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I have something new here that's unusual. I just did my final inspection for the evening and 4/5 babies were gaping. The fifth I thought was dead. It's in the nest with its head foreward and its feet pointing upward. I looked and it is still breathing. The parents have fed well today but these babies are so hungry! I'm wondering if maybe it has been poorly fed compared to the others. I have some experience w/ this. If a nestling is too weak it will gape w/o being able to cheep. If it's near dead it won't be able to gape or vocalize. Just concerning. Hope he's okay!

Wayne, here's the headline...Crystal power Palmtop Nuclear Fusion Device Invented By Michael Schirber LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 27 April 2005 01:00 pm ET The nuclear reaction that powers the Sun has been reproduced in a pocket-sized device, scientists announced today. Researchers have for years tried to harness nuclear fusion to power the world. But its cousin, nuclear fission -- the breaking apart of atoms -- is the only method so far commercially viable. The latest invention is not in the same league as efforts to build complex commercial reactors. The new device creates a relatively small number of reactions, and requires more energy to operate than it produces. The Real Deal (AP) - Previous claims of tabletop fusion have been met with skepticism and even derision by physicists. In one of the most notable cases, Dr. B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England shocked the world in 1989 when they announced that they had achieved so-called cold fusion at room temperature. Their work was discredited after repeated attempts to reproduce it failed. Fusion experts noted that the new UCLA experiment is credible because, unlike the 1989 work, it did not violate basic principles of physics. "This doesn't have any controversy in it because they're using a tried and true method,'' said David Ruzic, professor of nuclear and plasma engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "There's no mystery in terms of the physics.'' -- Associated Press But the configuration is so small and simple that its creators think it may inspire unforeseen applications. "I certainly find it interesting that you can heat a cubic centimeter crystal in your hand, then plunge it in cold water and it will cause nuclear fusion," Seth Putterman from the University of California Los Angeles told LiveScience. Putterman's lay description greatly oversimplifies how the compact apparatus works. Specifically, Putterman and collaborators heat a pyroelectric crystal, lithium tantalite, from minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit to plus 45 in a matter of minutes. This generates an electrical charge -- 100,000 volts -- across the tiny crystal, which is housed in a chamber filled with deuterium gas, a heavy form of hydrogen. The high voltage is focused onto a needle-thin tip, which strips electrons from nearby deuterium nuclei and then accelerates them at a solid target containing deuterium. When two deuterium nuclei collide together at high speed, they fuse to form helium. The Sun also fuses atoms in thermonuclear reactions that create light and heat. The byproduct of the newly discovered lab reaction is a particle called the neutron. The scientists detect about 1,000 neutrons per second. Because neutrons are so penetrating, Putterman said that a hand-held neutron source might one-day be used to do geologic surveys or to look into cargo containers for nuclear devices. "Current neutron generators are extremely cumbersome," Putterman said. "They are about as big as a dentists X-ray machine, so you canÂt carry them into the field." Pyroelectric crystals could also provide a beam of ions for use as a microthruster in a miniature spacecraft. The research is described in the April 28 issue of the journal Nature.

Thank you, Georgia, for posting your thoughts while the story is still fresh on your mind. It's only been ten months since I read The Terror twice, but I'm afraid I've already lost a lot of the details. For instance, I had forgotten the use of present tense -- I nearly always find that awkward, too, while I'm reading, but I immediately put things into my memory in past tense once I've read something. I figure you're right about male readers posting at other sites about The Terror. I still have run across only one additional male reader, though. The John Clute review: "No reader who has begun to get used to the literatures of the early 21st century should be flummoxed by the strangeness of The Terror, which seems to be an historically exact recounting of the famous doomed Arctic expedition led by the ineffably stupid Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), who caused the deaths of 130 men in his attempt to find the Northwest Passage by force..."Clute almost lost me completely with that intro sentence because Franklin didn't cause the deaths of 130 men by "force." Franklin may be considered "ineffably stupid" but that's hindsight about a failed expedition -- if he had pulled it off and found the passage his stupidities would have been considered minor. Besides that, Franklin himself died before all but a few of his men succumbed, and those that preceded him had other problems, such as tuberculosis. Clute either didn't know this or he made faulty conclusions. However, I was more interested in what Clute had to say about Simmons's writing style. He does like to use lit crit jargon: mimetic and in medias res -- I was half expecting him to tell us about breaching the fourth wall. "Crozier is still what one might call a victim of the wrong story, and he will not be able to save himself in any sense before he abandons, as it were, the mimetic tradition as applied to the para-mimetic exorbitance of the genuinely extreme, of a set of experiences that stretch mimesis beyond the breaking point."Got that? I don't, but I think I agree that Crozier is the victim of the wrong story. I still say that The Terror was one of the most interesting novels I read last year...maybe in several years. But the more I think about the story and the way Simmons wrote it, I have nagging feelings of dissatisfaction. I agree, Georgia, that the Inuit mythtelling was too much expository lump, and not presented seamlessly enough with the realistic aspects for me to accept with ease. Georgia, you've brought up some things that I will definitely have to think more about. That's pretty good for a book: to be still analyzing it a year later. I wonder if you will be too.