems that were developed over centuries of colonization have to be solved at a controlled rate, on the same time scales.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.