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Note: This story is over four years old, but I just came upon it and thought other Soylentils might find it interesting.
5 Things That Sound, Move, or Smell Like a Nuclear Explosion:
After most of the world's nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, in 1996, they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO[*]) has wired the world with hundreds of seismometers, infrasound detectors, radionuclide sniffers, and underwater microphones. The stations send their data to the CTBTO's headquarters in Vienna, Austria, where it is analyzed for signs of a secret bomb. But the system keeps picking up other things, too—which is sometimes a problem for the system and sometimes a boon to science. Here are some of the things that can at first seem like nuclear tests:
In the course of the efforts to detect clandestine nuclear tests, these devices have also detected:
- Space rocks
- Aurora (Northern and Southern Lights)
- Whales
- Tsunamis
- Nuclear-power-plant disasters
- Medical-isotope manufacturing
[*] CTBTO: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 28 2018, @02:33PM (5 children)
Author lists SIX THINGS, I guess he can't count? He's just so used to making clickbait titles that he couldn't resist the "5 things"??
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 28 2018, @03:01PM
Technically the aurora doesn't have a taste movement or smell, purely visual. But overall in spirit I agree, clickbait is lame.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 28 2018, @05:04PM (1 child)
The original article said 5 things. Reading the text, it's plain that they conflated auroras with space rocks. Apparently both aurora and the exploding meteorite they mentioned were atmospheric phenomena.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 28 2018, @05:12PM
But the article, too, listed six things. In addition to the five/six things in the summary, they listed actual nuclear explosions. But those aren't the things that the system was designed to detect. The article's intent was to list the things that might confuse the monitoring system.
But technically...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @01:49AM
It seems to be some type of female thing:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=29217&page=1&cid=776962#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday December 29 2018, @03:48AM
Don't worry...
Between Japan starting up commercial whaling again (and a few countries sure to follow them as well) and the environmental policies of the current US president, I am positive that any detection of whales will not be on the list for very long.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P