TL;DR: As of August 27, get lifetime access to StackSkills Unlimited learning courses for only $34.97 — that’s a 96% discount.
Whether you want to learn a new hobby or skill or even explore a whole field, it’s tough to do it independently. There’s a wealth of material to learn from online, but then you have to find where to start, make sure you aren’t leaving anything out, and ensure it’s even the most recent information. Instead, you could try learning from one of the experienced professionals available through StackSkills.
StackSkills is a learning platform that’s home to more than 1,000 online learning courses with a broad range of topics, from business management to coding to art. During the Labor Day Sale, Lifetime Access to the entire StackSkills catalog is on sale for just $34.97.
StackSkills isn’t like a college. You don’t have to pick a major, and you definitely aren’t limited to a few classes. Once you’re a member, you can explore the entire course catalog at your own pace. Start a photography course on Monday and hop into an Excel Automation video lecture on Tuesday. The large selection might be daunting, but you can track your progress through each course as you earn certificates of completion and learn new skills.
Many StackSkills courses are at the beginner level, so it’s a great chance to survey different fields and skills if you’re still deciding what you want to do. Can’t decide if you wish to learn Python or C++? Learn the basics of both. Or if you want to practice a different kind of writing, there are a few courses showing you the ropes of non-fiction and self-publishing.
The learning catalog is already pretty extensive, but over 50 new courses are added every month.
Until September 4 at 11:59 p.m. PT, get Lifetime Access to StackSkills Unlimited for $34.97 (reg. $1,495).
TL;DR: As of August 27, get the Wicked Ball interactive pet toy for only $34.99 — a 28% discount.
We all love being greeted by our pets when we get home after a long day. When your pup brings you his favorite toy, it can be an instant mood booster. But thinking about him being alone all day sure isn’t.
Something that might help your furry friend stay entertained is the Wicked Ball, an interactive pet toy. It’s designed to keep dogs busy when you’re away from home. And you can save some money when you get it here for just $34.99, usually $49.
Just turn the Wicked Ball on, and it moves around on its own to keep your pet occupied. Designed to offer fun, stimulating, and exciting exercises, choose from three fully automatic modes: gentle, active, or normal, to match your pet’s energy level. Young and rambunctious dogs may get the most out of active mode, while your older doggo might appreciate gentle.
The Wicked Ball runs through a cycle of play and rest, so you don’t have to worry about wearing out your pet too much. They can play for ten minutes, then rest for thirty minutes, and go through that cycle until you return home. A built-in collision sensor helps prevent the toy from getting stuck in odd places, like between furniture, so there are fewer barriers throughout their playtime.
Funded on Kickstarter, the Wicked Ball can last up to eight hours of playtime on a single charge. That’s likely enough to get your pet through your average workday or an evening of running errands.
If you have a food-motivated pet, the Wicked Ball has a hole specifically meant for holding treats. Your pup will smell the treats, be extra intrigued, and get a reward as they play around with the toy.
It certainly won’t replace you, but this interactive pet toy can help your four-legged friend stay busy when you’re away.
Get your FDA-certified Wicked Ball now for just $34.99 (reg. $49).
TL;DR: The Mail Backup X Individual Edition is on sale for £39.39, saving you 72% on list price.
The widespread importance of email is often overlooked. Despite the rise of instant messaging and video chatting apps, like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, email still remains king of the business world. Half of the global population — almost 4 billion people — use it, and you can reach virtually anyone from any place in the world. What would happen if, suddenly, your email was hacked and you could no longer access your archives, going back decades?
With Mail Backup X, an email solution trusted by over 42,000 businesses and home users, you’ll never have to worry about an email disaster occurring. This seamless tool offers simple management and backup for your email and safeguards you against potential hacks, crashes, or other mishaps. It works with all major mail clients, including Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, and Office 365, plus all major mail services, including Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. You can even mirror your backup to popular cloud storage solutions (Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, etc.) or a USB drive.
Add military-grade AES 256-bit encryption and your own private key to your backups, whether on the cloud or locally stored offline. That way you don’t have to worry about your precious emails being seen by the wrong eyes. It’s 100 percent private and can only be unlocked by you.
Mail Backup X has rave reviews across the web. And when you stop to think about how much we all rely on email to make it through the workday, it’s easy to see why. Save 72% and snag a lifetime individual license to this one-stop solution for mail backup, archiving, email management, and mail conversion for just £39.39 for a limited time.
