… Drought Reveals Drowned Town, Jobs You May Not Hate, Spacecraft Force Field, Spring-Loaded Fishhooks and MORE.

Sticking Your Drill Where It Doesn’t Belong
Researchers are about to drill down into an earthquake zone at the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme is coordinating the project, the purpose of which is to “understand the causes of deadly quakes and tsunami by pulling up cores for study and by putting down sensors to monitor changes in the rock,” reports BBC News.

“The place we are going to has a history of disastrous earthquakes and tsunami every 100 or 200 years; and these have resulted in the deaths of many people,” chief project scientist Masataka Kinoshita, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), explained to BBC. Indeed, the program will focus on a region of the sea floor that has been responsible for such immense tremor events as the 1944 Tonankai (Magnitude 8.1) and 1946 Nankaido (Magnitude 8.3) earthquakes.

The Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) expects to get under way with the project, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 10 years, in September.

Drilling deep into an area that has a centuries-long history of disastrous earthquakes and tsunami? Strong possibility this will not end well.

Chinese to Be On Best Manners During Olympics
In Beijing, the cultural and political capital of China, citywide campaigns are trying to curb public spitting and to discourage public cursing and littering.

Beijing has already announced that people caught spitting in public before the Olympics could face fines up to 50 yuan, or about US$6.50.

Last week, the city commemorated “Queuing Day.” Volunteers wearing satin Queuing Day sashes shooed rush-hour commuters into lines at busy subway stations, while hospital administrators and a few city officials handed out long-stemmed roses to patients who stood in line to pay their bills or pick up medicines, according to The New York Times.

There is even a campaign to rectify the often awesomely awful English translations on signs and restaurant menus (Dongda Anus Hospital, anyone?), as we noted last Friday (second from bottom).

The Beatings Will Continue ‘Til Innovation Improves
Fellow blogger Fred pointed out this little item from Russia’s Kommersant: The country’s vice premier, Sergey Ivanov, recently announced that it is necessary to create conditions so that authorities could “financially punish enterprises avoiding innovation.”

Umm, the global market already punishes those businesses that avoid innovation… by putting them out of business.

Drought Reveals Flooded Town
Australia’s worst drought in a century has uncovered a town purposely flooded 50 years ago as part of a massive hydro-electricity scheme, according to Agence France-Presse:

Adaminaby, a small farming town nestled in the Snowy Mountains on the border between New South Wales and Victoria states, was submerged under 30 metres of water in 1957 when the local valley was dammed to form the man-made Lake Eucumbene.

Although the settlement was never expected to ever again be seen, the severity of the drought has evaporated most of the lake, bringing it back to the surface.

Image credit: AFP/File/Anoek De Groot

Hate Your Job? Try Helping People
People with professional jobs that involve helping or serving people are more satisfied with their work and, overall, are happier than those in other professions, according to results from the 2006 General Social Survey, which is based on interviews with randomly selected people who collectively represent a cross section of Americans. In the current study, LiveScience reports, interviewers asked more than 27,000 people questions about job satisfaction and general happiness.

Here are the top 10 most gratifying jobs, along with the percentage of subjects who said they were very satisfied with the job:

• Clergy (87 percent)
• Firefighters (80 percent)
• Physical therapists (78 percent)
• Authors (74 percent)
• Special education teachers (70 percent)
• Teachers (69 percent)
• Education administrators (68 percent)
• Painters and sculptors (67 percent)
• Psychologists (67 percent)
• Security and financial services salespersons (65 percent)
• Operating engineers (64 percent)
• Office supervisors (61 percent)

A few common jobs in which about half the participants reported high satisfaction: police and detectives, registered nurses, accountants, and editors and reporters.

Fishhooks, Corsets and Sock Scents
Some 700 inventors from 42 countries are competing for top honors at the 35th annual International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva, Switzerland, this weekend. Corporations, independent researchers and some amateurs are taking part, and “a 75-member jury will select the best invention and award prizes in 45 other categories on April 22,” reports The Associated Press. All entries require having received a patent.

Entrants from around the world are offering new designs for devices that:

• Roll sushi dexterously for “chefs” who lack fine motor skills;
• Can reduce a 29-inch waistline to a 23-inch waistline (a new kind of corset);
• Shut down appliances that go into stand-by mode;
• Biodegrade or burn after serving as a funeral ornament;
• Emit a scent from socks;
• Distribute food to pets while giving them a check-up; and
• Hold hot pieces of meat by the bone.

The only U.S. entrant, Michael Adcock, designed and entered a spring-loaded fishhook. When the fish nibbles on bait, this action causes a spring to release, sending a dart through the fish’s lips. “The fish catcher is most effective for pan fish such as bream, crappie, bass and catfish,” he said in the AP article.

Radical Self-Operation
Some years ago, a man with a severe hand-washing compulsion became so depressed he shot himself in the head, and survived, and then his obsessive-compulsive disorder was gone, says Clifford Pickover in “Strange Brains and Genius” (via Pocono Record, last item). Physician’s Weekly reported that the bullet had achieved the same result as a leucotomy — less radical than a lobotomy — in removing part of the left lobe of the brain.

“He hit himself in exactly the same spot a surgeon would have in a leucotomy,” said the reporting doctor. A millimeter higher or lower would have killed him.

Spacecraft Force Field
British scientists are developing a force field to protect astronauts and spacecraft from the hazards they may encounter on future missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. The shield is designed to act as a “virtual umbrella” to shelter astronauts and sensitive electronics from the violent blasts of radiation that erupt from the sun, according to UK’s The Guardian.

Different versions of the shield are envisaged for spacecraft embarking on lengthy interplanetary journeys and for pioneering colonies of astronauts taking the first steps on the path to building an extraterrestrial outpost.

The 7 Sisters
The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, is swathed in a wispy veil in the below image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Pleiades star cluster formed some 100 million years. The 19th-century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson described the stars as “glittering like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ J. Stauffer (Spitzer Science Center, Caltech)

Like on Charles Foster Kane’s Death Bed
The infrared image below, also from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, shows the star-forming region Rosette Nebula. In optical light, the nebula looks like a rosebud, or the “rosette” adornments that date back to antiquity.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.

Click HERE for answers to last Friday’s OSHA visual quiz (last Light Friday item).

Cheers.