BP's Tried And Tested Failures
If you have a problem which has been attacked before, you don't try failed methods again unless your name is Homer Simpson - or you are too young to remember the event.
The methods tried by BP in the Gulf of Mexico have been tried before. They have failed before. In the Gulf of Mexico. At 18,000 feet, the same depth as the Deepwater Horizon well.
One thing the film industry get right - and they don't get much right, since romantic comedy behavior in real life is likely to get you a restraining order - is that music evokes moods.
French researchers (naturally) say they have determined that if you want to successfully ask a woman on a date, the right soundtrack could improve the odds. They found women were more prepared to give their number to an ‘average’ young man after listening to romantic background music.
Giant freak waves - seriously, that is what oceanographers and physicists call them - are called that because they can appear on the open sea out of nowhere.
Researchers from the Ruhr- Universität Bochum and the University of Umeå, Sweden say they have developed a new statistical model for non-linear, interacting waves in computer simulations which will allow them to be theoretically calculated and modeled.
Scientists from the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Collaborative Research Center 746 of the University of Freiburg say they have discovered a new mechanism which plays an essential role in the assembly and growth of mitochondria, the 'power plants' of the cell.
These organelles make energy stored in food ready for use by the cell. The generators in the cellular power plants are biological membranes located inside the mitochondria. Even minute errors in the composition of the inner mitochondrial membrane can lead to severe metabolic derangements, which can have an especially negative impact on the energy-hungry muscle and nerve cells.
For our 1951 pick, we have the work of one of the great British writers of sci-fi’s Golden Age. In The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham presents a horror story of giant, ambulatory, flesh-eating plants that topple humans from their dominance of a world they thought they had tamed. The theme is common to other post-apocalyptic stories of the 1950’s: we may tame nature with our technological wizardry, but our undoing is our inability to tame ourselves. We take our dominance of the planet for granted - and it wouldn’t take much to find ourselves in a relentlessly hostile world where we have compete as a species with a new top dog.
When Art Meets War
If you want to make a good historical movie you should find yourself a good historian.
If one of the characters is a singer, make sure they sing in a contemporary style.
Now add in a stirring contemporary theme tune and you may well have a blockbuster.
A war movie which misses an opportunity to show the realities of war is just so much blood and guts. The realities of war are not just the horrors of bloodshed. There are realities of psychology, physics and philosophy: of human interactions, of weaponry and of theories of war.