It’s Sunday, and while you’re picking your next period drama to obsess over today, there’s another Wordle puzzle to solve. We’re here for you, as we are every day, with some tips and tricks to help you figure out the solution.
If you just want to be told today’s answer, you can jump to the end of this article for August 27’s Wordle solution revealed. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
Where did Wordle come from?
Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble, music identification game Heardle, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once.
Wordle eventually became so popular that it was purchased by the New York Times, and TikTok creators even livestream themselves playing.
Not the day you’re after? Here’s the Wordle answer for Aug 26.
What’s the best Wordle starting word?
The best Wordle starting word is the one that brings you the most joy. But if you like being strategic in your approach, we have a few ideas to help you pick a word that might help you find the solution faster. One tip is to select a word that includes at least two different vowels, plus some common consonants like S, T, R, or N.
What happened to the Wordle archive?
The entire archive of past Wordle puzzles used to be available for anyone to enjoy whenever they felt like it. Unfortunately, it has since been taken down, with the website’s creator stating it was done at the request of the New York Times.
Is Wordle getting harder?
It might feel like Wordle is getting harder, but it actually isn’t any more difficult than when it first began. You can turn on Wordle‘s Hard Mode if you’re after more of a challenge, though.
Why are there two different Wordle answers some days?
Though usually Wordle will only accept one correct solution per day, occasionally it has rebelled against the norm and deem two different answers acceptable. This is due to changes the New York Times made to Wordle after it acquired the puzzle game.
The Times has since added its own updated word list, so this should happen even less frequently than before. To avoid any confusion, it’s a good idea to refresh your browser before getting stuck into a new puzzle.
Here’s a subtle hint for today’s Wordle answer:
✌️
Does today’s Wordle answer have a double letter?
Yes, both vowels.
Today’s Wordle is a 5-letter word that starts with…
Today’s Wordle starts with the letter P.
SEE ALSO:
Wordle-obsessed? These are the best word games to play IRL.
What’s the answer to Wordle today?
Get your last guesses in now, because it’s your final chance to solve today’s Wordle before we reveal the solution.
Drumroll please!
The solution to Wordle #799 is…
PEACE.
Don’t feel down if you didn’t manage to guess it this time. There will be a new Wordle for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we’ll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
If Quordle is a little too challenging today, you’ve come to the right place for hints. There aren’t just hints here, but the whole Quordle solution. Scroll to the bottom of this page, and there it is. But are you sure you need all four answers? Maybe you just need a strategy guide. Either way, scroll down, and you’ll get what you need.
What is Quordle?
Quordle is a five-letter word guessing game similar to Wordle, except each guess applies letters to four words at the same time. You get nine guesses instead of six to correctly guess all four words. It looks like playing four Wordle games at the same time, and that is essentially what it is. But it’s not nearly as intimidating as it sounds.
Is Quordle harder than Wordle?
Yes, though not diabolically so.
Where did Quordle come from?
Amid the Wordle boom of late 2021 and early 2022, when everyone was learning to love free, in-browser, once-a-day word guessing games, creator Freddie Meyer says he took inspiration from one of the first big Wordle variations, Dordle — the one where you essentially play two Wordles at once. He took things up a notch, and released Quordle on January 30. Meyer’s creation was covered in The Guardian six days later, and now, according to Meyer, it attracts millions of daily users. Today, Meyer earns modest revenue from Patreon, where dedicated Quordle fans can donate to keep their favorite puzzle game running.
How is Quordle pronounced?
“Kwordle.” It should rhyme with “Wordle,” and definitely should not be pronounced exactly like “curdle.”
Is Quordle strategy different from Wordle?
Yes and no.
Your starting strategy should be the same as with Wordle. In fact, if you have a favorite Wordle opening word, there’s no reason to change that here. We suggest something rich in vowels, featuring common letters like C, R, and N. But you do you.
After your first guess, however, you’ll notice things getting out of control if you play Quordle exactly like Wordle.
What should I do in Quordle that I don’t do in Wordle?
Solving a Wordle puzzle can famously come down to a series of single letter-change variations. If you’ve narrowed it down to “-IGHT,” you could guess “MIGHT” “NIGHT” “LIGHT” and “SIGHT” and one of those will probably be the solution — though this is also a famous way to end up losing in Wordle, particularly if you play on “hard mode.” In Quordle, however, this sort of single-letter winnowing is a deadly trap, and it hints at the important strategic difference between Wordle and Quordle: In Quordle, you can’t afford to waste guesses unless you’re eliminating as many letters as possible at all times.
