{"id":1085,"date":"2004-07-20T02:05:22","date_gmt":"2004-07-20T07:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/the-upside-of-nuclear-testing\/"},"modified":"2004-07-20T02:05:22","modified_gmt":"2004-07-20T07:05:22","slug":"the-upside-of-nuclear-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/the-upside-of-nuclear-testing\/","title":{"rendered":"the upside of nuclear testing"},"content":{"rendered":"

back in 1989, the ivory trade was officially (though not practically) shut down<\/a> by international agreement. since then it’s been a bit of a contentious issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

what makes this a science story and not an endagered-species story or an economics story, is that scientist thinks he has the technology to reopen the ivory trade, on more-acceptable terms.<\/p>\n

\n
Past Nuclear Tests May Unlock Africa Ivory Sales<\/a> [reuters, july 16, 2004]<\/div>\n

Nuclear physicist Elias Sideras-Haddad says he can determine when an elephant died as well as its age by a new carbon-dating technique applied to the tusks — a process made possible by the above-ground nuclear tests of the past.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

the reuters article mentions a presentation from two years ago in japan… there’s a faint echo of that here<\/a> [pdf] – it was called “Dating studies of elephant tusks from the Kruger National Park South Africa using accelerator based mass spectrometry.”<\/p>\n

that’s just not terribly satisfying, but the paper<\/a> [pdf, october 3, 2002] itself is also available from lawrence livermore national labs. sadly, it’s a pretty bad scan-based document as opposed to real text, so it’s not much fun to read.<\/p>\n

given the bush administration’s concept of science, this may just come back as a good reason to build those baby nukes<\/a> and get out of the test-ban treaty. there seems to be more solid science behind this than behind, for example, the missile-defense plan<\/a>…. and you can spin it as an economic support plan that lets those poor african countries pay back their debts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

back in 1989, the ivory trade was officially (though not practically) shut down by international agreement. since then it’s been a bit of a contentious issue. what makes this a science story and not an endagered-species story or an economics story, is that scientist thinks he has the technology to reopen the ivory trade, on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}