News That Stays News

Linked December 23, 2010

1. The US government has spent more than $30 billion to clean up an old Atomic site in Washington state. Their job is complicated by the wildlife, who occasionally do their part to spread the radiation:

In 1998, after workers with Geiger counters detected hot spots in a dumpster full of old cantaloupe rinds, Mr. Johnson sent a technician out to investigate.She homed in on a radioactive speck. “Her meter was going up, and all of a sudden the speck flew away,” Mr. Johnson says. “She called and told me about it, and I said ‘Yeah, right.'”

Mr. Johnson soon learned the specks were radioactive fruit flies. His team traced the flies back to a box with pipes used to transfer waste. It was sealed with a sugar-based coating that contained radioactive material. The flies had noshed on the sealant and flown the radiation to the dumpster.

2. Lapham’s Quarterly has the story of Barbara Follett, the rare writing prodigy who published her first novel at 8 and achieved national attention a few years later, before vanishing in 1939 at the age of 24. Her story reminds me of what Virginia Woolf had to say about Shakespeare’s sister.

Credit: The Browser