The reassuring news, according to Dr. G.D. Kersley, was that if you've had one nuclear bomb dropped on you, you're unlikely to have another.
Kersley's article appeared in the Aug 9, 1958 issue of the British Medical Journal. You can read it here. The reassuring comments are on the final page, in the conclusions section.
Between 1961 and 1965, a "Miss Missile" was chosen annually at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls. The contest was part of the Armed Forces Day celebrations.
The first winner was Nancy Mitchell, making her Miss Mitchell Miss Missile.
Radiological warfare is the use of radiation as a weapon. "Death Sand" is a variant of this — the use of irradiated sand as a weapon. Details from Popular Science, Feb 1951.
Prof. Hans Thirring of Vienna proposes drying a solution of the RW [radiological warfare] agent upon sand, or metal powder. Naming the preparation "death sand," he calls it "the lightest and most transportable of all weapons of mass destruction."
Airplanes for "death-sand" attacks could resemble those used for crop dusting and spreading fertilizer from the air. A British plane for the latter purpose has dropped five tons of chemicals in a single experimental flight.
To protect occupants from the cargo's radioactivity a death-sand plane would need heavy shielding. (After calculating its weight, one scientist suggested dropping the shielding instead of the RW agent on the enemy!) But shielding could be omitted if crewless planes, under radio control from accompanying aircraft, laid the sand.
Troops in an area sprinkles with death sand will have no choice but to get out. Those who remain will receive a fatal dose in anywhere from a few hours to several weeks, depending on the intensity of the radioactivity. Like victims of A-bomb radiation, they will suffer nausea, loss of hair, anemia, and hemorrhages. But those who flee at once will suffer no ill effects.
The justification for this clipboard gun was that it would allow police officers to approach stopped vehicles looking as if they were holding a clipboard, not a gun.
The problem that I see is that it wouldn't take long for the public to realize that the clipboards were actually guns. In which case, even if a police officer was genuinely only carrying a clipboard, everyone would assume it was a gun.
Lewis Omer’s Hand Grenade Throwing as a College Sport, published in 1918, appears in various lists of books with odd titles.
I was curious about the contents of the book, but I initially came up empty handed. The British Library blog reported that it was a nine-page booklet, but that no copies of the title seemed to remain in existence. The Library of Congress didn't have a copy, nor did any other libraries. And the British Library's own copy was destroyed during aerial bombing in World War II.
So why hand-grenade throwing as a college sport? Because, at the time Omer wrote his book, young American men were being sent to fight in World War I, and some colleges had introduced grenade throwing as a sport, to prepare them for the war. Using dummy grenades, obviously, rather than live ones. Omer's booklet provided the official rules for the new sport.
This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.