I don't know if ethylene oxide is used for all sponges- that's a bit pricey for disposable items like that. I know a number of items are sterilized with gamma radiation, which would flat out kill any electronics like RFID chips.
That would require chips being sterilized with ethylene oxide, after which they would be combined with gamma irradiated items- which in turn would have to be placed in sterile packaging. That compares with packing the disposables, nuking them, and shipping them out. Much higher risk of contamination (versus virtually assured sterility of unopened items), and much more expensive due to the combination step.
An interesting book on the subject is called "The Book on the Bookshelf," by Harry Petroski (ISBN: 0375706399). So- one more book to add to the collection.
Although largely a historical perspective on how books have gone from being protected documents, chained to desks, to commonly available paperbacks and similar, there is also a section on organization, including some pros and cons. Published in 2000, it does not cover computer databases. A used copy shoud be available on the cheap.
I have a similar conundrum with an analagous collection of plants, and am working on using my existing database to deal with those as well- everything is in there, but I need to assign location data. It's already barcoded.
I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned the Cornell Pumpkin story yet.
I had a co-worker that was at Cornell at the time, and claims to know the perpetrators. Further inquiries were met with vague comments about the statute of limitations.
"Soon Dutch settlers were hopping off ships with their dogs, monkeys, and pigs, and several seasick rats also would scurry ashore at each docking. While the colonists were eating the adult birds, the animals they had brought with them were feasting on the eggs and the young. What could the dodo do? With the exception of its beak, the bird was defenseless. When it tried to run, its big belly scraped on the ground, and it was physically impossible for it to climb a tree to nest out of harm's way. The last dodo on Mauritius was eaten in 1681. By that time a dozen of the birds had made their way to Europe, where one of them became a sideshow attraction in London. Naturalist John Tradescant bought it after its death, had it stuffed, and placed it on the shelf next to his other unusual specimens. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford acquired the bird in 1683, but during spring cleaning in 1755 the museum's board of directors took one look at the dusty, stupid-looking bird and unanimously voted to discard it. Fortunately, the museum's curator had enough foresight to cut off the head and one foot before he tossed the rest of the world's only stuffed dodo in the trash. The old saying "Out of sight, out of mind" was quite apt in this case."
Because there were no complete specimens, the dodo was thought to be purely mythical. Thanks to some work by a resident of Mauritius, some additional bones were found in the 1850s. Saved from cryptozoology, in effect.
Helium is produced as a function of radioactive decay in the lab (or, in larger quantities, in nuclear reactors). The quantities are not commercially viable.
Commercial quantities of helium come out of the ground in Texas. People think the Strategic Helium Reserve was such a big joke. Except for the fact that without helium, we can't make computer chips, can't do inert gas welding, can't do a lot of science and (most important) can't make squeaky voices at kid's parties. So, the government has decided it's in the best interests of all to privatize the collection, storage, and the distribution network for what is a non-renewable, economically critical element.
Even Wired magazine has mentioned the potential helium shortage. We'll run out eventually. The American Chemical Society puts it at around 2015. That's not good. The spring of 2002, there was enough of a shortage that the distributors of air products had to clamp down on helium- there was rationing for a few months. And the government's concept is to *privatize* it. Wonderful.
Those first two estimates are based on the text content alone. If the graphical contents of those books were rendered into digital format. The third one assumes maps, photographs, sound recordings, etc.
Liquid propane boils at -42.1 degrees C. It goes from the solid to the liquid at -187.7 degrees C, which is not important for this, but read on below. It also has an explosive range from 2.8% to 9.5% in air- a little lower than natural gas.
Liquid nitrogen boils at -195.8 degrees C, which is cold enough to freeze propane into a solid (there's a fun experiment for you). Further, liquid nitrogen is not flammable, and presents no hazards other than asphyxiation and freeze damage. Nitrogen already makes up 80% of the air we breathe, so unless one works in an enclosed space with plenty of NL2 boiling off, it's tough to die from asphyxiation.
In other words, LN2 is colder, and won't blow up on you. I've used it for years, and have yet to get hurt by it. A little respect goes a long way.
I actually used to do research on this. I served as a radar tech on what is one of the largest- if not THE largest- study on bird interactions at windpower sites. It gets into some pretty dirty politics, actually. Here's the net upshot.
Yes, windpower generators kill birds. That's pretty well-established. The question is what kind, how many, and can these strikes be reduced?
However, the movement against wind power (conventional fuels, such as gas, coal, and oil) use the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1929 to try to shut down wind power sites as they are competition. I forget the specific wording, but the net upshot is that if someone plunks down a power generator, whomever runs the local grid must buy it from them at a reasonable rate. This is what keeps people with solar panels and a grid tie happy, for example.
