For years, almost no one at the Dozier School even knew about the burial ground in a clearing in the woods on the edge of campus. It was forbidden territory. The soil here, churned in places by tiny ants, holds more than the remains of little boys. Only now is it starting to give up its dark secrets: horror stories of state-sanctioned barbarism, including flogging, sexual assault and, possibly, murder.

That the Arthur G Dozier School – a borstal for delinquent boys founded in 1900 – was not a gentle place was well-established. Boys as young as six were chained to walls, lashings with a leather strap were frequent and, in the early decades, children endured enforced labour, making bricks and working printing presses. When it was closed in 2011, it had already been the subject of separate federal and state investigations.

But, as suspicions deepen about how the boys in the burial ground died, pressure is growing again on the state to shine new light into the darkest days of the school in Marianna, a Florida Panhandle town that once was a bastion of the KKK and the site of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal. The pressure is coming from some of the school’s survivors, from relatives of boys who died here, and from Florida’s top US Senator, Bill Nelson.

“Where there is smoke, there is fire,” Senator Nelson declared last month, calling on the state to delay plans to sell off the 1,400 acres occupied by the old school so that a team of forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida can complete a project begun last year to comb the campus for more graves. He wants any bodies found exhumed, identified and returned to the families they came from.

So far, the team, led by Erin Kimmerle, has focused its work around the once-secret cemetery. It knows that as many as 98 boys died at the school between 1914 and 1973. Since starting last year, Professor Kimmerle has found 19 previously undiscovered graves in addition to the 31 marked by steel-pipe crosses. That means 50 graves so far. Forty-eight have yet to be located, assuming graves were dug for each body.

“It’s more than we anticipated,” she says. “Our purpose is to explain who these children were, what happened to them and to understand what the story is that should be told.” The official stance – that all the children died from accidents, such as fires and drownings, or natural causes – does not impress her. She cites the case of one child, Billy Jackson, whose cause of death was listed as kidney failure. There is a record of his being beaten two weeks earlier and admitted to hospital. “Common sense”, she asserts, says he died from the beating.

The place of Dozier in Florida’s history is already set and it’s a shameful one. That is thanks in part to a group of Dozier survivors who call themselves the “White House Boys” because that was the colour of the small building where the floggings used to take place. A decade ago, they began finding one another by email and social networks and sharing their painful memories. In a book that Roger Dean Kiser eventually wrote about his time at the school – The White House Boys: an American Tragedy – he called it a “concentration camp for little boys”.

Even now, he recalls the wardens with fear, including the one-armed Troy Tidwell, who, he says, beat him on his first day. “They were just totally out of control up there,” he said. “The ones that got the most beating were the 11-year-olds. They liked to beat the little ones because they didn’t have to be afraid of them coming back after them with a brick in the hands. The older the boys, the less beatings they got.”

Prior to the premier of her multi-media production “SEKAI,” Soul Fire Productions co-owner Kaia Shine promised her audience a sensual feast.

She and her cast of 28 performers, supported by dozens of behind-the-scenes crew members, kept their word, wooing the crowd with a mesmerizing, high-energy, spiritually-guided journey resembling a toned-down Cirque Du Soleil show set inside an episode of the Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth.”

“We were thrilled,” Skylar Mallas, co-owner of Soul Fire, said. “It went better than I imagined, and I was so thankful the audience received it so well … Everybody was just ecstatic.”

“Absolutely amazing,” Shine added. “A real touching, profound experience that seemed to reach a lot of people. (I’m) super grateful the Kaua’i community came out and supported us.”

Inspired by a dream Shine had two years ago, “SEKAI” “follows the story of a young girl, the Chosen One, who has a mystic vision to travel to a far away land to plant a sacred seed, thus enabling a new consciousness to be born,” according to a release. “Her voyage takes us through mystical lands and unknown worlds as she is shown the way by elemental guides that support her along her quest.”

The storyline, written by Thalyn Nikolau, focuses on the dying of an old paradigm and shifting the human consciousness coming into 2013.

“It’s not your average theater piece,” Nikolau said. “I have the distinct feeling that this show happened because the catharsis needed to happen on some level. That set all the inspiration pieces in motion so this show would be created at this time on Kaua’i.”

