GLENN T. SEABORG ISOLATED PLUTONIUM FOR FIRST TIME

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the last accident in the industrial zone of Tarragona some weeks ago.

Tarragona is a city surrounded by lots of chemical industries that give the city a sensation of permanent danger. Near Tarragona, we can find Ascó a beautiful town with a nuclear central and Vandellós, another amazing town where there was another nuclear plant that is dismantled nowadays.

Uranium and Plutonium are dangerous elements that we have in our planet and we must use them correctly and with the biggest of precautions. On a day like today in 1941, Plutonium was first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg and The Grandma wants to talk about this historical event.

Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized.

More information: Royal Society of Chemistry

The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen, silicon, and hydrogen. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that can expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that is pyrophoric. It is radioactive and can accumulate in bones, which makes the handling of plutonium dangerous.

Plutonium was first produced and isolated on December 14, 1940, by a deuteron bombardment of uranium-238 in the 1.5 metre cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley. First, neptunium-238 was synthesized, which subsequently beta-decayed to form the new element with atomic number 94 and atomic weight 238.

More information: Atomic Heritage

Since uranium had been named after the planet Uranus and neptunium after the planet Neptune, element 94 was named after Pluto, which at the time was considered to be a planet as well. Wartime secrecy prevented the University of California team from publishing its discovery until 1948.

Plutonium is the element with the highest atomic number to occur in nature. Trace quantities arise in natural uranium-238 deposits when uranium-238 captures neutrons emitted by decay of other uranium-238 atoms. Plutonium is much more common on Earth since 1945 as a product of neutron capture and beta decay, where some of the neutrons released by the fission process convert uranium-238 nuclei into plutonium-239.

Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg

Both plutonium-239 and plutonium-241 are fissile, meaning that they can sustain a nuclear chain reaction, leading to applications in nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Plutonium-240 exhibits a high rate of spontaneous fission, raising the neutron flux of any sample containing it. The presence of plutonium-240 limits a plutonium sample's usability for weapons or its quality as reactor fuel, and the percentage of plutonium-240 determines its grade -weapons-grade, fuel-grade, or reactor-grade. Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years and emits alpha particles. It is a heat source in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are used to power some spacecraft.

Plutonium isotopes are expensive and inconvenient to separate, so particular isotopes are usually manufactured in specialized reactors.

Producing plutonium in useful quantities for the first time was a major part of the Manhattan Project during World War II that developed the first atomic bombs.

The Fat Man bombs used in the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945, and in the bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945, had plutonium cores. Human radiation experiments studying plutonium were conducted without informed consent, and several criticality accidents, some lethal, occurred after the war.

Disposal of plutonium waste from nuclear power plants and dismantled nuclear weapons built during the Cold War is a nuclear-proliferation and environmental concern. Other sources of plutonium in the environment are fallout from numerous above-ground nuclear tests, now banned.

More information: Live Science

Enrico Fermi and a team of scientists at the University of Rome reported that they had discovered element 94 in 1934. Fermi called the element hesperium and mentioned it in his Nobel Lecture in 1938. The sample was actually a mixture of barium, krypton, and other elements, but this was not known at the time. Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. The mechanism of fission was then theoretically explained by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch.

Plutonium (specifically, plutonium-238) was first produced and isolated on December 14, 1940, and chemically identified on February 23, 1941, by Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, Joseph W. Kennedy, and Arthur Wahl by deuteron bombardment of uranium in the 150 cm cyclotron at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

In the 1940 experiment, neptunium-238 was created directly by the bombardment but decayed by beta emission with a half-life of a little over two days, which indicated the formation of element 94.

Plutonium

A paper documenting the discovery was prepared by the team and sent to the journal Physical Review in March 1941, but publication was delayed until a year after the end of World War II due to security concerns.

At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather realized that a slow neutron reactor fuelled with uranium would theoretically produce substantial amounts of plutonium-239 as a by-product. They calculated that element 94 would be fissile, and had the added advantage of being chemically different from uranium, and could easily be separated from it.

