BP's Macondo Well May Leak for Years

CNN reports:

An oil sheen about four miles long has appeared in the Gulf of Mexico near the site of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, a Coast Guard spokesman said Thursday.

It was not immediately clear where the oil is coming from, said Petty Officer 3rd Class Ryan Tippets. [Although previous oil has been matched as a "dead ringer" to the BP well.]

After a French study suggested that rats fed on Monsanto GMO corn suffered tumors, Russian researches plan their own, this time public, experiment. The unique reality show with rats is expected to prove or deny GMO's health-threatening influence.

The Russian scientists, who oppose genetically modified organisms (GMO) in food, expect that their year-long experiment will show whether the controversial cultivation process has effects as dangerous as French revelations claimed on September 19.

Scientists from France's University of Caen made public the results of their classified study, publishing the images of rats with tumors after they were fed a diet of genetically modified (GM) maize produced by American chemical giant Monsanto.

Vitamin B6, naturally present in a variety of foods, is necessary for proper nerve function, protein synthesis, regulating blood sugar, and producing antibodies and hemoglobin. In other words, it's pretty important stuff. But, while many people get their B6 through supplements, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is looking to make things a lot more difficult—by slowly taking all forms of B6 supplements off the market so Big Pharma can make millions off of prescriptions instead.

Humans have reached the moon and are planning to return samples from Mars, but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet.

This may be about to change with a $1 billion mission to drill 6 km (3.7 miles) beneath the seafloor to reach the Earth's mantle -- a 3000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet -- and bring back the first ever fresh samples.

Electricity is the lifeblood of many aspects of our world. Without volts and amps, many of our technological innovations would cease to exist. Even our bodies wouldn't function without an electrical charge zipping through our cells. But what electricity gives, electricity can take away.

Although this form of energy is vital to so much of our lives, it's one of those things that are only good in the right amounts. Too much electricity can electrocute people. Likewise, it can kill our modern electronics and machines.

But thanks to Michael Faraday, the brilliant 19th-century scientist, and one of his namesake inventions, the Faraday cage, we humans have developed plenty of ways to control electricity and make it safer for our computers, cars and other inventions -- and for us, too.

Janet is protecting her electronics from an EMP by encasing them in homemade Faraday cages