Dresden in early 1945. Complete devastation but there are plenty of unexploded bombs down there

Here is an interesting article about a guy who has worked for 40 years as a bomb disposal expert in Germany. During World War II 1.9 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany and a surprisingly high number of them (5 to 15 percent) didn’t explode.

After the war Germany was in such a hurry to rebuild that authorities didn’t have the time or the means to locate and dispose of the bombs. The result is that every year about 2,000 tons of munitions are found and must be safely disposed of!

There are full time teams of disposal experts who get 2 or 3 calls a day from people who have found unexploded munitions. Everything from bombs, to grenades, to mines.

Especially dangerous are delayed-action bombs which were designed to explode 2 to 146 hours after being dropped (to disrupt clearing up and to cause extra chaos). The way many of them landed meant that they have been lying just under the ground on a hair-trigger every since.

Madness to get into a job like that.

Many types of munitions are defused - including some huge bombs

Dropped more than 60 years ago, the bombs are still killing. This bulldozer set off a bomb during road works.

There is a gallery with several more pictures here.

Wired has this article on “the world’s loneliest species” which was discovered living deep (3km down) in a South African mine. This is the first ecosystem ever discovered that is comprised of only a single species. That makes it “the tidiest package of life found yet” with everything necessary for maintaining life packed into a single genome.

Nice.

The Ig Nobel awards are a parody of the Nobels for ‘improbable science’

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes that are awarded for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The prizes generally go out for interesting but strange research.

This year’s awards for for research including:

• Nutrition: For electronically modifying the sound of potato chips to make a person chewing them believe they are fresher than they really are.
• Archeology: For measuring how armadillos scramble dig sites thereby confusing the order to history
• Biology: For discovering that fleas living a dogs can jump higher than fleas on cats
• Medicine: For showing that high priced placebos are more effective than cheap placebos. This actually makes sense to me (I have blogged about the effect on wines)
• Economics: For showing that lap dancers make more money when they are fertile (also blogged this one before)
• Physics: For mathematically proving that a heap of string will almost certainly tangle into knots (seriously)
• Chemistry: For discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicid

Very cool. Check out more detail on the winners and previous winners here.