McMillan had recently named the first transuranic element neptunium after the planet Neptune, and suggested that element 94, being the next element in the series, be named for what was then considered the next planet, Pluto.

Nicholas Kemmer of the Cambridge team independently proposed the same name, based on the same reasoning as the Berkeley team. Seaborg originally considered the name plutium, but later thought that it did not sound as good as plutonium. He chose the letters Pu as a joke, in reference to the interjection P U to indicate an especially disgusting smell, which passed without notice into the periodic table. Alternative names considered by Seaborg and others were ultimium or extremium because of the erroneous belief that they had found the last possible element on the periodic table.

More information: Scientific American

During World War II the U.S. government established the Manhattan Project, which was tasked with developing an atomic bomb. The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The first production reactor that made plutonium-239 was the X-10 Graphite Reactor. It went online in 1943 and was built at a facility in Oak Ridge that later became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

More information: Chemistry World

In January 1944, workers laid the foundations for the first chemical separation building, T Plant located in 200-West. Both the T Plant and its sister facility in 200-West, the U Plant, were completed by October. U Plant was used only for training during the Manhattan Project. The separation building in 200-East, B Plant, was completed in February 1945. The second facility planned for 200-East was canceled.

Plutonium

Nicknamed Queen Marys by the workers who built them, the separation buildings were awesome canyon-like structures 800 feet long, 65 feet wide, and 80 feet high containing forty process pools.

The interior had an eerie quality as operators behind seven feet of concrete shielding manipulated remote control equipment by looking through television monitors and periscopes from an upper gallery. Even with massive concrete lids on the process pools, precautions against radiation exposure were necessary and influenced all aspects of plant design.

On April 5, 1944, Emilio Segrè at Los Alamos received the first sample of reactor-produced plutonium from Oak Ridge. Within ten days, he discovered that reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of the isotope plutonium-240 than cyclotron-produced plutonium.

Plutonium-240 has a high spontaneous fission rate, raising the overall background neutron level of the plutonium sample. The original gun-type plutonium weapon, code-named Thin Man, had to be abandoned as a result -the increased number of spontaneous neutrons meant that nuclear pre-detonation (fizzle) was likely.

More information: Science Direct

The entire plutonium weapon design effort at Los Alamos was soon changed to the more complicated implosion device, code-named Fat Man. With an implosion weapon, plutonium is compressed to a high density with explosive lenses -a technically more daunting task than the simple gun-type design, but necessary to use plutonium for weapons purposes. Enriched uranium, by contrast, can be used with either method.

Construction of the Hanford B Reactor, the first industrial-sized nuclear reactor for the purposes of material production, was completed in March 1945. B Reactor produced the fissile material for the plutonium weapons used during World War II. B, D and F were the initial reactors built at Hanford, and six additional plutonium-producing reactors were built later at the site.

By the end of January 1945, the highly purified plutonium underwent further concentration in the completed chemical isolation building, where remaining impurities were removed successfully. Los Alamos received its first plutonium from Hanford on February 2.

Glenn Seaborg's ID Badge and Slide Rule

While it was still by no means clear that enough plutonium could be produced for use in bombs by the war's end, Hanford was by early 1945 in operation. Only two years had passed since Col. Franklin Matthias first set up his temporary headquarters on the banks of the Columbia River.

According to Kate Brown, the plutonium production plants at Hanford and Mayak in Russia, over a period of four decades, both released more than 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment -twice the amount expelled in the Chernobyl disaster in each instance.

Most of this radioactive contamination over the years were part of normal operations, but unforeseen accidents did occur and plant management kept this secret, as the pollution continued unabated.

In 2004, a safe was discovered during excavations of a burial trench at the Hanford nuclear site. Inside the safe were various items, including a large glass bottle containing a whitish slurry which was subsequently identified as the oldest sample of weapons-grade plutonium known to exist. Isotope analysis by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory indicated that the plutonium in the bottle was manufactured in the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge during 1944.

More information: World Nuclear

The first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity and detonated on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, used plutonium as its fissile material.

