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...ATLAS particle detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside Geneva is 150 ft. long, 82 ft. high, weighs 7,000 tons, and contains enough cable and wiring to wrap around Earth's equator seven times. It's a mammoth machine, designed for the delightful purpose of detecting particles so tiny, you can fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair...
...actors - Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Claire Bloom as Hera, Maggie Smith as Thetis - whose contempt for the material, and for themselves for taking this rich but demeaning payday, deprives their readings of either the sizzle of high drama or the florid flounce of high camp. Then we're on earth, in Argos, where the half-god Perseus, Zeus' bastard son, is incarnated by Harry Hamlin with a pouty air and the look of a Muscle Beach Andy Samberg. Under director Desmond Davis, the live-action scenes are stately, starchy, suffocating...
...clear what caused the toads to scatter. Grant, whose research was published this week in the Journal of Zoology, says the toads could have reacted to changes in the earth's magnetic field, alterations in the ionosphere or spikes in the amount of radon gas in the water. "Toads are very sensitive to their environment," she says. Now that at least one potential connection has been drawn between toads and earthquakes, she says, scientists could look for similar reactions in other toad populations that live in seismic areas and are being monitored by conservationists. She suggests exploring how toads respond...
...There was a brief boom of research into whether animals could be used to predict earthquakes in the 1970s, when a few scientists documented changes in the behavior of birds, mice and domestic animals immediately before the earth's beginning to shake. But the idea never gained much traction. The very difficulty of predicting earthquakes makes it hard to study how animals react to them. "This was a completely fortuitous event," says Halliday. "It would be practically impossible to plan research like this. You'd spend a lot of time watching toads with nothing happening." (Read "Why Chile's Quake...
...Aquila earthquake was preceded by minor shocks that also worried the city's residents. "If there was a fright among the toads, it would have been a reflection of the fright that was happening among the people," says Pascal Bernard, a seismologist at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris. "People were afraid, but nobody knew for certain that something was going to happen...