Of course, this would cut into the bottom line for the power companies, particularly in remote, windy areas. Fortunately, the big money is in urban distribution nets, and not in rural electrification- these smaller companies don't have the money to tie it up in courts. However, the big power generators DO have the money to tie it up in courts. Until recently (the past decade), windpower sites were pretty rare, and were nothing more than an oddity. However, larger wind farms have sprung up. Some in Texas generate megawatts of power; the Brazos windfarm does 160 megawatts from (160) 1-megawatt towers, for example. That's not an oddity- that's an industry.
These wind farms are now competing against conventional fuels, so the race is on. The big power companies see the Migratory Waterfowl Act as their best bet to constrain or even extinguish wind power. My understanding (which is probably simplified and wrong) is that killing just one bird is a violation of the treaty- and treaties with other countries (such as the MWA) take precedence over all other legislation.
I worked on the field research end, trying to figure out how many birds flew through wind corridors using radar. It was a lot of fun- really cold, but very worthwhile. I still don't think that windpower site is open; the research was done 9 years ago this fall. It's been in limbo since then, best as I know.
As a side note, we saw vast numbers of birds, flying at all hours of the night. Nobody had any idea there were that many birds out there. To this day, I have no idea how a bird flying in subzero weather at 40+ MPH kept its eyes from freezing over.
New explosives for Disney
on
Disney Goes Boom!
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· Score: 4, Informative
While the compressed gas systems won't change the toxics used in the shells, this will. (Look for the bit at the bottom on "Better Holidays through Chemistry.")
It will be difficult to replace all of the colors produced by metals and other compounds used in fireworks- some of which are quite toxic (strontium, cadmium, arsenic, antimony, PVC plastic, etc.). It will also be much more expensive. But high nitrogen explosives and newer organic compounds have a lot to offer the field- including colors you can't get with the old standbys.
Some of the high nitrogen stuff I used to work with was pretty interesting. Lots of newer, potentially safer compounds are in the pipeline- mainly for military applications, but they can be bastardized to, er, recreational purposes.
That depends upon what is used as the "desiccant." Two possibilities come to mind:
1) The desiccant volatilizes in the melt during recycling. A number of compounds come to mind. Ammonium nitrate (yes, THAT ammonium nitrate) is used in cold packs for athletic purposes, and decomposes at 250 C into water and N2O (nitrous oxide, or laughing gas). At about 300 C, it decomposes into other, less desirable oxides of nitrogen, and water.
2) As the reaction itself is inspired by the introduction of water, the "desiccant" must be water soluble; you get an endothermic reaction as it dissolves. Anyway- I don't know too much about recycling these days, but I've seen cans go into chippers so they can be blown into the back of a semi truck to go to the recycling plant. One would assume that at some point, those chips get washed before they get re-melted. Otherwise, carmelized sugar and other gunk left on the inside of the cans- even in tiny amounts, multiplied by many cans- would cause more problems than it's worth.
Not quite so much. My forte is conventional munitions, not nuclear. I've been assured by my nuclear associates that they're all perfectly safe, and blah blah blah. Sure, whatever.
The Brits and the French have a lot of worries with regards to unexploded ordnance (UXO), which we don't have to deal with here in the US. Although there are a few exceptions (minefields at White Sands Missile Range that are, ironically enough, very close to one of the Space Shuttle's emergency landing strips, for example) on military bases, the US is largely free of unexploded munitions, unlike much of the rest of the world.
However, in France, the incidence of UXO is sufficiently high that local farmers plow up "items" on a regular basis. If they are small enough to be moved by an individual, they are taken out by hand and put in drop boxes by the road for ordnance techs to deal with. That's how common they are- farmers turned ordnance technicians.
While working on a test program with some British ordnance people, a story was related to me regarding buried UXO from WWII. Pipes were filled with nitroglycerin (NG), and buried perpendicular to landing strips in the UK. The idea was that they could be detonated in the event of invasion, rendering the landing strips useless. They were forgotten after WWII, and during construction some decades later, were re-discovered when a pipe containing NG was struck with a backhoe; I believe it killed the operator.
Making things worse during the remediation effort was that apartments had been built over part of the old runway. The Brits paid to bus the residents to the beach each day, and then bring them back in the afternoon after work for the day had halted. Evidently, they became quite cross when the work was finished a day early and everyone lined up for the buses, and the buses didn't come that day.