The implosion design of the gadget, as the Trinity device was code-named, used conventional explosive lenses to compress a sphere of plutonium into a supercritical mass, which was simultaneously showered with neutrons from the Urchin, an initiator made of polonium and beryllium, neutron source: (α, n) reaction.

Together, these ensured a runaway chain reaction and explosion. The overall weapon weighed over 4 tonnes, although it used just 6.2 kg of plutonium in its core. About 20% of the plutonium used in the Trinity weapon underwent fission, resulting in an explosion with an energy equivalent to approximately 20,000 tons of TNT.

An identical design was used in the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, killing 35,000–40,000 people and destroying 68%–80% of war production at Nagasaki.

Only after the announcement of the first atomic bombs was the existence and name of plutonium made known to the public by the Manhattan Project's Smyth Report.

More information: Los Alamos National Observatory

Unlike uranium,

plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940,

but scientists soon realized that it could produce

even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions.

In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, 

the American government went to great lengths

to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.

Sam Kean

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, PHILOSOPHICAL PESSIMISM

Arthur Schopenhauer

Today, The Grandma has read about Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher. The Grandma loves Philosophy but she has to accept that she does not like Schopenhauer although he is one of the most popular and prestigious philosophers of his age and he has been a great influence to other philosophers, scientists and artists. Philosophy is something to read and think again and again and it is often usual that you reread an author and you find new things or points of view that you have not seen before. This is one of the reasons because of The Grandma has decided to reread Schopenhauer, another reason has been to homage him on the anniversary of his birthday.

Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788-21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, expanded in 1844, wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable metaphysical will.

Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Eastern philosophy, such as asceticism and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.

More information: The-Philosophy

Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer has had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology influenced thinkers and artists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Those who cited his influence included philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Anthony Ludovici, scientists Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein, psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, and Samuel Beckett.

Schopenhauer was born on 22 February 1788, in the city of Danzig (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; present-day Gdańsk, Poland) on Heiligegeistgasse, the son of Johanna Trosiener and Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, both descendants of wealthy German-Dutch patrician families.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Neither of them was very religious; both supported the French Revolution, and were republicans, cosmopolitans and Anglophiles. When Danzig became part of Prussia in 1793, Heinrich moved to Hamburg -a free city with a republican constitution, protected by Britain and Holland against Prussian aggression- although his firm continued trading in Danzig where most of their extended families remained. Adele, Arthur's only sibling was born on 12 July 1797.

He moved to Weimar but didn't live with his mother, who even tried to discourage him from coming by explaining that they wouldn't get along very well. Their relationship deteriorated even further due to their temperamental differences. He accused his mother of being financially irresponsible, flirtatious and seeking to remarry, which he considered an insult to his father's memory.

His mother, while professing her love to him, criticized him sharply for being moody, tactless, and argumentative -and urged him to improve his behavior so he would not alienate people. Arthur concentrated on his studies which were now going very well and he also enjoyed the usual social life such as balls, parties and theater. By that time Johanna's famous salon was well established among local intellectuals and dignitaries, most celebrated of them being Goethe.  

He left Weimar to become a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809. He arrived to the newly founded University of Berlin for the winter semester of 1811–12. At the same time his mother just started her literary career; she published her first book in 1810, a biography of her friend Karl Ludwig Fernow, which was a critical success. 

Download Parerga and Paralipomena by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer left Berlin in a rush in 1813 fearing that the city could be attacked and that he could be pressed into military service as Prussia just joined the war against France.

Also contrary to his mother's prediction, Schopenhauer's dissertation made an impression on Goethe to whom he sent it as a gift. Although it is doubtful that Goethe agreed with Schopenhauer's philosophical positions he was impressed by his intellect and extensive scientific education. Their subsequent meetings and correspondence were a great honor to a young philosopher who was finally acknowledged by his intellectual hero. They mostly discussed Goethe's newly published and somewhat lukewarmly received, work on color theory. 

