Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Greetings Infomaniacs,

Last Friday Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he called for a "world without nuclear weapons" during his remarks at the city's Peace Memorial Park.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 71 years ago ushered in the Atomic Age with all of its wonders and terrors.

NOTE: Thanks to the readers who alerted us that The Daily Tease page for submitting Mind-Scrambler answers was down. The page is back up and you are welcome to resubmit your answers!

Enjoy!

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WHO SAID IT?
QUOTE: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

HINT: As the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he is among those who are called the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project.

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RANDOM TIDBITS
In 1905, Einstein discovered that mass could be changed into energy and vice versa. In 1918, Sir Ernest Rutherford showed that atoms could be split. By 1942, the world had its first nuclear reactor.

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Today, 104 nuclear plants supply about 20 percent of the United State's electricity. The oldest plants have been operating since before 1979. There have been no new sites built since the Three Mile Island disaster (1979).

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Currently, nuclear waste in the United States is stored in cooling pools of water and in dry storage casks at nuclear power plants. The United States government, however, hopes to bury its waste deep underground at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Nevadans and surrounding states have protested this proposal.

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The United States has 71,862 tons of nuclear waste. Waste can stay dangerous for tens of thousands of years. The industry's nuclear pile of waste is growing about 2,200 tons a year. Some waste sites contain four times the amount of spent fuel they were designed to handle.

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The first nuclear-powered surface vessel was the Russian icebreaker Lenin. The largest nuclear powered surface ship is the 1,122-foot-long USS Enterprise, which was launched in 1960. It is the longest naval vessel in the world and has eight reactors driving four propellers. It is still active.

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The U.S.S. Nautilus was the first nuclear-powered submarine and was put to sea in December 1954. Named after the submarine in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, she was the first vessel to travel submerged under the North Pole, on August 3, 1958. She was decommissioned in 1980 and has been preserved as a National Historic Landmark.




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*** Weekly Mind-Scrambler ***
A father and his son were in a car accident. The dad died, and the son had to have surgery; however, the surgeon said, "I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!" How is this possible?

Submit your answer by clicking: TheDailyTease

Answer will be posted in Friday's Trivia Today. Good Luck! If your name appears in Friday's newsletter, EMAIL MICHELE your complete name and address to be shipped your prize.

Be sure to put "Winner" in the subject line.

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WHO SAID IT?
QUOTE: "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

ANSWER: J. Robert Oppenheimer, after witnessing the first atomic bomb test, famously uttered this quote from the Sanskrit text the Bhagavad Gita.