Anyway- the only thing worse than UXO is unexploded, toxic ordnance. Chemical warfare just hasn't been the same since the Chinese invented burning pepper upwind of the enemy, I'll tell ya.
Interestingly, Disney has been working on making pyrotechnics that are much safer in terms of their toxicity. To get those pretty colors, toxic elements such as strontium (crimson), gallium (as gallium nitrate in whistling fireworks), antimony (salutes), barium (deep green), plastics (such as PVC, Saran, Parlon), arsenic (in copper acetoarsenate), and so forth. When you're a huge consumer of fireworks like Disney (just ask any pyro guy how hard it is to get GOOD fireworks, thanks to Disney buying whatever they can), those chemicals have to go somewhere. The long-term result is contaminated soil and water.
People like Mike Hiskey at Los Alamos have been contracted by Disney to make fireworks that are based on organic molecules, and use smaller amounts of chemical salts for the color. He also works on high-nitrogen explosives, along with several others working in the specialized field of novel explosives design and synthesis.
Perhaps things have changed in the past years because of the drought (now in its 7th year). But one of the reasons that Workman et al. built the lightning observatory there was because of the very high lightning density. I understand the location drove his wife nuts.
As the other/.er noted, they eventually tore down Workman and put up NEW Workman, which is one of the most sterile and ugly buildings I've ever seen. Tech campus has a lot of structural oddities that remain- including a vast solar thermal array on the theater building that cannot be used because all of the valves were installed backwards, and they never had the funds to repair it.
Lightning in New Mexico was absolutely spectacular. New Mexico Tech has the Langmuir Lightning Lab, at the top of South Baldy (10,783 foot peak). Charlie Moore and Bernard Vonnegut (brother of author Kurt, now deceased) used to study lightning discharge there.
Until they tore it down in '98 or '99, New Mexico Tech used to have a lightning observatory right in the middle of campus, part of the legacy of E.J. Workman; it was actually an air traffic control tower, with a full 360-degree view. (Workman was an interesting character himself, having been sent down to Socorro from University of New Mexico to work on the "second most important" technological achievement of WWII, the proximity fuze, at what later became the explosives research and test facility at New Mexico Tech).
But, anyway- New Mexico has a very high density of lightning, second only to parts of FL (which has its own lightning research center). From firsthand experience, I can state that the size and duration of the strokes can be extremely powerful; one night I was woken up by a particularly powerful one that set off a number of car alarms. There was no storm with no rain before or after- it was as if one of the explosives bunkers had detonated up on the Hill at EMRTC.
Parts of eastern New Mexico get it even harder. There has to be something about the magnitude of the storms, and maybe the flatness of the land, that forms a particularly large discharge. A good New Mexican frog-strangler is something to behold.
There's a whole slew of other herbicides that can be employed.
To be honest, most Roundup (glyphosate) resistance is a byproduct of installing another gene. What happens is that the plants are transformed for one reason or another, and a linked gene for Roundup resistance is added.
So, when you try to transform, say, 1000 plants, you take the progeny and grow them on media with glyphosate in them, or spray the seedlings with glyphosate or whatever. The ones that survive *should* have the other gene along with it.
As a result, the plants have resistance to glyphosate AND a pesticide in every cell (BT gene, like Cry or something), or whatever. It's leftover from the transformation of the plants.
Now there are other options- other herbicides that can be used, although most work off of a similar mechanism that involves inhibition of ammonia detoxification (so the plants literally die in their own waste). Another option is to throw in antibiotic resistance (kanamycin, etc.) which will kill plants at a set level- unless they have the resistance gene in them.
Glyphosate resistance is handy, and Roundup is a "nice" herbicide in that it has low toxicity and relatively low environmental life, and it frickin' kills EVERYTHING... that doesn't have artificial resistance, of course. There have been one or two really weird plants discovered that don't have glyphostae resistance, but they're exceptions. The gene comes from a bacterium, IIRC. But there are other herbicides, and they can be employed- they're just a little more expensive, or have some effects that aren't always desirable- like all pesticides.
Well, in theory, it SHOULD be. But some of these el-cheapo safes just have to pass some pretty hairy tests (heating it up, dropping it some distance onto "rip rap," then flipping it over and- I think- doing it again), and that's it. Trusting a sheet steel toy safe to cooking then immersion- I don't know as I'd want to trust my data to that sort of thing!
As an aside, one of the nastiest structure fires I've ever seen was in a trailer home which, as goes without saying, went up pretty fast. We were fortunate in that there was a hydrant in front of the structure, and nobody was home at the time. Fire started in the kitchen, and completely gutted it. Interestingly, not more than 5' from the point of origin, the refrigerator survived quite well, and when we opened it up, we found the ice cream hadn't even melted. In light of the intensity and duration of the fire, we were pretty surprised.