The hour-and-a-half performance is broken up into 15 acts, which feature a myriad of art forms, including Taiko drumming, fire spinning and dance, an LED black light performance, aerial silks, acrobatics and belly and modern dance. There are geishas, senseis, spirits and goddesses of water, earth, wind and fire, all adorned in elaborate costuming and shadowed by unique set designs and visual projections.

It is clear that Soul Fire Productions has reached new heights with “SEKAI,” which sucks its audience in from the get-go and leaves the entire room begging for more.

“It has a message that really wants to be out in the world,” Mallas said. “People need to be touched by this show.”

In a post on the “SEKAI” Facebook page, Production Manager Angela Babcock wrote  that she could “hardly express in words the depth of emotion that has birthed itself from the experiences” during the premier.

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart, each and every one who put tireless, countless hours into making this event happen,” she wrote. “Not a detail was missed. Such a breathtaking, stunning, mind-blowing event, and one that will not be forgotten soon … We are holding the dream that this is just the beginning of many more shows to come.”

Although the cast and crew has taken time to step back and “decompress” following the premier, Mallas said “SEKAI” is “definitely something we are trying to travel with.”

“I think we’re all available and open to whatever the next step is,” she said. “What would be really great is if we could make it a regular thing on the island.”

Shine agreed, saying she has received nothing but positive feedback, with some people even breaking down in tears. Looking forward, Shine said several organizations have already expressed interest in sponsoring the production.

“It’s just the beginning,” she said. “We’ve just planted the seed … Once we have a budget, look out!”

Nikolau described the premier as “a victory for Kaua’i” and said “SEKAI” touches the heart in ways other theater performances don’t.

“This is something you aren’t able to get everywhere,” he said. “We did a really good job, I feel, of wielding the surgeon instruments, the heart specialist instruments … to pop Kaua’i open. That’s priceless.”

Only a few months ago, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission allowed hunting wild hogs at night with the aid of artificial light. The non-native animals are the scourge of native wildlife and habitats.

Feral swine root up swamps and fields and destroy crops, so they are a bane to farmers. Recently, for the first time, I was in an elevated stand after dark with a spotlight mounted on my Remington model 700 rifle. It was loaded with Remington’s new Hog Hammer ammo. Loaded with a solid copper Barnes TSX bullet, it is designed for taking the biggest, most heavily boned and muscled game on the planet, which includes hogs.

Milton Turnage operates Hog Heaven Outfitters in Johnston County and holds hog hunts January through March. The Neuse River’s swamps are the epicenter of the coastal plain’s feral hog infestation and, although their numbers are incredibly high, they are not easy to kill.

“The harder you hunt them, the smarter they get,” Turnage said. “If they hear the button click when you turn on a light, they can hear it and run away.”

Chad Kearney, one of Hog Heaven’s guides, had taken me to the stand at dusk. In front of the stand was a feeder to broadcast corn. An electronic light hung below the feeder’s motor, equipped with a photocell to illuminate the corn beneath it after dark.

“A boar’s shoulder has a cartilage shield three inches thick,” Kearney said. “A bullet has to penetrate both sides so there’s a blood trail. The best shot to take is a head shot. For a chest shot, aim low and right behind the leg because the heart and lungs are lower than a deer’s.”

Four other hunters were along the first night. Two shot hogs. Kearney picked me up at 1 p.m. and I was the last hunter in the stand. The next evening, the hunters’ numbers swelled to a dozen. From this stand a few days before, a hunter had seen 42 hogs rooting through a truckload of sweet potatoes.

Every five minutes, I switched on the light, which cast a green beam that provided shooting light at 300 yards. The light was a called an Assassinator and was designed by Turnage specifically for hunting hogs. This time, I had switched out the pushbutton switch on the rear of the light for a pressure switch mounted underneath the fingers of my left hand on the rifle stock.

I heard some shots, so before shooting time wound down at midnight on Saturday (Sunday hunting is prohibited to firearms users in North Carolina), I headed back to the clubhouse to shoot photos. Nick Sashe, an ammunition product manager for Remington who lives in Oak Ridge, had taken a 151-pound, red boar and his friend, Mark Payne of Greensboro, had taken a 232-pound, jet-black boar with long tusks.

