Archive of entries posted on 27th January 2026

Oh No! What’s The Normal Number?

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U.S. is Falling Short on 155mm Artillery Shell Production

Defense Express | June 19, 2025

… It is crucial not to confuse a round with a projectile. The figure of 40,000 refers to the number of 155mm projectiles, a level the U.S. reached back in September 2024, according to a Pentagon report. However, a complete round also includes a propellant charge and a fuze.

Currently, all U.S. artillery charges are manufactured at the Valleyfield facility near Montreal, Canada,

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which is owned by General Dynamics. However, production is being relocated to the U.S. at new American Ordnance plants in Middletown, Iowa, and Camden, Arkansas, where another General Dynamics facility will also be built.

In parallel with expanding shell body production and increasing the capacity for filling them with explosives — which remains a challenge, as 100,000 shells per month would require 66,000 tons of explosives, much of which is currently imported —

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these developments will enable the U.S. to eventually reach the target of producing 100,000 complete 155mm rounds per month.

Straight Line of the Day: What Would You Expect To Find in 1.4-Billion-Year-Old Air?

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Researchers Just Sampled 1.4-Billion-Year-Old Air—and It’s Not What They Expected
Gizmodo | 7/1/26 | Margherita Bassi

Researchers have retrieved samples of 1.4 billion-year-old air from ancient crystals …

The next time I’m in a fancy bar, I’m going to order that author’s name, and see what I get.

— The bartender will be too proud to admit he doesn’t know what I am talking about — proving that we have something in common.

Over a billion years ago, a lake in modern-day Ontario evaporated. During the evaporation, some of the resulting brine was captured within halite crystals along with air bubbles—precise records of our early atmosphere’s makeup. Extracting accurate readings from these fluid inclusions, which have both air and brine (salt water), is difficult, however—some gases, including oxygen and carbon dioxide, act differently based on whether they exist in water or air. As such, it’s been challenging to precisely measure the gases in their original state.

The team solved the problem using a method previously developed by Park, uncovering that around 1.4 billion years ago, during the Mesoproterozoic era (1.6 to 1.0 billion years ago), Earth’s atmosphere contained ten times more carbon dioxide than today.…the Mesoproterozoic climate was more mild than researchers theorized.

The atmosphere also had 3.7% of today’s oxygen levels.