Cloud Tumours

Cosmic Radiation is the cause for tumours within clouds, says leading meteorological expert Sam Skediva.

The cysts are formed when vapour molecules within the clouds are struck by cosmic radiation, high energy protons and nuclei that come from the solar system. Using scanning radio telescopes, Skediva and his team have demonstrated that clouds act as a sacrificial barrier to the harmful radiation.

“The tumours you see are a result of the fantastically high energy of the incident radiation. Vapour molecules collect around the trail of the decaying particles, in a similar fashion to a cloud chamber, but what we find extraordinary is that the residual traces ‘grow’ to form a cyst,” he says, “Although some of the cysts do grow, and can eventually grow so large as to disrupt the functioning of the cloud, there is no solid evidence for alarm. This happens on a daily basis as clouds are formed and unformed and reformed.”

More likely than not, the rate of extinction of clouds is more than enough to mitigate any ill effects.”Most of these are what you might call ‘benign’, and those that are ‘malignant’ don’t hang around for long enough to cause any lasting effects.”ChesterLogoSmall

Squid-loads!

Drop your shovel and pick up your net: There’s gold in them waves!

Squid are being hunted in the Caspian sea not for their meat, but for their precious metal content.

Douglas Graham, of Dorset, has spent years perfecting a method to extract the valuable resource, “We started off figuring out a way to extract toxic heavy metals from fish. Once we discovered that we were getting more than just lead and mercury, that was when we performed a break-even analysis.”

The process is a kind of ‘distillation for metals’, with the details kept deliberately vague.

“The process has taken a decade to become profitable. It is patented, internationally, but we want to get a firm foothold before we release the details.”

The metals are extracted using an electrolytic process, whereby the fish are dried, ground to a fine powder and mixed in a solution. The slurry is then passed through a series of specially designed chambers, each drawing out the precious minerals. The result is that, from 100kg of fish, 30 grams of gold, silver, platinum and copper can be extracted. The rest is sold as fertilizer and filler to make up the shortfall.ChesterLogoSmall