“I hit him a little far back with a .223 Hog Hammer round and he ran a short distance,” Sashe said. “But the bullet went all the way through.”

“That’s how I like them, lying in the field,” Kearney said. “I don’t like trailing a potentially dangerous animal into the swamp. Even with a hit, a pig can be hard to trail at night.”

A UT chemistry professor recently became the winner of the Japan Prize, an award similar to the Nobel Prize that comes with a cash award of 50 million Japanese yen, roughly $560,000, for his development of a process that is now used to manufacture nearly all microprocessors and memory chips worldwide.

The Japan Prize Foundation announced Wednesday that C. Grant Willson, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at UT, is one of this year’s two winners of the award. The Japan Prize is given out each year by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan to honor scientists from around the world who have made great strides in the fields of science and technology, according to a UT press release.

Willson said he will share the prize money with Jean M.J. Fréchet, a colleague and friend, who, 34 years ago, began the research with him that led to this recognition, according to the press release.

The press release stated that the two met while working in the Research and Development division of IBM. The company had been making great advances in the rapidly growing manufacturing chips industry but had hit a snag in its product development.

The company had been able to double the number of devices on each of its manufacturing chips every two years by shrinking the devices down through the principle of Moore’s Law, which states the density of transistors on integrated circuits will double every two years. However, continuing to advance the product by using that principle did not seem possible, the press release stated.

Further shrinkage of the devices would have required shorter wavelength ultraviolet light and the lightbulbs available did not produce much light at a short wavelength. This meant it would take hours to develop more advanced product, an amount of time not practical for mass production, according to the press release.

The press release stated that Wilson and Frecht then proposed the idea of using a catalyst to reduce the amount of light required for the process, and to their surprise, it worked.

The scientists soon recruited Hiroshi Ito, a professor at the State University of New York-Syracuse, and over the next few years developed the process to the point that IBM put it into mass production. By the early 1990s, the three were receiving patents on their work, according to the press release.

The press release stated that their breakthrough went on to offer a universal model for creating increasingly powerful semiconductors. That model is used today by businesses worldwide to provide the essential components of everyday technology including cell phones, medical devices, personal computers, home appliances and automobiles.

According to the UT press release, Wilson says it may soon be the end of his groundbreaking work’s implementation, however, as technology continues to develop. He has partnered with S V Sreenivasan, a professor of mechanical engineering at UT, to create a new process to replace the one he discovered decades ago. It is called nanoimprint lithography.

The press release stated that the researchers have worked to develop and commercialize it, and in 2012 were named Inventors of the Year by UT’s Office of Technology Commercialization.

Together Willson and Sreenivasan founded an Austin-based semiconductor manufacturing company, Molecular Imprints, that now has more than 100 employees that provide state-of-the-art semiconductor memory devices. These technologies are similarly implemented in other related fields including light emitting diodes (LED), solar energy and biotechnology markets, according to a January UT press release and the company’s website.

Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis based utility company, plans to restart a battery bank used for wind energy storage after a potential fire risk prompted its shutdown. This $4.7 million sodium-sulfur battery bank was operational for two years without a problem, however, a similar battery caught fire in Japan. It was capable of powering 500 homes for 7.2 hours and was manufactured by NGK Insulators of Nagoya.

After the September 2011 battery fire in Japan, NGK ceased production of the batteries and advised their customers, including Xcel Energy and 19 others in North America, to stop using them. NGK later determined that a faulty cell had leaked molten material, triggering a short-circuit and fire.

“It wasn’t like we had problems,” added Mark Willers, CEO of MinWind III, which owns the adjacent wind farm and substation and sells the output to Xcel. “It ran perfectly.”The battery was rebuilt by NGK Insulators, and according to Xcel Energy, the battery bank is likely to go back online in February.

Now that the problem has been identified, this battery bank can continue its important long-term trial which will give the world, and especially utility companies, an idea of one way in which wind energy storage can be done, and also the viability of this system set up by Xcel Energy and NGK Insulators. Many are still uncertain about wind energy storage, and some flat out say that there is no way it can work, this is why someone has to prove them wrong (or right).

