After nearly a month of failed efforts to stop the oil gushing into the Gulf, BP needs to get serious about destroying its well. Nuclear policy scholar Christopher Brownfield on the benefits of a nuclear explosion.

On Day 1 of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, my gut instinct was to nuke the well shut. This was not simply an aggressive urge to brandish the most beastly of weapons in our mighty American arsenal, but a serious way to snuff out an enormous problem that grows worse by the day.
For more than 100 years, explosives have been used to break the necks of runaway oil wells, snapping the long, narrow columns and sealing them shut with tons and tons of rock. Over the last several days, our 24-hour news cycle has pumped us full of excruciating details about the failed efforts to siphon, cap off, and ultimately recover the oil that is gushing into the Gulf. The latest nonsense and false hope, a mile-long pipe designed to divert some of the oil flow, is like putting a 4-inch straw into a 22-inch-diameter fire hose. It's a sordid attempt by BP at drinking its own milkshake. But the problem with this disaster response is that the ideas BP has brought to the table all seem to ignore the simplest solution: permanently destroying the well.

Ahh...yeah

Last week, Noah's Ark Ministries, including evangelical explorers and filmmakers, announced that they had found the remnants of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey. (Read all about the claim in National Geographic.) Of course, this isn't the first group that's "found" Noah's Ark. No, it's at least the sixth in the last 50 years. Over at Discovery News, the Skeptical Inquirer's Benjamin Radford provides "A Short History of Noah's Ark Discoveries." From Discovery:

Interest in the Ark spiked in the 1970s after a man named Georgie Hagopian said he located and climbed on the remains of the Ark at least twice--though he claimed it occurred some 60 years earlier (in the early 1900s) and could offer no evidence to back it up. One of the first people to claim to have found the Ark on Mt. Ararat was a woman named Violet Cummings, who in the early 1970s wrote a book titled Noah's Ark: Fable or Fact? Despite its intriguing title, the claim turned out to be fable, not fact. A few years later, in 1976, yet another man claimed to have discovered the Ark on Ararat, and offered ambiguous photos as proof but nothing more came of it.
Interest waned until the 1990s, when CBS television aired a primetime special titled The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark, which finally offered seemingly definitive proof in the form of an eyewitness who owned a piece of wood he claimed was from the ark. The whole thing turned out to be a huge hoax; CBS and its viewers had been duped