BRIEFS

A US-German genetically engineered drug was given to vic-tims of a Brazilian radiation accident (who stumbled into neg-ligently abandoned radiotherapy equipment), and unlike the much ballyhooed bone marrow transplants in Chernobyl (all but one patients died), it appears to have been effective in curing radiation sickness. Rifkin, I assume, will file suit.

On 22 Aug. the DoA'a Agr. Res. Serv. in Burns, Ore., released the results of a $1.7 million study (paid for by ten US and Canadian utilities), investigating the effects on cattle grazing under a 900 mile, 500 kV transmission line from Oregon to Southern California. No significant differences in body weights or number of calves born were found between the exposed and control groups.

And still more about cows. A six-year study of energy utiliza- tion in Bavarian stables (reported by the Swiss Nouvelles de l'energie no.4, 1987) shows that a 600 kg (1320 lb) cow produces heat at the rate of 1.2 kW. Some German farms now transfer the heat of the warm stable air to water, which reaches temperatures of up to 50øC (122øF) and is pumped through well insulated piping to the farmhouse for space heating. To heat a typical home re- quires a stable of about 20 cows. [Oh no, you don't, Amory! They still belch methane.]

In late July the National Conference of State Legislatures (7,000 conferees representing 50 states) adopted a strong pro-nuclear power resolution by a 40:6 margin.

Iraq, Neville Shultz's preferred genocidal and poison-gas-dispensing party in the war with Iran, attacked the unfinished Iranian nuclear plant at Bushehr several times, mostly before, but also once after, the Iranian acceptance of a cease fire. Press scares to the contrary, a plant with fuel that has not been in operation (generating fission products), let alone with no fuel at all, does not present a radiological hazard. With a halflife of 4.6 billion years, Uranium is, except for the radon it releases in US homes and other places as it decays, itself quite innocuous. (Radiologically, that is; chemically it is toxic like lead and all other heavy metals.)

As newscasters and congressional experts told the country that there was no way of saving the two Soviet "marooned" space-men, space expert and author James E. Oberg (a long-time AtE subscriber) calmly predicted on TV that nothing was threatening them and that they would almost certainly make a safe landing at their Soviet base within the next 90 minutes, which they did. Sepa-rately, he wrote the editor of the British leftist New Scientist in a reply to one of their articles " . . . It is a major current theme of Moscow propaganda that space debris results mainly from "Star Wars," not from careless Soviet space practices and from decades of Soviet space-to-space weapons testing ("killer satellites"), which Moscow explicitly denies ever happened. The Soviets are lying about this crucial subject. Your article, carelessly or deliberately, fostered precisely that inaccurate view of space history."

AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, says everybody "who counts." Except rebel Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular bio-logy at Berkeley, regarded as a crank by most and with admiration by some. As a total layman I can have no opinion, but readers might look through Science, 7/29/88, pp.514-517, to see what a genuine scientific controversy looks like when it is (as yet) unpoliti-cized and (as yet) not directed by the mass media.

As if to prove the point made about Burundi [AtE Sep 88], the minority tribe of Tutsi has just slaughtered at least 5,000 more Hutu. As before, this was met by the yawns of Madame Schroeder and other South-Africa bashers who are interested in racial per-secution only when it can be used for their pro-Soviet and anti-capitalist propaganda. (Schroeder, incidentally, has been actively involved in many IPS projects.) Although it is no longer fashion-able to say so aloud, these great "liberals" are evidently thinking "It's only niggers doing it to each other."