Cheap wind energy storage would solidify the advantages of wind power and make it available to everyone at all times, without wasting any of it. This has the potential to save money as the cost of wasted wind energy normally has to be passed on to consumers.

Xcel Energy has the most wind power generation capacity in the United States, and other utilities like them are considering energy storage to capture the extra electricity generated by wind turbines.

North Dakota is the number one wind resource state in the nation. But that wind isn’t being captured for electricity in the far Western part of the state, thanks to a few obstacles prohibiting production from taking off in the area. The first is available resources. A standard wind turbine sits 260 feet off the ground. At that height, the average wind speed in Williston is about 15 miles per hour. But south of Minot, where Basin Electric operates their Prairie Winds wind farm, the average wind speed is closer to 20 miles per hour.

“The best wind resources are right through the center of the state. That doesn’t mean wind projects can’t be located elsewhere, but the best are right through the center of the state. They can start producing at 8 miles an hour, but they aren’t able to reach full generating capacity until wind speeds are 25 to 30 miles per hour”, says Basin Electric spokesman Daryl Hill.

Another aspect hindering the growth of wind turbines out west is on again off again tax policies instituted by the federal government. Tax incentives have been offered to developers installing wind energy for over 10 years, but those incentives have expired and then been renewed 4 times over that span, including just over a month ago. Developers were forced to finish projects before the end of 2012, unsure if the incentives would be available after December 31st. Just before the new year, the government extended the incentives again, by including a wind production tax credit in the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. Those incentives will expire again in 2014, leaving developers with minimal time to research and build before tax incentives expire.

In a bid to promote child education World Vision Sierra Leone has commenced the distribution of solar lamps to primary and secondary school children in Kono District where electricity for the ordinary people has not been available for years.

But as children World Vision believes they too have the rights to be educated, so also do they have the responsibility to study hard and pass their exams, the solar lamps will help school children to study at night in remote communities where the NGO operate.

In Kono district (one of the districts devastated by the war) like many other rural parts in Sierra Leone, children study using two means “Fefeh” Lamp (a local lantern made from milk tin which uses small kerosene) or candle.

“Since I started school I have been studying with a ‘Fefeh’ lamp to study, as there was no other means for me to study and studying with it blackens my nostrils’ expressed Jeneba.

Both means of studying, i.e. using a candle or ‘fefeh lamp’ poses threat to children lives. Sometimes using the candle can be fatal sometimes as houses normally get burnt, when a child over sleeps or fail to put out the candle before going to bed after studying. Using the ‘Fefeh’ lamp on the other hand, gets children’s nostrils blacken with fume which always cause severe lung infection for the children.

“Using this lamp has caused me a lot of problems, there was a time when I went to school and we were taking exams, I was having cold, so when I blew out my nose, the mucus that came out was black as charcoal, several days later I started having side pains’  Jeneba laments.

As most parents live in abject poverty in rural areas, getting Le 20,000 (Twenty thousand Leones which is equivalent to $5) to buy a gallon of Kerosene that will light the lantern that kids will use to study every day is a huge problem compounded with the present global fuel crisis, so they refer to cheaper means at the expense of their children’s health. ‘with the current hardship in the country, if I have  Le 20,000 I will rather use it to put food on the table for them than buy a gallon of kerosene and this money can be  used for 2 days meal’ Kadie, Jeneba’s mother expressed.

Issues like these impede on the children’s grades when they take public exams and making it to the next stage is always a problem, in a bid to address the situation the ADPs in Kono get together and contacted support offices with the idea of using solar lamps instead of candle or ‘Fefeh’ lamp.

“We thought it fit that, building school and getting the children to access it is great, but if there performances at public and class exams, then our goal in getting children have quality education is farfetched.  So we thought that making their studies meaningful should be part of our strategy in getting quality education’ Tommy Vandy, Area Development Programme Manager, Gbane.

The solar lights when charged can be used for 4 days and then it can be taken to school and then recharged. “We have put a mechanism in place, wherein we can sustain these lights so that it can serve children in the community.

