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04/21/10 02:38:53 pm, 
Genocide in the 20th Century
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Armenians in Turkey 1915 - 1918 1,500,000 deaths
The first genocide of the 20th Century occurred when two million Armenians living in Turkey were eliminated from their historic homeland through forced deportations and massacres.
Iceland Volcano Pictures: Lightning Adds Flash to Ash
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A blast of white-hot lightning crackles over Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Sunday. Clouds of volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull have snarled European air traffic for nearly a week.
the photograph from about 18 miles (30 kilometers) away from the volcanic lightning storm, which not "unlike a regular old thunderstorm," said Martin Uman, a lightning expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The same ingredients are present: water droplets, ice, and possibly hail—all interacting with each other and with particles, in this case ash from the eruptions, to cause electrical charging, Uman said. (See pictures of the Iceland volcano's ash plume.)
The volcanic-lightning pictures are "really very sensational," Uman said. "Somebody ought to be up there with an HD movie camera—it's ready for the IMAX theater."
The Fall Of The Soviet Union
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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 some 70 years after its grimly riveting and highly expectant Marxist-Leninist beginning ranks alongside World War I as the two most singularly pivotal events of the Twentieth Century. In a sense, both are conjoined, with the War providing the decisive finishing blow to what remained of both the totteringly indecisive Romanov dynasty and centuries of turgid, slow-to-change Russian autocracy. Lenin and Trotsky's ability in October 1917 to "pick the Revolution up off the street," if not guaranteed, certainly was facilitated by the disaster on the Eastern Front.
Contained between the Great War, which rather than "ending all wars" ironically triggered a crescendo of successors, and the House of Usher -- like disintegration of the Soviet system and empire, lies an historical framework, a chessboard if you will, of moves and countermoves whereupon geo-political reality is played out for at least three generations.
Nanotechnology Makes a Strong Boron-Cotton Fabric That Feels Like T-Shirt Material
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Boron carbide nanofibres surround cotton fibres like a dense fur. The diagram on the bottom right shows the structure of the reinforced fibres. (Credit: Images: from Tao X. et al., 2010)
Cotton reinforced with boron carbide is tough and hard but nonetheless elastic. These properties indicate future promise, but this material is not yet bulletproof.
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American and Chinese researchers, together with ETH Zurich Professor Brad Nelson, recently published a paper in the scientific journal Advanced Materials in which they presented a new method that uses an ordinary cotton T-shirt as the raw material to make a tough, hard but flexible cloth. The University of South Carolina, which is heading this project led by Professor Xiaodong Li, suggests in a communiqué that more comfortable and more lightweight bulletproof vests for the police, for example, could be manufactured from this new material. The media reported that this kind of vest would soon be available.