Schopenhauer soon started writing his own treatise on the subject, On Vision and Colors, which in many points differed from his teacher's. Although they remained polite towards each other, their growing theoretical disagreements -and especially Schopenhauer's tactless criticisms and extreme self-confidence- soon made Goethe become distant again and after 1816 their correspondence became less frequent.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer admitted that he was greatly hurt by this rejection, but he continued to praise Goethe, and considered his color theory a great introduction to his own.

Another important experience during his stay in Weimar was his acquaintance with Friedrich Majer -a historian of religion, orientalist and disciple of Herder- who introduced him to the Eastern philosophy. Schopenhauer was immediately impressed by the Upanishads and the Buddha and put them at par with Plato and Kant. He continued his studies by reading the Bhagavad Gita, an amateurish German journal Asiatisches Magazin and Asiatick Researches by The Asiatic Society.

Although he loved Hindu texts he was more interested in Buddhism, which he came to regard as the best religion. However, his early studies were constrained by the lack of adequate literature, and were mostly restricted to Early Buddhism. He also claimed that he formulated most of his ideas independently, and only later realized the similarities with Buddhism.

After his academic failure he continued to travel extensively, visiting Leipzig, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Schaffhausen, Vevey, Milan and spending eight months in Florence.

Schopenhauer enjoyed Italy, where he studied art and socialized with Italian and English nobles. It was his last visit to the country. He left for Munich and stayed there for a year, mostly recuperating from various health issues, some of them possibly caused by venereal diseases. He contacted publishers offering to translate Hume into German and Kant into English but his proposals were declined.

Download The Art of Being Right by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer claimed that in his last year in Berlin, he had a prophetic dream that urged him to escape the city. As he arrived in his new home in Frankfurt he supposedly had another supernatural experience, an apparition of his dead father and his mother, who was still alive. This experience led him to spend some time investigating paranormal phenomena and magic. He was quite critical of the available studies and claimed that they were mostly ignorant or fraudulent, but he did believe that there are authentic cases of such phenomena and tried to explain them through his metaphysics as manifestations of the will.

In July 1832 Schopenhauer left Frankfurt for Mannheim but returned in July 1833 to remain there for the rest of his life, except for a few short journeys. In 1836, he published On the Will in Nature. In 1836 he sent his essay On the Freedom of the Will.

Academic philosophers were also starting to notice his work. In 1856 University of Leipzig sponsored an essay contest about Schopenhauer's philosophy.

He remained healthy in his old age, which he attributed to regular walks no matter the weather, and always getting enough sleep. He had a great appetite and could read without glasses but his hearing was declining since his youth and he developed problems with rheumatism. He remained active and lucid, continued his reading, writing and correspondences until his death. The numerous notes that he made during these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title Senilia. 

Arthur Schopenhauer

In the spring of 1860 his health started to decline. In September he suffered inflammation of the lungs and although he was starting to recover he remained very weak. He died on 21 September 1860 while sitting at home on his couch. He was 72.

Schopenhauer saw his philosophy as a continuation of that of Kant, and used the results of his epistemological investigations, that is, transcendental idealism, as starting point for his own.

In November 1813 Goethe invited Schopenhauer for research on his Theory of Colours. Although Schopenhauer considered colour theory a minor matter, he accepted the invitation out of admiration for Goethe. Nevertheless, these investigations led him to his most important discovery in epistemology: finding a demonstration for the a priori nature of causality.

The difference between the approach of Kant and Schopenhauer was this: Kant simply declared that the empirical content of perception is given to us from outside, an expression with which Schopenhauer often expressed his dissatisfaction. He, on the other hand, was occupied with: how do we get this empirical content of perception; how is it possible to comprehend subjective sensations limited to my skin as the objective perception of things that lie outside of me?

Causality is therefore not an empirical concept drawn from objective perceptions, but objective perception presupposes knowledge of causality. Hereby Hume's skepticism is disproven.

Download The Basis of Morality by Arthur Schopenhauer

By this intellectual operation, comprehending every effect in our sensory organs as having an external cause, the external world arises. With vision, finding the cause is essentially simplified due to light acting in straight lines. We are seldom conscious of the process that interprets the double sensation in both eyes as coming from one object; that turns the upside down impression, and that adds depth to make from the planimetrical data stereometrical perception with distance between objects.