Fire safes (or containers, as they're called in the industry) come in many different forms. As has already been noted by fellow/.'ers, there are media containers, and document containers- the difference being that media containers are SUPPOSED to stay cooler than document containers. Here's how each one of them works.
Document containers consist of two thin layers of steel, which have a hydrated compound stored between them; used to be plaster of Paris, or calcium sulfate hemihydrate (same as gypsum sheetrock). Upon heating, the hydrate gives up its water, flooding the inside of the container with water vapor. This serves two purposes. The first is that the heat of vaporization absorbs large amounts of heat, so the container heats up less rapidly. The second is that the water vapor displaces oxygen, making it less likely that documents will burn- unless, of course, the container fails. Remember- it's just two pieces of sheet steel. A fire safe is not necessarily a burglar-resistant safe, and most of the common safes on the market can be manipulated ("cracked") very easily by even a novice- they're not SUPPOSED to prevent theft. One needs to purchase a UL-rated burglar resistant container for that sort of thing. Safes can combine theft and fire resistance ratings; consult a security professional (like a SAVTA member) for the appropriate safe.
Also important to remember is the location: If a safe is on the 2nd or 3rd floor, once that floor burns through, the container will fall. If it cracks open- there goes your contents. So- put it in the basement. BUT- make sure you don't have heavy objects located above it (refrigerators, etc.), which will crack it open. Put the safe on blocks if you can so that the contents aren't soaked from the firefighters flooding the basement!
Media containers should follow the same general rules (be careful where you put it, etc.), but work on a different principle. Last I checked (it could have changed), media containers use wood as insulation. This keeps the contents at an acceptable temperature, provided everything works. Wood is a great insulator, and it burns relatively slowly unless it is divided in a manner than allows combustion.
None of this means that every fire-rated safe will survive. In fact, a review of areas swept by wildfires in California in... 1991, IIRC, showed that even home-made safes worked as well in some instances as UL-rated containers. However, the best containers were all positioned in the slab, or in some other large, non-combustible heat sink. In-floor safes fare well, although exceptions (such as where the dial melted and dripped into the money stored within, causing most of it to burn) were noted.
So- in short, look for the UL rating. No, the $50 toy safe at the discount store isn't the same as the $500 media vault from a locksmith, even if they ARE both rated. No, the people who sold you the $50 safe will know nothing about how it works, or how well it will protect your data, or how to open it and retrieve your property if your house *does* burn down. No, the $50 safe will not come with a professional who knows how to open your container if something DOES happen to go wrong with it. A professional SAVTA member will be able to help you with all of this, as well as sell you the appropriate container.
But, of course, if you want to try the $50 safe, go right ahead if it helps you sleep better. They have to meet the minimum standards from Underwriter's Labs (UL 72 for Class 125 and Class 150 containers). And it will depend upon where you live (across from a fire station in a Class 1 noncombustible structure, versus Uncle Marty's trailer home, 25 minutes from the nearest volunteer fire department), of course. But for GOD'S SAKE, don't assume that because the label says "FIRE SAFE," that they're all the same, or that they'll save your data no matter what.
Disclaimer: No, I'm not a SAVTA member, and I don't currently work as a locksmith or a safe/vault technician.
I've often wondered if ultrapure water could be employed if the substrate were properly prepared. In other words, if the components had a very thin passivating or inerting layer that would prevent ions from leaching into solution, and then the water was very high purity (higher than distilled), you *could* immerse the components. Ultrapure water straight out of the tap has a resistance of 18.3 million ohms per centimeter (until it hits air, and carbon dioxide drops it to about 500,000 ohms).
So, if you could exclude air, coat the components, and then recirculate the ultrapure water through a resin bed (which is how it's made ultrapure in the first place), it *could* be done- but it would be a lot of work. Plus, very pure water is surprisingly corrosive, so the inerting layer would have to be pretty specific, like the polyethylene that coats the inside of soda cans (cheap but effective).
Water has the benefit of having a large specific heat (4.18 kJ/kg), which is about as good as it gets. While Novec 1230 is good stuff, it has low specific heat (1.103 kJ/kg). It's a trade-off, though, since you can't get pure water below 0 C without the risk of it freezing, unlike Novec, which gets down to -108 C.
I didn't know that about Albertson's (I live in AZ, too). I heard The Card (tm) was coming, and wanted no part of it.