When children graduate to the next class they will leave the light for the other set of kids that will make it to that class, as they too will be facing their public exams” Tommy Vandy again.

World Vision is trying to see the possibility of getting every child one solar light that will enhance the children’s performance thus achieving our child well-being aspiration of children are able to read at age eleven.

One of my pool pals was telling me about his forthcoming trip to Japan. I’ve never been there, but I was excited for him. I mentioned, in passing, that Japan is the only industrial country in the world that is losing population. My friend jumped on that statement. “It’s a good thing, too. Every country should cut its population in half.” Now, my friend is a well-to-do biotech executive. He’s going to Japan to work with their Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Shinya Yamanaka. And my friend noted approvingly that Dr. Yamanaka’s work with stem cells “doesn’t raise ethical issues.” That’s a roundabout way of saying Yamanaka isn’t killing embryonic humans. Thank God.

But my swimming buddy’s attitude toward population should not have surprised me. He is well-educated and a successful professional—traveling China, Japan, Thailand, and Singapore on an almost monthly basis. The educated classes in America, and in the international arena, are almost all anti-population.

Too bad. One of America’s greatest scientists, Benjamin Franklin, was born this day in 1706. Ben was the 15th of 16 children of a poor Boston candlemaker. Very early in his life, he was apprenticed to his older brother, a printer. When Ben became distracted by his reading and arrived late at the print shop, his brother would box his ears. Franklin wrote satirical articles that ridiculed the solemn leaders of that still-Puritan influenced colony. He got into an early controversy when he attacked the great Rev. Cotton Mather for Mather’s advocacy of inoculation for smallpox. Young Ben was wrong on that one. The learned Mather was a member of Britain’s Royal Society and had read deeply on prevention of smallpox.

Franklin soon ran off to Philadelphia. He arrived almost penniless. His future wife, Deborah, laughed at the threadbare youth walking past her door, with only a loaf of bread under his arm. It wouldn’t be Franklin’s last laugh in the City of Brotherly Love.

He soon became a leading figure in colonial America’s largest city. He was not only a hard worker and a creative writer, he liked to be known as a hard worker. In his autobiography, he tells the delightful story of how he deliberately left the wheel on his printer’s barrow ungreased. That’s so Philadelphians  would hear him squeaking through the streets before dawn every morning.

The list of his practical ideas and inventions staggers the mind. He urged on his neighbors to provide street lighting. Once the streets were lighted, everyone could better see the filth that needed cleaning up. Franklin pushed for that, too. And subscription libraries, volunteer fire companies, and even a university. Franklin’s friends formed the Junto, an association of ambitious young men whose goal was self-advancement through community service.

Franklin studied simple, everyday needs. Americans (and Europeans) then spent an inordinate amount of time simply staying warm. Franklin developed a stove that brought the heat into center of the room.

The Franklin stove alone would have made Ben a fortune—if he had sought a patent for it. But he didn’t. He gave the idea away freely.

He later wrote that he saw too many inventors wasting their time and talents fighting bitter patent battles. Ben might have had to go to thirteen colonial capitals and maybe London, too, to lock up his patent rights. He preferred to give his inventions away. And, with typical self-mockery, he allowed that he was not unaware of what this did for his reputation.

Franklin’s discoveries in electricity made him a worldwide sensation. The experiment with the kite and key proved that lightning was electricity, just a more powerful form of that phenomenon people knew from the Leyden jar experiments. Franklin gave it plus and minus charges. Franklin’s speculations about its nature truly revolutionized the world’s understanding. He deserves to be in the front rank of scientists. For this achievement, he was granted an honorary doctorate by Scotland’s University of St. Andrews.

James Robert Verhoeven has been charged with felony assault on a peace officer and several misdemeanors, including DUI, in Great Falls. The charges stem from an incident that happened on Saturday, January 12th, on 2nd Avenue South.

Great Falls police officers saw a truck that appeared to be high-centered on a snow berm in the middle of the street, and as they drove closer to see if they could help, the driver was able to get the truck free and drove east on 2nd Avenue South without any headlights on.

When the officers turned on their emergency lights, the driver turned into a parking lot; the officers pulled in behind the truck.