Schopenhauer stresses the importance of the intellectual nature of perception; the senses furnish the raw material by which the intellect produces the world as representation. He set out his theory of perception for the first time in On Vision and Colors.

Schopenhauer developed a system called metaphysical voluntarism. For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world.

The task of ethics is not to prescribe moral actions that ought to be done, but to investigate moral actions. Philosophy is always theoretical: its task to explain what is given.

 Download The World as Will and Representation by A. Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer's realist views on mathematics are evident in his criticism of the contemporaneous attempts to prove the parallel postulate in Euclidean geometry. Writing shortly before the discovery of hyperbolic geometry demonstrated the logical independence of the axiom -and long before the general theory of relativity revealed that it does not necessarily express a property of physical space- Schopenhauer criticized mathematicians for trying to use indirect concepts to prove what he held was directly evident from intuitive perception.

For Schopenhauer, human desiring, willing, and craving cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation.

Schopenhauer calls the principle through which multiplicity appears the principium individuationis. When we behold nature we see that it is a cruel battle for existence. Individual manifestations of the will can maintain themselves only at the expense of others -the will, as the only thing that exists, has no other option but to devour itself to experience pleasure. This is a fundamental characteristic of the will, and cannot be circumvented.

Suffering is the moral retribution of our attachment to pleasure. Schopenhauer deemed that this truth was expressed by Christian dogma of original sin and in Eastern religions with the dogma of rebirth.

Download On the Freedom of the Will by Arthur Schopenhauer

Every person takes the limits of their own

field of vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

THE NEW YORKER PUBLISHES ITS FIRST ISSUE IN 1925

The New Yorker, February 21, 1925

The Grandma is relaxing at home after her travel to Brussels. She has been unpacking her suitcase and she has sit on her sofa to read a little about world news. She has chosen one of her favourite English newspapers, The New Yorker, a publication that published its first issue on a day like today in 1925.

The New Yorker is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry.

Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric Americana, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.

The New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, and debuted on February 21, 1925. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine that would be different from perceivably corny" humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or the old Life.

More information: The New Yorker

Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, who founded the General Baking Company, to establish the F-R Publishing Company. The magazine's first offices were at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951.

During the early, occasionally precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. Ross famously declared in a 1925 prospectus for the magazine: It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.

More information: @NewYorker

Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction, essays and journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue.

In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Ann Beattie, Sally Benson, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Mavis Gallant, Geoffrey Hellman, Ruth McKenney, John McNulty, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Stephen King, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery drew more mail than any other story in the magazine's history.

The New Yorker, September 12, 1994

In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue.

While some styles and themes recur more often than others in its fiction, the stories are marked less by uniformity than by variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras and translated from many languages.

Kurt Vonnegut said that The New Yorker has been an effective instrument for getting a large audience to appreciate modern literature.

The magazine is notable for its editorial traditions. Under the rubric Profiles, it publishes articles about notable people such as Ernest Hemingway, Henry R. Luce and Marlon Brando, Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff, magician Ricky Jay and mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky.

Other enduring features have been Goings on About Town, a listing of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and The Talk of the Town, a miscellany of brief pieces -frequently humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York- written in a breezily light style, or feuilleton, although in recent years the section often begins with a serious commentary.

More information: The New Yorker

For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing errors, unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors (Block That Metaphor) have been used as filler items, accompanied by a witty retort. There is no masthead listing the editors and staff. Despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr, in 1985, for $200 million when it was earning less than $6 million a year.

As far back as the 1940s, the magazine's commitment to fact-checking was already well-known. However, the magazine played a role in a literary scandal and defamation lawsuit over two articles written by Janet Malcolm in the 1990s, who wrote about Sigmund Freud's legacy. Questions were raised about the magazine's fact-checking process.

