Wired.com: In 2006, Oleg Khinsagov was caught trying to smuggle 100 grams of refined uranium into Georgia with the aim of selling it to a Muslim man he believed was connected to “a serious organization."The amount was small, but enriched enough to make a bomb, and Khinsagov said he had another 2 to 3 kilograms stored in his apartment that he was willing to sell.That should be the opening scene of a new documentary on nuclear proliferation, but instead it’s tucked into the middle of Countdown to Zero, which aims to do for antinuclear proliferation what An Inconvenient Truth did for the environmental movement.The film takes a while to work up to its most important point—that anyone with a relatively small amount of money has the ability to obtain enough nuclear weapons material to incinerate everything in a five-mile radius of a large city. And he or she wouldn’t have to missile it into the US, they could simply detonate it in a container ship at a port.
The finding that the Saturnian moon may host layers of icy slush instead of a global ocean could change how planetary scientists think about other icy moons as well.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.
January 29, 2026 12:52 PM
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