To Build A Better Cooking Stove

In a story that brings in all the trendy narratives of the day, a physicist who has designed a more efficient wood-burning stove to help the starving in Darfur, we also read references to climate change, micro-loans, foreign aid corruption, and even metal theft. The stoves could be stolen before they even reach the Darfur residents because the steel in the stoves is more profitable as scrap metal than the cooking implement. Of course, talking about the 70 year history of Lawrence National Laboratories at Berkeley, the reporter doesn't mention that one of its first tasks was to refine the radioactive material necessary for atomic bombs. There's a 100 ton magnet up there that newer accelerators have been built around because they can't move it. But I guess mentioning the atom bomb history, especially during the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, doesn't fit in too well with the touchy-feely international narrative.