Fortunately, Trader Joe's has no card requirements, and Sprout's has better produce- and better prices. The coming of the card to Albertson's has really opened my eyes to other options in the neighborhood. Now we're eating better and it's costing us less.
There has been some discussion about the Mars rocks that may eventually be returned to Earth. Containment for those particular nuggets of goodness will consist of unprecedented biosafety security. Who knows if they'll refer to it as Level 5 or not.
All of which means that there'll probably be unprecedented failure, but that's just my inner cynic speaking.
As an aside the moon rocks were returned with some modicum of biosafety, but considering the fact that they splashed down in the ocean, and there was no way to fully contain all the dust from the vehicles and the suits the astronauts wore, it was mostly cosmetic.
When I lived in New Mexico, I set my swamp cooler on a timer to come on about half an hour before I got home. After working in the field some days in 90-100F heat, it was sure good to come home to a place that was just the right temperature. MUCH less expensive than refrigerated air, and the increase in humidity was welcome.
In a somewhat related note, a little trick for those of you with swamp coolers. When you start them up for the first time in the spring, after you flush the system and scrape out the scale and dust, fill it with water and add half a cup of fabric softener to the reservoir. Makes the whole house smell clean. This may not sound like much to people who don't know swamp coolers, but for those that do- you know how bad they can stink after a winter of disuse!
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That would require chips being sterilized with ethylene oxide, after which they would be combined with gamma irradiated items- which in turn would have to be placed in sterile packaging. That compares with packing the disposables, nuking them, and shipping them out. Much higher risk of contamination (versus virtually assured sterility of unopened items), and much more expensive due to the combination step.
An interesting book on the subject is called "The Book on the Bookshelf," by Harry Petroski (ISBN: 0375706399). So- one more book to add to the collection. Although largely a historical perspective on how books have gone from being protected documents, chained to desks, to commonly available paperbacks and similar, there is also a section on organization, including some pros and cons. Published in 2000, it does not cover computer databases. A used copy shoud be available on the cheap. I have a similar conundrum with an analagous collection of plants, and am working on using my existing database to deal with those as well- everything is in there, but I need to assign location data. It's already barcoded.
I had a co-worker that was at Cornell at the time, and claims to know the perpetrators. Further inquiries were met with vague comments about the statute of limitations.
"Soon Dutch settlers were hopping off ships with their dogs, monkeys, and pigs, and several seasick rats also would scurry ashore at each docking. While the colonists were eating the adult birds, the animals they had brought with them were feasting on the eggs and the young. What could the dodo do? With the exception of its beak, the bird was defenseless. When it tried to run, its big belly scraped on the ground, and it was physically impossible for it to climb a tree to nest out of harm's way. The last dodo on Mauritius was eaten in 1681. By that time a dozen of the birds had made their way to Europe, where one of them became a sideshow attraction in London. Naturalist John Tradescant bought it after its death, had it stuffed, and placed it on the shelf next to his other unusual specimens. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford acquired the bird in 1683, but during spring cleaning in 1755 the museum's board of directors took one look at the dusty, stupid-looking bird and unanimously voted to discard it. Fortunately, the museum's curator had enough foresight to cut off the head and one foot before he tossed the rest of the world's only stuffed dodo in the trash. The old saying "Out of sight, out of mind" was quite apt in this case."
That's from:
http://www.trivia-library.com/c/extinct-animals- the-dodo-bird-part-2.htm
Because there were no complete specimens, the dodo was thought to be purely mythical. Thanks to some work by a resident of Mauritius, some additional bones were found in the 1850s. Saved from cryptozoology, in effect.
Fire resistant containers protect paper and other common combustibles. However, they do not keep plastics from melting.
That's why you need a media vault or container.
Commercial quantities of helium come out of the ground in Texas. People think the Strategic Helium Reserve was such a big joke. Except for the fact that without helium, we can't make computer chips, can't do inert gas welding, can't do a lot of science and (most important) can't make squeaky voices at kid's parties. So, the government has decided it's in the best interests of all to privatize the collection, storage, and the distribution network for what is a non-renewable, economically critical element.
Even Wired magazine has mentioned the potential helium shortage. We'll run out eventually. The American Chemical Society puts it at around 2015. That's not good. The spring of 2002, there was enough of a shortage that the distributors of air products had to clamp down on helium- there was rationing for a few months. And the government's concept is to *privatize* it. Wonderful.
Those first two estimates are based on the text content alone. If the graphical contents of those books were rendered into digital format. The third one assumes maps, photographs, sound recordings, etc.
