Hello, everyone! A message from your favorite scince bowl friends.

Hey! We all are in Aiken, South Carolina having a most excellent time. We flew in on Sunday and spent the night inthe local Hampton Inn. It has pretty nice accommodations. Yesterday we went to the Savanna River Site. Because it's government property, we had to get badgered .... er .... badged by a badger. Or something. We all had to show our ID's and get visitor tags that we are required to wear at all times while we are on the grounds. We hadn't gotten a lot of sleep at all the night before because we stayed up late playing 80 and talking, so we all were pretty tired in the morning. First, we went to check out some Red Cockaded Woodpeckers, and endangered species whose population they have brought up from 4 to about 150 in the past few years. We got to raise up a telescoping pole to their nest hole up in a pine tree and see the little baby woodpeckers. Next, Meredith and Adam got to climb maybe 30 feet up on a tree (with the help of a foot-ladder and some climbing gear) to see another nest. There wasn't time for the rest of us to go, so oh well. We got to see some holes dug by the gopher tortises, which are a species of turtles (not a cross-breed). There was some kind of uninteresting tours that went on for a bit (i.e. a local archeology slide show that was designed for fifth-graders). The next part was, in my humble opinion, the coolest part of the day. We got to speak with some forest firefighters/firestarters. We talked a bit about fire safety, but that was mostly in the context of lighting so-called "prescribed burns" to alleviate the threat of wildfires among other things. We could have started a controlled burn ourselves if it had rained recently, but alas! it hadn't. Ah well. We still got to see some of their cool fire-starting equipment and climb up one of the fire towers. It was nifty. Anyhow, we went back to the hotel. Later that night, we went to the local Publix. We each had $285 paid to us for the whole trip, so we wanted to get some Klondike bars. While we were there, we had this awesome idea of frightening the pants off Mrs. Jones. We decided to get a $4 bottle of sparkling grape juice. We went back to the hotel and tried to do some good acting, but Meredith kind of messed it up. Oh well, it was still fun. We also wanted to just for the heck of it buy a park bench that was for sale at the Publix for $80. It would have been hilarious. Ah, well.

Today, we went back to the SRS again. We didn't have to get badgered again, but our van did have to be searched again. Tom Colleran, a person at the Defense Waste Processing Facility, explained to us what they did there. Basically, they take high-level radioactive waste left over from the Cold War bomb-making days, process it, and add borosilicate (the stuff that Pyrex is made of) to turn it into still high-level but very stable glass. They put it into huge canisters (10ft high and a diameter of 2 ft) to be temporarily stored in a warehouse so that they can put it into Yucca Mountain later when it hopefully opens up for waste storage. We got to have a tour of the facility in which they did that. It was quite cool, but the goggles gave me a headache. (It felt as if I were crosseyed; it's kind of wierd to explain.) Later, we got to see this cool demonstration of Wackenhut Security Incorporated, which is hired to do security for the area. They had all sorts of awesome police/near-military equipment. We got to see one of the K-9 demonstrations too.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing a tour of the robotics lab, which was awesome. To get into the complex (which apparently houses fissile materials) containing the robot lab, we had to undergo some really strict security. There, we wern't allowed to take any cameras, cell phones, or even PDAs. There was an extra security check too. Anyhow, once we got in, we went to the robot lab. The guy there is awesome. He's a middle-aged engineer who is a kid on the inside. He had these inchworm robots that the robot team designed to remotely check out contaminated (e.g. inside the processing plant) pipeline. He had some scaled-down versions that he let us try to make go. Each robot had three toggle switches: left (out, in) which controlled the position of some claws on the left, center (expand, contract) which toggled a hydraulic system that pushed the two ends apart or pulled them together, and right (out, in) which controlled the position of some claws on the right. He let Meredith and me race them, but he didn't tell us how to operate them. It took a little, but we got the hang of it (and I won the race :-) ). Then he showed us a robot that they designed and built in 10 days to clean up the bottom of the inside of the DWPF which had fragments of highly radioactive glass all over. It was neat. Then he showed us that they built a battlebot (the Jabberwock) that got 17th in the world. It was pretty cool. Next, we got to remotely command (the robots were actually in the same room, but we did it by camera and wires) some robots. It was awesome.

Well, we came back to the hotel, and the rest of the guys took a nap, Meredith is reading the new Harry Potter, and I am sitting here on Mrs. Jones' laptop. So, they probably won't post for a while, but I'll try to keep in touch.