Vegan influencer Zhanna Samsonova has reportedly “died of starvation” after subsisting exclusively off a diet of exotic fruit in Malaysia, according to her friends and family.

She was 39

In mid-February, one year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish internet was hit with a deluge of near-identical messages chastizing Finland’s ambitions to join western security alliance NATO.

On social media platforms like Twitter, an army of users parroted the same sentence: “NATO can’t save Finland.” Some posts received tens of thousands of views in the lead-up to the country’s admission to NATO on April 4.

But there was a catch: the sentence that spread like wildfire was grammatically incorrect. In the Finnish language, there are two verbs that mean “to save.” One means to rescue, and the other means to save in the form of recording or storing. The viral phrase used the latter.

The erroneous use of the verb, alongside the proliferation of seemingly fake accounts tweeting the slogan — many were only a few months or weeks old — alerted the Finnish public that the viral message was not the product of an organic uprising at home. The origin of the campaign hasn’t been determined, but many believe it was an act of disruption, or disinformation warfare, likely stemming from pro-Kremlin actors using bots, paid trolls and influencers relying on Google Translate to carry out the failed campaign.

What began as an effort to stoke discord in Finnish society and discredit Finland’s efforts to join NATO became a running joke in the nation, inspiring a flood of wisecracks and memes. The country’s public broadcaster Yle published a story in late February with a headline that read: “Finnish grammar foils pro-Russia trolls.”

NASA Data Show Volcanic Eruption, Not Man-Made Climate Change, Likely Cause of Record Heat Wave

Agency says that water vapor injected into the atmosphere from a recent volcanic eruption was enough to increase Earth's global average temperature //

“It turns out that levels of water vapor in the atmosphere have dramatically increased over the last year-and-a-half, and water vapor is well recognized as a greenhouse gas, whose heightened presence leads to higher temperatures, a mechanism that dwarfs any effect CO2 may have,” Thomas Lifson, founder of American Thinker, wrote in a July 31 op-ed.

“So, why has atmospheric water vapor increased so dramatically? Because of a historic, gigantic volcanic eruption last year that I — probably along with you — had never heard of,” he added. “The mass media ignored it because it took place 490 feet underwater in the South Pacific.”

According to NASA, when the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted last year, along with producing a sonic boom that circled the globe twice and a tsunami, it “blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere — enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.”
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere

NASA cited a study published in Geophysical Research Letters showing that an estimated 146 teragrams (one teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor was sent into the atmosphere, which is equal to 10 percent of the water already present in that atmospheric later. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022GL099381

Other data published in the journal Nature estimate the rise in global stratospheric water mass following the volcanic event at 13 percent. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00652-x

As the space agency, which also tracks global temperatures, readily admitted on its own webpage, “The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.”

One day in Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, a brief, casual moment of carelessness killed one scientist and severely injured another. In this specially illustrated story, the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills recounts what happened to these atomic bomb-makers – and why their accident holds powerful lessons for today.

"...In the search for a harmonious attitude towards life, it must never be forgotten that we ourselves are both actors and spectators in the drama of existence." – Niels Bohr, physicist //

On 21 May 1946, the physicist Louis Slotin was in his final weeks of working for the Project. He was an expert in bomb assembly and had played a central role, hand-building the "Trinity" device for the first test in July 1945, just a month before the Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. But, like Oppenheimer, in the months that followed, he came to object to the continuation of the nuclear weapons programme and had decided to go back to civilian life.

Slotin was giving a tour to Alvin Graves, the scientist who was due to replace him. A little before 15:00, in the middle of one of the laboratory buildings, Graves spotted something he recognised: the "critical assembly", which was Slotin's specialism. Like an experimental nuclear bomb, it was used to safely test the reactivity of a plutonium core.

Graves commented that he had never seen the assembly demonstrated. Slotin offered to run through it for him.

From the other side of the room, Raemer Schreiber, Slotin's colleague, agreed. However, he encouraged him to proceed slowly and with caution: //

There are conflicting reports about what went wrong. An onlooker said Slotin's approach on this occasion was "improvised". Others said what he did was perfectly normal. In Schreiber's official report, he said Slotin acted "too rapidly and without adequate consideration", but that the others in the room "by their silence, agreed to the procedure".

"I turned because of some noise or sudden movement," wrote Schreiber. "I saw a blue flash... and felt a heat wave simultaneously." It seems the screwdriver had slipped and the plutonium had gone "prompt critical" as the reflector dropped down over it. It happened, as Schreiber wrote, in "a few tenths of a second." Slotin flipped the upper reflector to the floor, but his reaction was already too late. In the moments after the accident, the room was silent.

Then Slotin said quietly: "Well, that does it." //

Slotin died nine days later from organ failure. "A pure and simple case of death from radiation," as a colleague would later describe it. //

In fact his boss, Enrico Fermi, had explicitly warned Slotin only a few months earlier about his approach to critical assemblies. "You'll be dead within the year, if you keep doing that," he had said.

But it seems Fermi's was a lone voice in an institution that tended to downplay the dangers of its work. //

Relatively unscathed by the accident, Schreiber went on to help re-design the way procedures like the one that killed Slotin were conducted, with a greater emphasis on safety.

Standing at Slotin's shoulder, Graves received a high dosage of radiation and became critically ill. //

Floy Agnes Lee, the haematologist treating Graves after the accident described in a 2017 interview how severe his condition was. "His white blood cells were so low that they didn’t understand why he was still living," she said. "I don’t remember how long it took before his hair started growing back again."