Liquid nitrogen boils at -195.8 degrees C, which is cold enough to freeze propane into a solid (there's a fun experiment for you). Further, liquid nitrogen is not flammable, and presents no hazards other than asphyxiation and freeze damage. Nitrogen already makes up 80% of the air we breathe, so unless one works in an enclosed space with plenty of NL2 boiling off, it's tough to die from asphyxiation.
In other words, LN2 is colder, and won't blow up on you. I've used it for years, and have yet to get hurt by it. A little respect goes a long way.
Yes, windpower generators kill birds. That's pretty well-established. The question is what kind, how many, and can these strikes be reduced?
However, the movement against wind power (conventional fuels, such as gas, coal, and oil) use the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1929 to try to shut down wind power sites as they are competition. I forget the specific wording, but the net upshot is that if someone plunks down a power generator, whomever runs the local grid must buy it from them at a reasonable rate. This is what keeps people with solar panels and a grid tie happy, for example.
Of course, this would cut into the bottom line for the power companies, particularly in remote, windy areas. Fortunately, the big money is in urban distribution nets, and not in rural electrification- these smaller companies don't have the money to tie it up in courts. However, the big power generators DO have the money to tie it up in courts. Until recently (the past decade), windpower sites were pretty rare, and were nothing more than an oddity. However, larger wind farms have sprung up. Some in Texas generate megawatts of power; the Brazos windfarm does 160 megawatts from (160) 1-megawatt towers, for example. That's not an oddity- that's an industry.
These wind farms are now competing against conventional fuels, so the race is on. The big power companies see the Migratory Waterfowl Act as their best bet to constrain or even extinguish wind power. My understanding (which is probably simplified and wrong) is that killing just one bird is a violation of the treaty- and treaties with other countries (such as the MWA) take precedence over all other legislation.
I worked on the field research end, trying to figure out how many birds flew through wind corridors using radar. It was a lot of fun- really cold, but very worthwhile. I still don't think that windpower site is open; the research was done 9 years ago this fall. It's been in limbo since then, best as I know.
As a side note, we saw vast numbers of birds, flying at all hours of the night. Nobody had any idea there were that many birds out there. To this day, I have no idea how a bird flying in subzero weather at 40+ MPH kept its eyes from freezing over.
Some of the new high nitrogen explosives are well suited to this application.
It will be difficult to replace all of the colors produced by metals and other compounds used in fireworks- some of which are quite toxic (strontium, cadmium, arsenic, antimony, PVC plastic, etc.). It will also be much more expensive. But high nitrogen explosives and newer organic compounds have a lot to offer the field- including colors you can't get with the old standbys.
Some of the high nitrogen stuff I used to work with was pretty interesting. Lots of newer, potentially safer compounds are in the pipeline- mainly for military applications, but they can be bastardized to, er, recreational purposes.
1) The desiccant volatilizes in the melt during recycling. A number of compounds come to mind. Ammonium nitrate (yes, THAT ammonium nitrate) is used in cold packs for athletic purposes, and decomposes at 250 C into water and N2O (nitrous oxide, or laughing gas). At about 300 C, it decomposes into other, less desirable oxides of nitrogen, and water.
2) As the reaction itself is inspired by the introduction of water, the "desiccant" must be water soluble; you get an endothermic reaction as it dissolves. Anyway- I don't know too much about recycling these days, but I've seen cans go into chippers so they can be blown into the back of a semi truck to go to the recycling plant. One would assume that at some point, those chips get washed before they get re-melted. Otherwise, carmelized sugar and other gunk left on the inside of the cans- even in tiny amounts, multiplied by many cans- would cause more problems than it's worth.
But the list of broken arrows is a pretty long one. The way I understand it, there's no one organization that keeps track of all incidents and lost devices. On the bright side, they may have found the lost Mk-39 near Savannah, GA.
However, in France, the incidence of UXO is sufficiently high that local farmers plow up "items" on a regular basis. If they are small enough to be moved by an individual, they are taken out by hand and put in drop boxes by the road for ordnance techs to deal with. That's how common they are- farmers turned ordnance technicians.
While working on a test program with some British ordnance people, a story was related to me regarding buried UXO from WWII. Pipes were filled with nitroglycerin (NG), and buried perpendicular to landing strips in the UK. The idea was that they could be detonated in the event of invasion, rendering the landing strips useless. They were forgotten after WWII, and during construction some decades later, were re-discovered when a pipe containing NG was struck with a backhoe; I believe it killed the operator.
Making things worse during the remediation effort was that apartments had been built over part of the old runway. The Brits paid to bus the residents to the beach each day, and then bring them back in the afternoon after work for the day had halted. Evidently, they became quite cross when the work was finished a day early and everyone lined up for the buses, and the buses didn't come that day.
