In Nanjing, that is close to Shanghai, and I suppose also in other places around here*, you cannot buy salt anymore. Every last grain has been bought up. Why? Apparently, some evil guy started the rumor that table salt, which is sodium chloride (NaCl), can protect you from radioactivity. We are not talking about iodide salt here, nor even sea salt either, which has some iodide in it, but simple salt, which there is already way too much in the Chinese diet.

*(Update: In the whole of China, the first person died already from eating too much salt!)

So I check my blog comments this morning, and guess who the culprit is? IT IS ME! According to the comments to my last article, I am the one to blame! How so?

For days now, scientists and science blogs tell us not to worry about Japan’s nuclear reactors. Nothing can happen; no radiation will be released, all is fine. We are treated to false experts even, to one-sided rants of somebody who studied risk management in corporations, published originally on a business friendly website.

Polar bears’ noses are phenomenal. They smell a seal’s fart through a light year of snow and ice or something like that. Polar bears are cute, strong, beautiful, pure awesomeness all the way. Come on: they sleep on snow then swim a few rounds in ice water to cool off! I adore them, I love ‘em, I really do.

Now they disappear. Also the number of lions is drastically plummeting, due to poaching and other factors. What to do about it?

Superfluid liquid Helium is shot under very high pressure out of a tiny nozzle and into vacuum. Outside in front of the nozzle, the excess pressure bursts the liquid apart violently into a myriad of fragments. A cloud of ultra small droplets comes into existence. The liquid beam is almost completely atomized.

If you take a randomly drawn droplet from the explosion, the number of atoms inside of it is mostly just one, a single atom. Finding two atoms is less likely, three atoms even less, and so on.