Guessing a completely random word that you already know isn’t the solution, just to eliminate three or four possible letters you haven’t tried yet, is thought of as a desperate, latch-ditch move in Wordle. In Quordle, however, it’s a normal part of the player’s strategic toolset.
Is there a way to get the answer faster?
In my experience Quordle can be a slow game, sometimes dragging out longer than it would take to play Wordle four times. But a sort of blunt-force guessing approach can speed things up. The following strategy also works with Wordle if you only want the solution, and don’t care about having the fewest possible guesses:
Try starting with a series of words that puts all the vowels (including Y) on the board, along with some other common letters. We’ve had good luck with the three words: “NOTES,” “ACRID,” and “LUMPY.” YouTuber DougMansLand suggests four words: “CANOE,” “SKIRT,” “PLUMB,” and “FUDGY.”
Most of the alphabet is now eliminated, and you’ll only have the ability to make one or two wrong guesses if you use this strategy. But in most cases you’ll have all the information you need to guess the remaining words without any wrong guesses.
If strategy isn’t helping, and you’re still stumped, here are some hints:
Are there any double or triple letters in today’s Quordle words?
No.
Are any rare letters being used in today’s Quordle like Q or Z?
SpaceX’s Starship launch this past April was a big success. Yes, the rocket ship exploded, which at the time was the focus of most criticism. But, as experts have explained, that was a planned part of Elon Musk’s highly-subsidized space exploration company’s milestone achievement.
The real failure of SpaceX’s Starship, however, is now coming fully to light in the months following the launch.
According to a new report by Bloomberg, the Starship launch left behind devastating destruction to the local environment, as reported by U.S. Wildlife officials following an investigation of the site shortly after the launch. These reports by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists were obtained by the news outlet via a Freedom of Information Act request.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. government sues SpaceX for discrimination
Wildlife officials note that upon surveying the scene after Starship’s launch, they found chunks of concrete across the area and foot-deep craters on the tidal flats. The report states that four acres of the nearby Texas state park were burned. A group of blue land crabs and seven bobwhite quail eggs were “incinerated” by the launch.
Overall, the explosion from the launch “left a 385-acre debris field that flung concrete chunks as far as 2,680 feet from the launchpad and sparked a 3.5-acre fire.”
There had been concern for years about the proximity of SpaceX’s rocket base to endangered species, including a loggerhead sea turtles nesting beach. A group of environmental groups sued the FAA following SpaceX’s April launch, claiming the agency failed to perform an adequate environmental review. As for the harmed species, U.S. wildlife biologists did not find any deceased endangered animal life.
However, biologists note that their investigation into this matter was greatly hindered by SpaceX. Wildlife officials were not allowed into the site area until a whole 48 hours after Starship’s launch. This means that any possible animal life that was killed could’ve been previously removed from the site, washed away by the currents, or eaten by other animals before experts could properly document the aftermath.
Much of the damage was caused by a purposeful decision from SpaceX that seemingly baffled experts in the documents. SpaceX did not use flame-suppression technology like a flame diverter or flame trench, a standard in the industry that redirects energy away from the rocket ship. Without it, Starship blew a hole in the ground underneath it, subsequently destroying its launchpad.
The FAA is currently reviewing an investigation into the launch and has temporarily grounded further attempts. But one Wildlife official noted in the documents that it’s likely SpaceX won’t be ready for another launch anytime soon.
“Pad site was totally destroyed and will likely force them to re-design the whole thing,” the official wrote. “Probably won’t see another launch for a while.”
For years, a little-known company by the name of Flannery Associates has been buying up undeveloped land directly northeast of San Francisco in Solano County. Hundreds of landowners who have received offers for their properties, many times more than what the land is actually valued, have wondered exactly who is behind these real estate purchases — now thousands of acres of rolling hills.
A new report from the New York Times details what’s going on here: A group of tech elites have come together to buy up land in an attempt to create a city of their own. The group includes tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. (The firm Andreessen Horowitz itself is also an investor.) Other notable names like Chris Dixon, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund, as well as the founders of the payment company Stripe have invested. Even Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Job’s politically-active widow, is involved.