Anyway- the only thing worse than UXO is unexploded, toxic ordnance. Chemical warfare just hasn't been the same since the Chinese invented burning pepper upwind of the enemy, I'll tell ya.
People like Mike Hiskey at Los Alamos have been contracted by Disney to make fireworks that are based on organic molecules, and use smaller amounts of chemical salts for the color. He also works on high-nitrogen explosives, along with several others working in the specialized field of novel explosives design and synthesis.
As the other /.er noted, they eventually tore down Workman and put up NEW Workman, which is one of the most sterile and ugly buildings I've ever seen. Tech campus has a lot of structural oddities that remain- including a vast solar thermal array on the theater building that cannot be used because all of the valves were installed backwards, and they never had the funds to repair it.
Until they tore it down in '98 or '99, New Mexico Tech used to have a lightning observatory right in the middle of campus, part of the legacy of E.J. Workman; it was actually an air traffic control tower, with a full 360-degree view. (Workman was an interesting character himself, having been sent down to Socorro from University of New Mexico to work on the "second most important" technological achievement of WWII, the proximity fuze, at what later became the explosives research and test facility at New Mexico Tech).
But, anyway- New Mexico has a very high density of lightning, second only to parts of FL (which has its own lightning research center). From firsthand experience, I can state that the size and duration of the strokes can be extremely powerful; one night I was woken up by a particularly powerful one that set off a number of car alarms. There was no storm with no rain before or after- it was as if one of the explosives bunkers had detonated up on the Hill at EMRTC.
Parts of eastern New Mexico get it even harder. There has to be something about the magnitude of the storms, and maybe the flatness of the land, that forms a particularly large discharge. A good New Mexican frog-strangler is something to behold.
To be honest, most Roundup (glyphosate) resistance is a byproduct of installing another gene. What happens is that the plants are transformed for one reason or another, and a linked gene for Roundup resistance is added.
So, when you try to transform, say, 1000 plants, you take the progeny and grow them on media with glyphosate in them, or spray the seedlings with glyphosate or whatever. The ones that survive *should* have the other gene along with it.
As a result, the plants have resistance to glyphosate AND a pesticide in every cell (BT gene, like Cry or something), or whatever. It's leftover from the transformation of the plants.
Now there are other options- other herbicides that can be used, although most work off of a similar mechanism that involves inhibition of ammonia detoxification (so the plants literally die in their own waste). Another option is to throw in antibiotic resistance (kanamycin, etc.) which will kill plants at a set level- unless they have the resistance gene in them.
Glyphosate resistance is handy, and Roundup is a "nice" herbicide in that it has low toxicity and relatively low environmental life, and it frickin' kills EVERYTHING... that doesn't have artificial resistance, of course. There have been one or two really weird plants discovered that don't have glyphostae resistance, but they're exceptions. The gene comes from a bacterium, IIRC. But there are other herbicides, and they can be employed- they're just a little more expensive, or have some effects that aren't always desirable- like all pesticides.
4/07/04 JEFF F HUNSAKER Divisional Officer 5,976 Open Market Sale proceeds of $66,558.83
4/07/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Proposed Sale (Form 144) estimated proceeds of $126,817.11
4/07/04 JEFF F HUNSAKER Vice President 5,976 Proposed Sale (Form 144) estimated proceeds of $64,002.95
4/07/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 2,363 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $2,646.55
4/07/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,481 Open Market Sale proceeds of $128,736.45
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Proposed Sale (Form 144) estimated proceeds of $137,237.19
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $143,276.10
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $170,510.39
As an aside, one of the nastiest structure fires I've ever seen was in a trailer home which, as goes without saying, went up pretty fast. We were fortunate in that there was a hydrant in front of the structure, and nobody was home at the time. Fire started in the kitchen, and completely gutted it. Interestingly, not more than 5' from the point of origin, the refrigerator survived quite well, and when we opened it up, we found the ice cream hadn't even melted. In light of the intensity and duration of the fire, we were pretty surprised.
Document containers consist of two thin layers of steel, which have a hydrated compound stored between them; used to be plaster of Paris, or calcium sulfate hemihydrate (same as gypsum sheetrock). Upon heating, the hydrate gives up its water, flooding the inside of the container with water vapor. This serves two purposes. The first is that the heat of vaporization absorbs large amounts of heat, so the container heats up less rapidly. The second is that the water vapor displaces oxygen, making it less likely that documents will burn- unless, of course, the container fails. Remember- it's just two pieces of sheet steel. A fire safe is not necessarily a burglar-resistant safe, and most of the common safes on the market can be manipulated ("cracked") very easily by even a novice- they're not SUPPOSED to prevent theft. One needs to purchase a UL-rated burglar resistant container for that sort of thing. Safes can combine theft and fire resistance ratings; consult a security professional (like a SAVTA member) for the appropriate safe.
