Rotundus.com

This month, at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, physicists and engineers built tracks inside one of its fusion reactors and ran a toy train on them for three days. It was not an exercise in silliness, but in calibration.

The modified model of a diesel train engine was carrying a small chunk of californium-252, a radioactive element that spews neutrons as it falls apart. “We needed to refine the calibration technique to make sure we are measuring our neutrons as accurately as possible,” said Masa Ono, the project head of the National Spherical Torus Experiment.

- Excerpted from The New York Times

Here's an interesting news report from Al Jazeera, looking into some of the "stimulus" spending in China. One of the results: a new and almost entirely empty city that few of the common people can seem to afford to live in.

(HT: Freakonomics)

Here's an interesting 6 minute clip from a guy who's the professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, looking at risk analysis of everyday life:

Wow... Cambridge is old!

(HT: Open Culture)

CIA Afghan base bomber was triple agent

Yeesh... and I thought the typical double-agents in movies were difficult enough to keep track of. Or perhaps it's true that truth is stranger than fiction)

Calgary suspect injured after leap between rooftops

So maybe in this case things didn't go quite as well as this guy had planned. Seems like he'd seen one too many rooftop-chase sequences in the movies.