Double Shot in a Ford Flathead Powered Dragster
Anybody who knows the history of hot rodding knows that the roots of the hobby are interwoven pretty tightly with the sport of drag racing. Long-time readers will remember that features on dragsters made up part of the editorial mix of ROD & CUSTOM back in our "little pages" days of the late '50s. Since then, the sport of drag racing has evolved from a pastime for grassroots rodders into a huge high-dollar industry. The top-end cars have morphed from homebuilt rods with tuned-up bangers and flatheads to scientifically engineered apparatuses powered by 8,000-plus-hp supercharged aluminum Hemis. Impressive machines all right, but we still like watching the old-time Gassers and Altereds, doorslammers, and front-engined rails. Evidently we're not alone, since events such as the Antique Nationals, the March Meet, and the Goodguys Nitro Nationals have become extremely popular.
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News from the Moon!
Back when the space race was in its heyday in the late 1960s, it became clear that the United States was going to beat the Soviet Union to landing a man on the Moon. But that didn't mean the Soviet Union wasn't going to do something spectacular in their own right. In 1970, they launched and landed the first-ever rover on another celestial body. Say hello to Lunokhod 1, which became the first remote-controlled robot to land on another rock in our Solar System. Lunokhod 1 landed on the Moon, brought there by the lander Luna 17, and immediately went to work. Lunokhod 1, initially slated for a mission of just under 90 days, lasted 11 months, traveled over 10 kilometers and took over 20,000 images and over 200 panoramas. It also became the first vehicle to photograph its own footprints, which fascinates me for some reason.
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Hot Rod Power Tour 2010: Day Five, Chattanooga TN
Early this morning we were lucky that many of our friends in the MoPowered Tour were at the same hotel. So we all left together for an early morning adventure. Our plan was not to get breakfast, but to go to the Holley Headquarters and get a tour of their facility.
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Spontaneous Discharge of a Firearm in an MR Imaging Environment
An incident recently occurred at an outpatient imaging center in western New York State, in which a firearm spontaneously discharged in a 1.5-T MR imaging environment with active shielding. To our knowledge, this is the first documented case of such an occurrence. The event confirms previously reported theoretic risks of a firearm discharging in an MR imaging environment. In this report, we examine the incident in detail from the official police and ballistic reports.
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