Also important to remember is the location: If a safe is on the 2nd or 3rd floor, once that floor burns through, the container will fall. If it cracks open- there goes your contents. So- put it in the basement. BUT- make sure you don't have heavy objects located above it (refrigerators, etc.), which will crack it open. Put the safe on blocks if you can so that the contents aren't soaked from the firefighters flooding the basement!
Media containers should follow the same general rules (be careful where you put it, etc.), but work on a different principle. Last I checked (it could have changed), media containers use wood as insulation. This keeps the contents at an acceptable temperature, provided everything works. Wood is a great insulator, and it burns relatively slowly unless it is divided in a manner than allows combustion.
None of this means that every fire-rated safe will survive. In fact, a review of areas swept by wildfires in California in... 1991, IIRC, showed that even home-made safes worked as well in some instances as UL-rated containers. However, the best containers were all positioned in the slab, or in some other large, non-combustible heat sink. In-floor safes fare well, although exceptions (such as where the dial melted and dripped into the money stored within, causing most of it to burn) were noted.
So- in short, look for the UL rating. No, the $50 toy safe at the discount store isn't the same as the $500 media vault from a locksmith, even if they ARE both rated. No, the people who sold you the $50 safe will know nothing about how it works, or how well it will protect your data, or how to open it and retrieve your property if your house *does* burn down. No, the $50 safe will not come with a professional who knows how to open your container if something DOES happen to go wrong with it. A professional SAVTA member will be able to help you with all of this, as well as sell you the appropriate container.
But, of course, if you want to try the $50 safe, go right ahead if it helps you sleep better. They have to meet the minimum standards from Underwriter's Labs (UL 72 for Class 125 and Class 150 containers). And it will depend upon where you live (across from a fire station in a Class 1 noncombustible structure, versus Uncle Marty's trailer home, 25 minutes from the nearest volunteer fire department), of course. But for GOD'S SAKE, don't assume that because the label says "FIRE SAFE," that they're all the same, or that they'll save your data no matter what.
Disclaimer: No, I'm not a SAVTA member, and I don't currently work as a locksmith or a safe/vault technician.
So, if you could exclude air, coat the components, and then recirculate the ultrapure water through a resin bed (which is how it's made ultrapure in the first place), it *could* be done- but it would be a lot of work. Plus, very pure water is surprisingly corrosive, so the inerting layer would have to be pretty specific, like the polyethylene that coats the inside of soda cans (cheap but effective).
Water has the benefit of having a large specific heat (4.18 kJ/kg), which is about as good as it gets. While Novec 1230 is good stuff, it has low specific heat (1.103 kJ/kg). It's a trade-off, though, since you can't get pure water below 0 C without the risk of it freezing, unlike Novec, which gets down to -108 C.
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $143,276.10
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
3/03/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Proposed Sale (Form 144) estimated proceeds of $137,237.19
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Proposed Sale (Form 144) estimated proceeds of $157,958.94
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $170,510.39
2/04/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
1/26/04 LARRY GASPARRO Divisional Officer 5,259 Open Market Sale proceeds of $81,076.50
1/26/04 LARRY GASPARRO Divisional Officer 5,259 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $47,962.80
1/07/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Open Market Sale proceeds of $210,189.59
1/07/04 THOMAS P RAIMONDI Director 11,841 Exercise of Stock Options at cost of $13,261.92
Fortunately, Trader Joe's has no card requirements, and Sprout's has better produce- and better prices. The coming of the card to Albertson's has really opened my eyes to other options in the neighborhood. Now we're eating better and it's costing us less.
All of which means that there'll probably be unprecedented failure, but that's just my inner cynic speaking.
As an aside the moon rocks were returned with some modicum of biosafety, but considering the fact that they splashed down in the ocean, and there was no way to fully contain all the dust from the vehicles and the suits the astronauts wore, it was mostly cosmetic.
In a somewhat related note, a little trick for those of you with swamp coolers. When you start them up for the first time in the spring, after you flush the system and scrape out the scale and dust, fill it with water and add half a cup of fabric softener to the reservoir. Makes the whole house smell clean. This may not sound like much to people who don't know swamp coolers, but for those that do- you know how bad they can stink after a winter of disuse!