The driver, later identified as Verhoeven, began trying to reverse “at a high speed,” but due to the snow and ice, the tires simply spun in place. The police officers blared their horn to get Verhoeven’s attention, but he reportedly continued trying to drive his truck in reverse.

Court documents state that the officers feared “imminent bodily injury” at that point; they were able to move their vehicle out of the way in time, and the truck passed within a couple feet of the patrol car.

Verhoeven’s truck then spun out, and the officers blocked it in the parking lot, at which point Verhoeven got out of the truck and began to run away. The police officers chased him and he was apprehended.

The officers noted a “very strong odor” of alcohol on Verhoeven’s breath and that he was slurring his speech; he admitted to having two beers within the last 90 minutes.

He agreed to a portable breathalyzer test; the result was 0.18%, more than twice the legal limit for driving. Once he was taken to the Cascade County Detention Center, he agreed to take another breathalyzer test; the result was 0.17%, still more than double the legal limit.

In addition to the felony charge of assault on a peace officer, Verhoeven has been charged with several misdemeanors: driving under the influence (first offense); obstructing a peace officer; careless driving; fleeing or eluding an officer; no insurance; no headlamps; operating a motor vehicle which has not been properly registered.

At the time of the incident, Verhoeven was listed as being on “conditional release” from the MT Department of Corrections for a felony theft conviction in 2011 in Cascade County.

A Bloomingdale’s security officer reported to police that a man had swept up two large armfuls of men’s jeans, having a retail value of $3,160, and ran out of the store without paying for them.

An Abington patrol officer spotted a car and driver, matching the descriptions given to police by the security officer, traveling south near the Abington Pharmacy on Old York Road.

When the officer activated his emergency lights, the car pulled over to the curb lane but then accelerated across two traffic lanes, running a red light and crashing into two vehicles at the intersection of Old York Road and Horace Avenue.

When the car came to a stop in a diagonal position over the median strip, the driver fled on foot. The patrol officer began to pursue the man on foot but broke off the chase when he noticed that the car that the man had been driving was still moving. The patrol officer got into the car, put it in park and removed the key.

They’ve thought about it, actually. But the truth is, we’re probably better off the way things are.

To find out about space cameras, we got in touch with Noam Izenberg, a planetary scientist working on the MESSENGER probe, which is now circling Mercury taking pictures. He told us there are basically two reasons space photography is mostly in black and white. The first, as you rightly suppose, is that grayscale images are often more useful for research.

In principle, most digital cameras, including cheap Walmart models in addition to the custom-built jobs on space probes, are monochrome, or more accurately panachrome. Each of the pixel-sized receptors in a digital camera sensor is basically a light bucket; unmodified, their combined output is simply a grayscale image generated from all light in the visible spectrum and sometimes beyond.

To create a color image, each pixel on a typical earthbound camera has a filter in front of it that passes red, green, or blue light, and the camera’s electronics add up the result to create the image we see, similar to a color TV. In effect, filtering dumbs down each panachrome pixel so that it registers only a fraction of the light it’s capable of seeing. In an earthbound camera, some information is lost.

Space cameras are configured differently. They’re designed to measure not just all visible light but also the infrared and ultraviolet light past each end of the visible spectrum. Filtering is used primarily to make scientifically interesting details stand out. “Most common planetary camera designs have filter wheels that rotate different crystal light filters in front of the sensor,” Izenberg says. “These filters aren’t selected to produce ‘realistic’ color that the human eye would see, but rather to collect light in wavelengths characteristic of different types of rocks and minerals,” to help identify them.

True-color images—that is, photos showing color as a human viewer would perceive it—can be approximated by combining exposures shot through different visible-color filters in certain proportions, essentially mimicking what an earth camera does. However, besides not inherently being of major scientific value, true-color photos are a bitch to produce: all the variously filtered images must be separately recorded, stored, and transmitted back to Earth, where they’re assembled into the final product. An 11-filter color snapshot really puts the squeeze on storage space and takes significant transmission time.

Given limited opportunities, time, and bandwidth, a better use of resources often is a false-color image—for example, an infrared photo of rocks revealing their mineral composition. At other times, when the goal is to study the shape of the surface, measuring craters and mountains and looking for telltale signs of tectonic shifts or ancient volcanoes, scientists want black-and-white images at maximum resolution so they can spot fine detail.