SEE ALSO:
Facebook board member Marc Andreessen offends India with colonialism tweets
According to the report, the mastermind behind Flannery Associates is a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader named Jan Sramek. A quick search of Sramek’s name pulls up a flurry of glowing articles on the former investment banker from about a decade ago. In those days he was in his 20s, and for a moment he was a sort of golden child in the finance world.
A 2017 pitch from Flannery Associates breaks down what the company claims its looking to do: “Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert [it] into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation and dense urban life.”
In light of its agreeable stated intentions, it’s odd that Flannery Associates’ has chosen to keep the locals living in the area in the dark about what it’s attempting until very recently. The company has been operating in such secrecy that even local Congresspeople couldn’t figure out the identity of those behind it.
However, the company lifted its cloak of anonymity just this past week, reaching out to public officials and requesting meetings to discuss its plans.
Why? The reason is likely because Flannery Associates has been mostly buying up farmland and other property that’s not actually zoned for residential use. That means it’s going to need to lobby officials and convince the locals to vote on a rezoning effort. The company is hoping the promise of jobs, new homes and public spaces will win them over.
But current residents just need to look dozens of miles south at Silicon Valley to see who a city that caters to the whims of the tech elite ends up actually being for.
At the bottom of the world, emperor penguins have experienced tragedy.
Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey report an “unprecedented breeding failure” in some big, well-observed colonies where sea ice had largely or completely vanished in 2022. The study, published in the science journal Communications Earth & Environment, concluded it’s likely that zero chicks survived from four of the five known colonies in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea, located off the Antarctic Peninsula. Over 9,000 chicks died.
Satellite images, from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 spacecraft, show the stark disappearances of breeding colonies, particularly the vivid comparison below.
SEE ALSO:
So, how hot will Earth get?
“We have never seen emperor penguins fail to breed, at this scale, in a single season,” Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who led the research, said in a statement. “The loss of sea ice in this region during the Antarctic summer made it very unlikely that displaced chicks would survive.”
The chicks, just recently-born, would not have been old enough to grow their water-resistant feathers, the science institute explained.
The two photos below show a region off of Antarctica’s Smyley Island. On left, the colony, stained by the penguin’s guano, is conspicuous on the ice in October 2022. By December, the colony had completely vanished. (The researchers also captured before-and-after images of colonies at Rothschild Island, Verdi Inlet, Bryan Peninsula, and Pfrogner Point.)
On left, an emperor penguin colony on sea ice off of Smyley Island in October 2022. On right, collapsed sea ice in December 2022. Credit: European Commission Copernicus SENTINEL-2
“Emperor penguins have previously responded to incidents of sea ice loss by moving to more stable sites the following year,” the British Antarctic Survey explained. “However, scientists say that this strategy won’t work if sea ice habitat across an entire region is affected.”
Antarctic sea ice has dropped considerably in recent years, and in August 2023 is at a record low for the continent’s winter. “This missing area is larger than the size of Greenland, or around ten times the size of the United Kingdom,” the institute said.
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Tweet may have been deleted
While historically unprecedented declines in Arctic sea ice are unquestionably driven by climate change, scientists are still observing Antarctic activity to see if recent losses are an unambiguous trend.
“There is some discussion about the Antarctic sea ice undergoing a regime-shift since 2016 toward a generally lower extent, and that maybe this could be a response to global warming; that is, the warming signal is starting to be seen in the Antarctic sea ice above the year-to-year variability,” Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), told NASA this year. “But it is hard to say at this point if it is a real shift and response to warming, or just a temporal multi-year variation.”
What is clear, however, is emperor penguins need sea ice, and the recent declines have been devastating.
The world celebrated India on its historic moon landing Wednesday, as it became the first space program to reach the lunar south pole region with a robotic spacecraft.
But in the words of a cynical internet meme: Pics, or it didn’t happen. And, as Apollo moon-landing deniers have taught us, even pictures sometimes aren’t enough to convince folks inclined to believe conspiracy theories.
So the Indian Space Research Organization — NASA’s counterpart — obliged skeptics, sharing a photo of its Chandrayaan-3 lander on the ground, with one leg visibly sticking out. Not since Angelina Jolie presented at the Oscars in 2012 has a leg had such an illustrious moment.
“And here at last is ISRO issuing an official post-landing image from the Chandrayaan-3 lander, which is the final confirmation we needed of a successful landing. Congrats to all those involved in the mission,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The space agency has since followed up with a two-minute video of the spacecraft descending onto the moon’s surface. The video was taken by the Lander Imager Camera, which assisted in finding a safe spot to land — without boulders or deep trenches — during the landing. Another brief video shows the six-wheeled golden rover, Pragyan, rolling out of the spacecraft.
