cold war

A Cold War bunker at Loring Air Force Base in Maine that has been converted into a winter haven for bats. Image from: BBC News, USFWS/S. Agius Scientists in Maine have converted two Cold War bunkers at Loring Air Force Base into winter havens for bats in an effort to protect the animals from the fungus that causes white nose syndrome. What is nice about using a man-made space is that they can actually clean up the area as opposed to trying to kill the fungus in a cave where multiple species of fungi may be affected, thereby disrupting the micro-ecosystem. The winter survival rate is not…

Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion. The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…

Many people give credit to Ronald Reagan, when he climbed up on the Berlin Wall and personally kicked it down brick by brick while under fire from the East German Stasi. Many people give credit to Team USA, the Hockey Team that beat the USSR team at the Lake Placid Olympics. Still others credit various movies , books, or political revelations. But I tend to agree with what my father always said about this. In 1987, teenager Mathias Rust flew a tiny, unarmed rented Cessna from Helsinki to Moscow, landing very near to Red Square. The soviets never detected the aircraft. This demonstrated…

Japanese artists' depiction of the horrors at Hiroshima.Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped "Little Boy," the first of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare, on the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima. In an instant flash of light an estimated 140,000 people were either incinerated or suffered an agonizing death that lasted several days. The standard mythology is that President Truman dropped the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (three days later on August 9) in order to avoid having to send half a million American soliders to their deaths in a…