They may be on our dirty words list, but recent articles on “fission”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html and “cold fusion”:http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/sep04/0904nfus.html might signal a new age for nuclear power. Most interesting to me is the idea of a “pebble bed reactor”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor or “cold fusion bottle”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion providing megawatts of power to Mars missions and other weight-conscious applications without having to compromise on environmental security.

Having been burned by the original hype about both “Our Bold Atomic Future”:http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000356.html and cold fusion, I’ll admit I’m skeptical. It’s now the responsibility of nuclear proponents to show that these technologies are safer and more effective than “existing”:http://www.greasecar.com/ “alternative”:http://www.cat.org.uk/index.tmpl?refer=index&init=1 “energy”:http://www.greenmountain.com/ “sources”:http://www.realgoods.com/. Good luck to them.

Some of you know of my interest in Susan McCarthy’s, Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Larn to Live in the Wild (that link is to a great blog entry about one of her book signings in San Diego). McCarthy worries that humans will never be able to teach captive-raised animals natural behaviors. Well, according to the BBC, San Diego native Hua Mei got pregnant and gave birth to twins after watching panda sex on-screen. I wonder if animals can actually learn things this way?