SEE ALSO:
India’s moon lander makes history as first to reach coveted south pole
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For the majority of the landing video, all that can be seen is the lunar terrain whizzing past in the background. It looks like miles upon miles of gray sponge cake, full of dimples and pockmarks. In the last 13 seconds, the camera angle appears to adjust to a more upright position and gradually lowers down.
You can watch the full video in the post below.
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The success of Chandrayaan-3, which means “moon craft” in Hindi, places India among an elite cadre — the former Soviet Union, United States, and China — who have landed on the moon 239,000 miles away. The victory comes four years after India’s preceding mission, Chandrayaan-2, crashed attempting the same feat.
India’s accomplishment follows mere days after the Russian space agency Roscosmos lost its Luna-25 robotic spacecraft, which had been orbiting the moon but apparently crashed after a botched flight maneuver. The dueling missions were both trying to set their crewless spacecraft down near the south pole this week.
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People watching India’s moon landing from mission control applaud confirmation of a smooth touchdown Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023. Credit: ISRO / Youtube screenshot
About 60 years have passed since the first uncrewed moon landings, but touching down is still onerous, with less than half of all missions succeeding.
Many nations and private ventures have set their sights on the unspoiled dark and craggy lunar region because of its ice, thought to be buried in the polar craters. The natural resource is coveted because it could supply drinking water, air, and rocket fuel for future missions, ushering a new era in spaceflight.
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Shortly after touching down, Pragyan, looking like a gilded pinewood derby car, deboarded the lander and rolled onto the moon. A solar panel is helping the rover generate power. A 30-second video in the post above shows it crawling down its unfurled ramp.
The rover has so far traveled close to nine yards on the surface, according to ISRO. Officials say all of its instruments and systems are performing properly. Over two weeks, the mission will conduct experiments, such as a study of the chemicals and minerals in the lunar soil.
And, hopefully, India will have more photographic proof of Pragyan’s adventures.
In Nazi Germany in 1938, scientists achieved the remarkable: they split an atom.
When physicists at Princeton heard the news, they became a “stirred-up ant heap.” Beyond the buzz of the discovery, other repercussions became quickly apparent: Not only did this event, called nuclear fission, create two smaller atoms, but breaking these powerful atomic bonds released a relatively enormous amount of energy. Scaled up, this could mean an atomic bomb.
Government gears started churning. Just months later, in April 1939, the German nuclear weapons program, Uranverein, began, which employed brilliant minds like Werner Heisenberg, a genius theoretical physicist. By August, Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, urging the nation’s leader to “speed up” atomic research; he concluded the message by noting the Nazis had taken control of uranium mines in then-Czechoslovakia, and had ceased selling the valuable fissile material.
The secretive United States’ effort to design and build an atomic bomb – led by the charismatic and already renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Los Alamos laboratory – didn’t kick into high gear until early 1943. By 1945, the U.S., propelled by its industrial and scientific might, had successfully built, tested, and deployed atomic bombs. Yet by that same time, the Nazis were still years behind; they had no bomb, and still struggled to generate the atomic chain reaction needed for such a dreadful weapon.
It turns out the Nazis were never ahead. But the U.S. was continually afraid they could be.
“There was this great fear.”
“There was this great fear,” Mark Walker, a historian of modern German history and its nuclear ambitions, told Mashable. “It might be true that the Germans were ahead. And that’s enough to drive them forward.”
SEE ALSO:
‘Oppenheimer’: Yes, there really was a nuclear reactor under a football field.
The U.S. eventually drove hard. Oppenheimer oversaw a nexus of many of the nation’s finest physicists. The Army built Los Alamos atop a remote plateau in the New Mexico desert, far away from any snooping eyes, and easy to secure. From 1943 to 1945, the bustling atomic lab made history. At the same time, it didn’t exist.
The U.S. Army detonated the first atomic bomb 200 miles south of Los Alamos on July 16, 1945. It was called the “Trinity Test.” Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The warring Nazis couldn’t rival U.S. abilities
The Nazi’s hyper-warring hamstrung their atomic bomb progress.