More information: The Legacy Lab

As of 2010, The New Yorker employs sixteen fact checkers. In July 2011, the magazine was sued for defamation in United States district court for an article written by David Grann on July 12, 2010, but the case was summarily dismissed. Today, the magazine is often identified as the leading publication for rigorous fact checking.

Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet to publish current and archived material, and maintains a website with some content from the current issue, plus exclusive web-only content. Subscribers have access to the full current issue online, as well as a complete archive of back issues viewable as they were originally printed. 

The New Yorker, April 17, 2017

In addition, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back issues from 1925 to April 2008, representing more than 4,000 issues and half a million pages, has also been issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue of the magazine has been released.

The New Yorker has featured cartoons, usually gag cartoons, since it began publication in 1925.

The cartoon editor of The New Yorker for years was Lee Lorenz, who first began cartooning in 1956 and became a New Yorker contract contributor in 1958.

After serving as the magazine's art editor from 1973 to 1993, when he was replaced by Françoise Mouly, he continued in the position of cartoon editor until 1998. His book The Art of the New Yorker: 1925–1995 (Knopf, 1995) was the first comprehensive survey of all aspects of the magazine's graphics.

In 1998, Robert Mankoff took over as cartoon editor and edited at least 14 collections of New Yorker cartoons. In addition, Mankoff usually contributed a short article to each book, describing some aspect of the cartooning process or the methods used to select cartoons for the magazine. Mankoff left the magazine in 2017.

More information: Literary Hub

The New Yorker's stable of cartoonists has included many important talents in American humor, including Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Sam Cobean, Leo Cullum, Richard Decker, Pia Guerra, J. B. Handelsman, Helen E. Hokinson, Ed Koren, Reginald Marsh, Mary Petty, George Price, Charles Saxon, David Snell, Otto Soglow, Saul Steinberg, William Steig, James Stevenson, Richard Taylor, James Thurber, Pete Holmes, Barney Tobey, and Gahan Wilson.

Many early New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their own cartoons. In his book The Years with Ross, Thurber describes the newspaper's weekly art meeting, where cartoons submitted over the previous week would be brought up from the mail room to be gone over by Ross, the editorial department, and a number of staff writers.

More information: CBS News

Cartoons often would be rejected or sent back to artists with requested amendments, while others would be accepted and captions written for them. Some artists hired their own writers; Helen Hokinson hired James Reid Parker in 1931.

Brendan Gill relates in his book Here at The New Yorker that at one point in the early 1940s, the quality of the artwork submitted to the magazine seemed to improve. It later was found out that the office boy, a teen-aged Truman Capote had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping pieces he didn't like down the far edge of his desk.

More information: Mag Culture

One of the nice things about 'The New Yorker' is

they let you write stories

that sometimes end up almost half a book.

David Grann

THE SOVIET UNION LAUNCHES ITS MIR SPACECRAFT

Mir

Today, The Grandma has returned from Brussels to Barcelona by plane. It has been a short visit to the Belgian and European capital but intensive and amazing one. Brussels is a wonderful place that you must visit with enough time and The Grandma has decided to return very soon accompanied by her closest friends.

During the short flight, The Grandma has been reading about the Mir, the space station launched by the Soviets on a day like today in 1986 The station remained in orbit for 15 years and was occupied for ten of those years.

Mir was a space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, operated by the Soviet Union and later by Russia.

Mir was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996. It had a greater mass than any previous spacecraft.

At the time it was the largest artificial satellite in orbit, succeeded by the International Space Station (ISS) after Mir's orbit decayed. The station served as a microgravity research laboratory in which crews conducted experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and spacecraft systems with a goal of developing technologies required for permanent occupation of space.

More information: Russian Space Web

Mir was the first continuously inhabited long-term research station in orbit and held the record for the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until it was surpassed by the ISS on 23 October 2010. It holds the record for the longest single human spaceflight, with Valeri Polyakov spending 437 days and 18 hours on the station between 1994 and 1995.

Mir was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years out of its fifteen-year lifespan, having the capacity to support a resident crew of three, or larger crews for short visits.

