Chicks rule!

I was instantly a Dixie Chicks fan from their first album. Though the trend was fading by their third album, I still liked listening to them.

Then there was the big incident. It didn't change my opinion of them. It might have made me a bit more fond of them for saying their piece. After all, many musicians had expressed their sentiments after 9/11 and were well received. Toby Keith's "The Angry American" with "boot in your ass" was popular.

So the Dixie Chicks expressed their disappointment with the current leader. So what, everyone's allowed to express their opinions - some just have a wider audience than others.

The backlash was terrible. Burning their CD's and their songs dropping off the country music stations was uncalled for. It was as much a statement as what they said.

I'm glad to see they're still together, and expressing their feelings about the incident. Click here to go to their website and you'll hear a song from the upcoming CD. Nice song, but I doubt I'll hear it on country music radio.

When the rain isn't good for you

Sometime in December, the Palo Verde Nuclear generating station about 50 miles west of Phoenix reported finding tritium (H3) in underground pipes. It was reported to be 3.5 times the EPA allowance for drinking water.

Now federal investigators finally showed up to investigate the source, and make a final report at the end of August.

Here's what APS (the company running the station) are now saying:

In Arizona, although APS has not pinpointed the source of the tritium contamination in water found at Palo Verde, company officials said more and more evidence suggests that rainfall, rather than a cracked or leaking pipe, could be a source.

Adding to this "washout" theory, they said, is that recent rainfall samples collected from a roof vent found tritium levels similar to the samples found in the contaminated water.

So, there's H3 in the rainwater? If that's true, I'd like to know how that's happening.

I've worked with H3 in the lab. The most disturbing thing about H3 is that it has a long half life. Which means it takes a long time to break down and no longer be radioactive. So if it's incorporated in your system, you'll die 50 years later and still set off a Geiger counter.

However, H3 is not as destructive to your system as other radioactive compounds. It's used a lot in research because it gets incorporated into the the cell. So each time the cell divides, each daughter cell has half the amount of H3 as the original cell. Then the daughter cell divides and those cells will have 1/4 the H3 the original cell has. If you add a known amount of H3, then you can measure what's there, therefore you'll know how many times that cell divided (or proliferation rate).

That concludes today's science lesson.