Although German scientists first discovered nuclear fusion, Nazis used conventional weapons to crush neighboring countries between 1939 and 1941. Called Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” the Nazis strategically attacked with surprise and speed to blast through overwhelmed armies, using a potent combination of infantry, tanks, vehicles, and bombing planes. “The Germans were doing very well. Germany didn’t need powerful new weapons,” Walker, a professor at Union College, explained. “It would knock one country off after another.”
Then, things changed.
By late 1941, the Soviet Union, after sustaining a horrifying 4 million deaths from the Nazis, countered. A years-long battle would ensue. And the Nazis were now fighting the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States. This would be no lightning war. In 1942, the German army asked its atomic scientists for a timetable on when an atomic bomb might be ready, but learned that creating the material for a bomb would take an enormous industrial mobilization of now-limited resources. The hard truth: no bomb could help the Nazi war now. Research to create fissile material for a bomb continued, but at a small laboratory scale. Instead, the German military focused brainpower and materials on producing jet planes and rockets to try and gain a technological battle advantage.
“It was crystal clear that it was impossible for Germany to make atomic weapons during the war,” Walker said. “They were already stretched to the limit.”
An underground Nazi jet plane factory, found by U.S. soldiers. Credit: Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images
In 1945, the U.S. and British took apart the German experimental nuclear reactor. Credit: U.S. Army
In turn, the Nazi atomic weapons effort couldn’t keep pace with Oppenheimer, who soon crisscrossed the U.S. by train, convincing the best physicists to join his burgeoning, deep-pocketed lab. And, crucially, Oppenheimer’s lab wasn’t working alone. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a whopping 50,000 people worked to create the material, enriched uranium, needed for Los Alamos’ bomb, while thousands more created another fissile material, plutonium, in Hanford, Washington. Including the hundreds of thousands of construction workers who built these labs and boomtowns, “the Oak Ridge and Hanford sites alone hired more than a half-million employees,” the U.S. Department of Energy said.
“We had all the resources. We had the money. We had the land,” Chris Griffith, the founder of atomicarchive.com, an educational website dedicated to the science and history of the atomic age, told Mashable. “America turned so much of its resources into a giant factory.”
“Germany didn’t have the industrial capability to gamble,” he added.
“We had all the resources. We had the money. We had the land.”
What’s more, the Nazi bomb effort certainly wasn’t helped when one of their leading nuclear physicists (and eventual Nobel Prize winner), Walter Bothe, made a miscalculation. Bothe concluded that a crucial mineral used to moderate or control a nuclear chain reaction, graphite, would not work, which some say slowed the Germans’ progress. (U.S. Manhattan Project physicists, however, achieved a chain reaction using graphite in a Chicago basement in December 1942, setting the stage for the bomb’s development.)
Yet the historian Walker underscored it’s a myth that Bothe’s error significantly derailed the Nazi bomb project. After all, other German scientists suspected graphite could be used; the true problem was the war-taxed Nazi regime couldn’t churn out the crucial, high-quality material out in sufficient quantities amid a devastating war.
Oppenheimer built a spectacular atomic team
In the high New Mexican desert, it was no guarantee Los Alamos would so quickly, and successfully, test an actual bomb. Yet Oppenheimer, for all his theoretical fame (his visionary research on the existence of black holes, for example), thrived as a manager and recruiter of talent.
Top scientists, like Richard Feynman (who worked on the bomb’s design and would later win a Nobel Prize) and MIT physicist Kenneth Bainbridge (who directed the first demonstration of the atomic bomb, the “Trinity Test,” some 200 miles away from Los Alamos) wanted to be part of his project. University researchers traveled across the country, following Oppenheimer to the hastily-assembled boomtown, largely composed of dirt roads and cabins in the middle of nowhere, to devise an unprecedented weapon amid global war.
“You can’t underestimate the magnetism of his personality,” marveled Griffith. “He had a fantastic collection of scientists around him.”
Robert Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos security badge photograph. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Oppenheimer realized these researchers needed a place to brainstorm, to tease out complicated schemes, to scrutinize some of the tiniest objects in the cosmos. “This thing will never get on the rails unless there is a place where people can talk to each other and work together on the problems of the bomb,” Oppenhiemer recalled telling General Leslie Groves, the Army officer in charge of the greater nationwide Manhattan Project of which Los Alamos was a defining part, before the isolated lab was built. “… it could be some California desert, but someplace, there has got to be a place where people are free to discuss what they know and what they do not know and to find out what they can.”
