Tillway Talk

Today is the 75th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test. On 16th July 1945, the atomic age was born at the Trinity Test Site in the Alamogordo Test Range in New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted from the Bhagvad Gita on seeing the explosion:  'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'. Less than a month after that, the USA dropped two atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, bringing an end to World War II. Since the Trinity test 75 years ago, at least eight countries have conducted more than 2,000 nuclear bomb tests. The nuclear age has ushered in an uneasy era of peace between the world's super-powers,  although they continue to fight wars by proxy in various corners of the earth. The atomic weapons serve as an effective deterrent. Today, there are enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. Before they come to be used for that purpose, the human race can possibly be wiped out by issues like irreversible climatic chan

Christopher Columbus, the Italian, gets the credit for being the first to land on these shores. His voyage across the Atlantic, funded by the Spanish monarchy, is all too well documented.  Does Columbus  deserve it? A host of competing theories say no. Here are a few of the more prominent ones: 1. 12000 BC: The Siberians: The settlement of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers entered North America from the North Asian  steppes via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and western Alaska due to the lowering of sea level during the  Last Glacial Period. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been linked to Siberian populations by linguistic factors, the distribution of blood types, and in genetic composition as reflected by DNA data. 2.  Sixth Century — Irish Monks: This "theory" is actually more of a legend. A sixth-century Irish monk named Saint Brendan supposedly sailed to North America on a currach — a wood-framed