Warden was just going back for seconds on both hotcakes and eggs when this blast shuddered by under the floor and rattled the cups It had become very quiet and everybody had stopped eating and looked up at each other. "Must be doin some dynamitin down to Wheeler Field," somebody said tentatively. -- James Jones, From Here to Eternity The brass band on the stern of the U.S.S. Nevada kept on playing The Star- Spangled Banner for the 8 a.m. ...

ALMOST every great city has a river. The poetic notion is that flowing water brings commerce, delights the eye, and cools the summer heat. But there is a more prosaic reason for the close affinity of cities and rivers. They serve as convenient, free sewers. The Potomac reaches the nation's capital as a pleasant stream, and leaves it stinking from the 240 million gallons of wastes that are flushed into it daily. Among other horrors, while Omaha's meat packers fill ...

Six atoms may seem minuscule--especially if they exist for only fractions of a second--but they can have huge implications. The recent announcement that Russian and American scientists finally managed to produce a tiny bit of element 117 by firing calcium atoms at berkelium fills in a missing spot on the periodic table. When the results are confirmed, "ununseptium" will get a catchier moniker and occupy the square between 116 and 118--elements that also await proper names from the ...

On the moon-like surface of the muddy crust that now covers a dozen Indonesian villages, any sign of life is welcome. "Right over there you can see some algae," says an excited Soffian Hadi, deputy head of operations for BPLS, the agency that monitors a still-seething volcanic crater."When the eruptions stop so will the subsidence but we don't know when that will be for sure." Five years after a mud volcano burst to life on May 29, ...

Chemists located the treasure long ago, and the knowledge that many valuable elements, including gold, are found in sea water has nourished a long dream of riches. But try as they would, no seawater miners could recover precious metals in practical quantities. Germany's famed Chemist Fritz Haber spent years after World War I trying to extract gold from the ocean to pay off his country's war reparations. He failed, and finally gave up the struggle. But in Angewandte Chemie ...

By legend Texans are a grandiose breed with more than the natural share of megalomaniacs. But University of Texas Biochemist Earl B. Dawson thinks that he detects an uncommon pocket of psychological adjustment around El Paso. The reason, says Dawson, lies in the deep wells from which the city draws its water supply.According to Dawson's studies of urine samples from 3,000 Texans, El Paso's water is heavily laced with lithium, a tranquilizing chemical widely used in the treatment of manic depression and other psychiatric disorders. He notes ...

A day after President Barack Obama publicly endorsed India's claim to a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley poured cold water on any expectation of New Delhi's elevation anytime soon. "It is inconceivable that you could contemplate U.N. Security Council reform without considering a country like India," Crowley said Tuesday. "But we have to recognize ... this is a process that has been going on for some time, and it ...

It seemed, on the face of things, to make sense: The first gate of the Morganza Spillway opened on Saturday afternoon, sending 10,000 cubic feet of Mississippi River water churning south toward the Atchafalaya Basin, all part of a concerted effort to help relieve pressure on burdened levees protecting Baton Rouge and New Orleans. By late Sunday morning, a total of four had been opened. But Bayou residents can be forgiven for wondering just how well-conceived the Army ...

Water shortages plague a fifth of southern Europe. And with temperatures in the region forecast to rise several degrees this century — reducing rainfall another 30% — things will only get worse. Several thousand miles to the northwest, however, global warming is increasing the number of icebergs calving off Greenland; they now number about 15,000 a year. "An iceberg is a floating reservoir. And water from icebergs is the purest water ... It was formed some 10,000 years ago," explains ...

THE ADMINISTRATION Indian Fighter In his office in the Department of the Interior, stoop-shouldered, intense little John Collier shuffled through a neat stack of papers, stopped occasionally to stare at a corncob pipe in an empty water glass on his desk. In his baggy old long-sleeved green sweater, he looked like a country storekeeper closing out the week's accounts. Actually, he was closing out twelve years with the Government. As U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs since 1933, John Collier has ...