They realize it all right. But that brings up the second reason most NASA images aren’t in color. The dirty little secret of space exploration is that a lot of the solar system, and for that matter the cosmos, is pretty drab. “The moon is 500 shades of gray and black with tiny spatterings of greenish and orangish glass,” Izenberg says. “Mars is red-dun and butterscotch with white ice at the poles. Jupiter and glorious Saturn are white/yellowish/brown/reddish.”

As for Mercury, Izenberg’s bailiwick, NASA has posted on its website detailed color photos showing vast swaths of the planet’s surface. If the accompanying text didn’t tell you they were true-color, you’d never know.

False-color images are often a lot more interesting. The colors aren’t faked, exactly; rather, they’re produced by amplifying modest variations in the visible spectrum and adding in infrared and ultraviolet. Some of the less successful examples look like a Hare Krishna tract, but done skillfully the result can be striking. The spectacular full-color nebula images from the Hubble Space Telescope were all produced by black-and-white sensors with color filters.

Northumberland County Council in England is using two 26-tonne Mercedes-Benz Axor 2629s and five 7.5-tonne Missubishi Fuso Canter 7C15s that are equipped to carry out multiple roles, thus maximizing their cost efficiency.

Supplied by Newcastle dealer Bell Truck and Van, the Axors are fitted with demountable grit hoppers and spreaders by Ripon-based Econ Engineering, and can also work with snowplow blades.

They have joined the authority’s fleet of more than 30 gritters now doing battle with snow and ice to keep the county moving this winter.

The fact that the gritting equipment is demountable means that rather than stand idle in summer, the trucks can be pressed into service for other road maintenance duties. These chassis were specified for operation with liquid tar tanks and spraying systems for resurfacing the county’s roads with chippings.

Transport & Fleet Category Specialist Brian Jones said: “Traditional gritters have fixed bodies and only work when the roads need salting – they are simply parked for the rest of the year. It’s the same with road surfacing vehicles, which tend to be unused during the winter. These new Axors give us the best of both worlds and can work all year round.”

The Canters were also supplied by Bell – the popular Fuso light truck range is sold and supported by Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicle dealers in the UK – and are also kitted out for a variety of tasks. Each has a cage tipper body with a side-mounted bin lift and a rear tail lift, fitted by Euro Truck Bodies, of Durham.

These tough little trucks are now being used to pick up bins from households where access is tight, and which larger refuse vehicles cannot reach. They can also collect loose litter from roadside bins, and remove large, heavy or bulky domestic items such as old freezers or washing machines, which can be hoisted into the cargo area safely and easily via their tail-lifts.

“The Canters can also fulfill a variety of roles,” Mr Jones said. “It’s all about getting the best possible deal for our Council Tax payers, increasing efficiency, and carrying out our work with the minimum number of vehicles.”

He continued: “We chose the Mercedes-Benz chassis as their toughness and reliability in a demanding emergency role is second-to-none. We run a lot of Mercedes-Benz trucks in our winter fleet and they perform extremely well.

“The Canter 7.5-tonners are very well suited to the range of tasks we demand of them too. The vehicle’s compact exterior dimensions make it ideally suited to work in areas with access problems, while it also offers an exceptionally high payload capacity – even with the body and lifting equipment fitted, ours can still carry well over three tonnes.”

Mr Jones added: “The back-up from Bell Truck and Van is first class. We run our own network of workshops and carry out all routine maintenance in-house, but the dealer supports us with regular parts deliveries and expert technical assistance is always just a phone call away.”

The water that went through the system started out as water that went down sinks, was used in washing machines, or flushed down toilets.

That water is usually processed at Beenyup Wastewater Treatment Plant and pumped out to the ocean, but as part of the trial a small portion of it was treated through three further steps.

While the water processed as part of the trial was restored to drinkable standards, as it was just a trial, it was not put back into Perth’s drinking water system; instead it was pumped into the Leederville aquifer.

Mr Marmion said more than 70,000 water quality results obtained throughout the trial had met stringent health and environmental guidelines for drinking water.