Following the success of the Salyut programme, Mir represented the next stage in the Soviet Union's space station programme. The first module of the station, known as the core module or base block, was launched in 1986 and followed by six further modules.

Mir

Proton rockets were used to launch all of its components except for the docking module, which was installed by US Space Shuttle mission STS-74 in 1995. When complete, the station consisted of seven pressurised modules and several unpressurised components.

Power was provided by several photovoltaic arrays attached directly to the modules. The station was maintained at an orbit between 296 km and 421 km altitude and travelled at an average speed of 27,700 km/h, completing 15.7 orbits per day.

The station was launched as part of the Soviet Union's manned spaceflight programme effort to maintain a long-term research outpost in space, and following the collapse of the USSR, was operated by the new Russian Federal Space Agency (RKA).

As a result, most of the station's occupants were Soviet; through international collaborations such as the Intercosmos, Euromir and Shuttle–Mir programmes, the station was made accessible to space travellers from several Asian, European and North American nations.

 More information: NASA

Mir was deorbited in March 2001 after funding was cut off. The cost of the Mir programme was estimated by former RKA General Director Yuri Koptev in 2001 as $4.2 billion over its lifetime including development, assembly and orbital operation.

Mir was authorised by a 17 February 1976 decree, to design an improved model of the Salyut DOS-17K space stations. Four Salyut space stations had been launched since 1971, with three more being launched during Mir's development.

It was planned that the station's core module (DOS-7 and the backup DOS-8) would be equipped with a total of four docking ports; two at either end of the station as with the Salyut stations, and an additional two ports on either side of a docking sphere at the front of the station to enable further modules to expand the station's capabilities.

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By August 1978, this had evolved to the final configuration of one aft port and five ports in a spherical compartment at the forward end of the station.

It was originally planned that the ports would connect to 7.5-tonne modules derived from the Soyuz spacecraft. These modules would have used a Soyuz propulsion module, as in Soyuz and Progress, and the descent and orbital modules would have been replaced with a long laboratory module.

Mir

Following a February 1979 governmental resolution, the programme was consolidated with Vladimir Chelomei's manned Almaz military space station programme. 

The docking ports were reinforced to accommodate 20-tonne space station modules based on the TKS spacecraft. NPO Energia was responsible for the overall space station, with work subcontracted to KB Salyut, due to ongoing work on the Energia rocket and Salyut 7, Soyuz-T, and Progress spacecraft. KB Salyut began work in 1979, and drawings were released in 1982 and 1983.

New systems incorporated into the station included the Salyut 5B digital flight control computer and gyrodyne flywheels, taken from Almaz, Kurs automatic rendezvous system, Luch satellite communications system, Elektron oxygen generators, and Vozdukh carbon dioxide scrubbers.

By early 1984, work on Mir had halted while all resources were being put into the Buran programme in order to prepare the Buran spacecraft for flight testing. Funding resumed in early 1984 when Valentin Glushko was ordered by the Central Committee's Secretary for Space and Defence to orbit Mir by early 1986, in time for the 27th Communist Party Congress.

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It was clear that the planned processing flow could not be followed and still meet the 1986 launch date. It was decided on Cosmonaut's Day (12 April) 1985 to ship the flight model of the base block to the Baikonur cosmodrome and conduct the systems testing and integration there.

The module arrived at the launch site on 6 May, with 1100 of 2500 cables requiring rework based on the results of tests to the ground test model at Khrunichev. In October, the base block was rolled outside its cleanroom to carry out communications tests. The first launch attempt on 16 February 1986 was scrubbed when the spacecraft communications failed, but the second launch attempt, on 19 February 1986 at 21:28:23 UTC, was successful, meeting the political deadline.

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The orbital assembly of Mir began on 19 February 1986 with the launch of the Proton-K rocket. Four of the six modules which were later added (Kvant-2 in 1989, Kristall in 1990, Spektr in 1995 and Priroda in 1996) followed the same sequence to be added to the main Mir complex.