“You can’t underestimate the magnetism of his personality.”
Hundreds of scientists and engineers ultimately traveled to the secretive desert lab. As Hans Bethe, the nuclear physicist who Oppenheimer picked to head the lab’s Theoretical Division, said: “He brought out the best in us.”
The Nazi’s purge, Oppenheimer’s gain
The Nazis vowed to persecute Jews.
Within weeks of assuming power and creating a totalitarian police state in 1933, the regime promptly began eliminating Jews from government positions, which included many scholars and academics. For example, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, a premier German research institute, the Nazis dismissed over 100 Jewish scientists.
But the Nazi’s loss was Oppenheimer’s gain.
Many Jewish physicists fled the authoritarian regime in the early 1930s — including some who saw the writing on the wall and left before Hitler’s takeover. (Einstein, though not part of the Manhattan Project, left Germany in 1932, after which he was vilified by the Nazi state.) “[Hitler] limited himself by creating the purge before the Manhattan Project got started,” the Atomic Archives’ Griffith said.
Daily life and spartan housing at the secretive Los Alamos site. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory
The Nazis lost substantial brainpower, but still had capable German scientists available to fill roles of the departed physicists on their limited atomic research, Walker explained. Yet the influx of bright minds into Los Alamos only enhanced Oppenheimer’s ability to deliver an unprecedented bomb that was successful on its inaugural test.
“It’s not that the purge of Jewish scientists hindered the German effort, but this emigration massively supported the American effort,” Walker said.
To name just a few:
Hans Bethe
Aprofessor at Germany’s University of Tübingen, the Nazis dismissed him in 1933. At Los Alamos, Bethe played a seminal role in making calculations about the fissile material needed for an atomic bomb’s chain reaction.
Edward Teller
A professor of physics at the University of Göttingen, Teller fled the Nazi regime in 1933 (with aid from the International Rescue Committee). One of the first scientists at Los Alamos, Teller made a number of valuable contributions to the atomic bomb’s development, though he grew distracted with research into an even stronger weapon: the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb.
Leo Szilard
A scientist at the University of Berlin who filed 29 patents, Szilard fled Germany in the spring of 1933. Szilard was quite aware of the possibilities of nuclear fission: “These might lead to large-scale production of energy and radioactive elements, unfortunately also perhaps to atomic bombs,” he wrote. The physicist played a leading role in producing the world’s first atomic chain reaction at the also-secretive research reactor in Chicago, though he didn’t join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer, on left, helps during the final assembly of the first detonated atomic bomb, called “the gadget.” Credit: U.S. Department of Energy
There is also popularized speculation that the Nazis weren’t just outcompeted by wartime resources and the purge of brilliant atomic minds. Some authors and historians have suggested that Heisenberg, the top scientist working on the Nazi atomic weapons program, deliberately stalled the research progress – and ultimately deprived Hitler of the bomb. Could the great Heisenberg – a 1932 Nobel Prize winner and master theoretical physicist – have quietly sabotaged the Nazi atomic effort? And when meeting with his physicist mentor Niels Bohr in 1941, might Heisenberg have also urged Allied scientists to stop work on such a terrible weapon?
We’ll likely never know. There’s no hard evidence. But the story makes for a great legend, Walker said.
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Some two and a half years after scientists began gathering at Los Alamos, the U.S. Army detonated the first atomic bomb on remote desert plains on July 16, 1945. “An individual 150 miles north said the explosion ‘lighted up the sky like the sun,'” the Air Force noted.
“We knew the world would not be the same,” Oppenheimer recounted.
The following month, the U.S. dropped two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Such a deadly outcome, deemed necessary at the time, would haunt Oppenheimer. “The ending of the war by this means, certainly cruel, was not undertaken lightly,” Oppenheimer said, years later. “But I am not, as of today, confident that a better course was then open.”
Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Credit: Photo12 / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
Christopher Nolan’s prominent new film, Oppenheimer, with Cillian Murphy playing the eponymous scientist, shines a light on the man who led the fateful project — and vastly outcompeted his Nazi rivals. It also provokes thinking about an uncomfortable reality, a consequence of building the bomb: the weapons have proliferated. There are 12,512 known nuclear warheads in the world today.
“You’re talking about the potential end of the world.”
“The weapons are so daunting, so off-putting that people don’t like to think about them,” John Mecklin, the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told Mashable. “You’re talking about the potential end of the world.”