Firstly, the module would be launched independently on its own Proton-K and chase the station automatically. It would then dock to the forward docking port on the core module's docking node, then extend its Lyappa arm to mate with a fixture on the node's exterior. The arm would then lift the module away from the forward docking port and rotate it on to the radial port where it was to mate, before lowering it to dock. The node was equipped with only two Konus drogues, which were required for dockings. This meant that, prior to the arrival of each new module, the node would have to be depressurised to allow spacewalking cosmonauts to manually relocate the drogue to the next port to be occupied.

Mir

The other two expansion modules, Kvant-1 in 1987 and the docking module in 1995, followed different procedures. Kvant-1, having, unlike the four modules mentioned above, no engines of its own, was launched attached to a tug based on the TKS spacecraft which delivered the module to the aft end of the core module instead of the docking node. Once hard docking had been achieved, the tug undocked and deorbited itself.

The docking module, meanwhile, was launched aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-74 and mated to the orbiter's Orbiter Docking System. Atlantis then docked, via the module, to Kristall, then left the module behind when it undocked later in the mission. Various other external components, including three truss structures, several experiments and other unpressurised elements were also mounted to the exterior of the station by cosmonauts conducting a total of eighty spacewalks over the course of the station's history.

The station's assembly marked the beginning of the third generation of space station design, being the first to consist of more than one primary spacecraft, thus opening a new era in space architecture. First generation stations such as Salyut 1 and Skylab had monolithic designs, consisting of one module with no resupply capability; the second generation stations Salyut 6 and Salyut 7 comprised a monolithic station with two ports to allow consumables to be replenished by cargo spacecraft such as Progress.

The capability of Mir to be expanded with add-on modules meant that each could be designed with a specific purpose in mind -for instance, the core module functioned largely as living quarters-, thus eliminating the need to install all the station's equipment in one module.

The most significant adverse effects of long-term weightlessness are muscle atrophy and deterioration of the skeleton, or spaceflight osteopenia. Other significant effects include fluid redistribution, a slowing of the cardiovascular system, decreased production of red blood cells, balance disorders, and a weakening of the immune system. Lesser symptoms include loss of body mass, nasal congestion, sleep disturbance, excess flatulence, and puffiness of the face. These effects begin to reverse quickly upon return to the Earth. 

More information: Astronautix

To prevent some of these effects, the station was equipped with two treadmills in the core module and Kvant-2 and a stationary bicycle in the core module; each cosmonaut was to cycle the equivalent of 10 kilometres and run the equivalent of 5 kilometres per day. Cosmonauts used bungee cords to strap themselves to the treadmill. Researchers believe that exercise is a good countermeasure for the bone and muscle density loss that occurs in low-gravity situations.

The EO-10 crew, launched aboard Soyuz TM-13 on 2 October 1991, was the last crew to launch from the USSR and continued the occupation of Mir during the fall of the Soviet Union. The crew launched as Soviet citizens and returned to Earth on 25 March 1992 as Russians. The newly formed Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) was unable to finance the unlaunched Spektr and Priroda modules, instead putting them into storage and ending Mir's second expansion.

More information: Popular Mechanics

Following the 8 June 1998 departure of Discovery, the EO-25 crew of Budarin and Musabayev remained on Mir, completing materials experiments and compiling a station inventory. On 2 July, Roskosmos director Yuri Koptev announced that, due to a lack of funding to keep Mir active, the station would be deorbited in June 1999.

The EO-26 crew of Gennady Padalka and Sergei Avdeyev arrived on 15 August in Soyuz TM-28, alongside physicist Yuri Baturin, who departed with the EO-25 crew on 25 August in Soyuz TM-27. The crew carried out two spacewalks, one inside Spektr to reseat some power cables and another outside to set up experiments delivered by Progress M-40, which also carried a large amount of propellant to begin alterations to Mir's orbit in preparation for the station's decommissioning.

More information: ABC News

When you talk to crews that went to Mir

or have gone up to International Space Station,

they say that you go through different phases

of adaptation or getting used to the space environment.

Laurel Clark