A woman was killed at a "gender reveal" party after being struck by shrapnel from an explosive contraption: "a metal stand, gunpowder and colored powder were involved," report police.

At about 4:03 p.m., police responded to a report that a woman, later identified as 56-year-old Pamela Kreimeyer, had been severely injured in an explosion, according to a news release from the Marion County Sheriff's Office. When officials arrived at the scene in Knoxville, the woman was pronounced dead. Knoxville is about 40 miles southeast of Des Moines.

Kreimeyer was 45 feet from the device when it exploded. It created a 200-yard wide debris field.

They put a piece of wood on top of the gunpowder and some powder of an unspecified color on top of that. The stand had a hole drilled in the side for a fuse. Finally, tape was wrapped over the top of the assembly. The idea was for the gunpowder to blast the powder indicating a boy or girl out the top of the stand. But the explosion instead sent metal shrapnel flying

Police are "warning people to not add to or make your own gender reveal kits." Read the rest

At least ten unexploded bombs are hidden somewhere deep in the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. They are leftovers from a 1943 allied air force raid that dropped 165 bombs in the area. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Pompeii attracts more than 2.5 million visitors annually. From The Guardian:

“Ninety-six bombs were located and deactivated,” the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano reported. “The other bombs ended up in an area of the site that has not yet been excavated. Many of them were defused or had already exploded. But at least 10 of those explosives are still there.”

Of the 66 hectares (163 acres) of the archaeological area, only 44 have been excavated. At least 10 unexploded bombs are yet to be found in the 22 remaining hectares, according to the investigation.

The Archaeological Museum of Pompeii said: “There is no risk for visitors. The site has regularly drawn up the reclamation project, which is carried out by the military. Area reclamation was carried out per metre.”

But Il Fatto said there was no sign of official documents for the location of at least 10 bombs...

According to statistics from the Italian defence ministry, thousands of second world war bombs are defused in the country every year.

image: Mark Vuaran (CC) Read the rest

On July 16, 1945, US Army detonated the first nuclear weapon in New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto desert. Codenamed Trinity, the test was part of the Manhattan Project. Three weeks later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the Atom Central page about Trinity:

The bomb was detonated, producing an intense flash and a fireball that expanded to 600 meters in two seconds. The explosive power was equivalent to 18.6 kilotons of TNT. It grew to a height of more than 12 kilometers, boiling up in the shape of a mushroom. Forty seconds later, the blast of air from the bomb reached the observation bunkers, along with a long and deafening roar of sound.

About this footage:

Original Trinity Footage restoration includes removing dirt and scratches and minimizing some defects in the processing of the original negative. Three shots include a wide shot, a medium shot and a close up.

Previously: "Nuclear explosion porn: watch newly declassified 1950s-1960s nuke test films"

Read the rest

This morning, Duke Energy mailroom employees in Charlotte, North Carolina called police after noticing an unusual small package with a handwritten address on it at their facility. Police cleared the area, shut down roads, and deployed a K-9 unit.

According to CBS17, "police and the bomb squad investigated the package, which contained a cassette tape by the band Journey."

Read the rest

The U.S. Justice Department told reporters today that a man in South Florida is in custody in connection with mailing of pipe bombs to political opponents of Donald Trump. Read the rest

The FBI is treating the serial bomber who sent explosives to critics of Donald Trump as domestic terrorism. There are a lot of bomb-making HOWTOs on the internet, and instructions for how to make improvised explosive devices have long been available online. Now, a federal agent says the perpetrator behind the 10 “suspicious packages” used bomb-making instructions that are “widely available” online. Read the rest

Authorities from the FBI, NYPD, and New York Mayor Bill De Blasio gave an update to reporters today in New York about the series of explosive devices sent to former presidents and public figures, and the news network CNN. Read the rest

All flights today at London City Airport were cancelled after a bomb was found in the River Thames. The bomb is actually a German 500kg fused device that's been sitting in the Thames since the Germans dropped it during World War II. The unexploded ordnance was discovered during work on a dock near the airport. The Royal Navy is working to remove the bomb. From NPR:

The discovery of World War II era bombs in London is not particularly rare, as NPR's Ari Shapiro has reported. "During the Blitz, German planes dropped nearly 30,000 bombs on London in just three months," he notes.

In 2015, a German bomb of about the same size was discovered in an east London neighborhood, prompting an evacuation.

At that time, Matt Brosnan, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, told the BBC that we don't know exactly how many of the bombs dropped could still be hidden.

"Clearly not all of those would have exploded, because of defects or other reasons, and they could have buried themselves tens of feet below the surface so we simply don't know where they are," he told the broadcaster.

"World War Two ordnance found in the Thames" (Metropolitan Police) Read the rest

The Chelsea bomber (Ahmad Khan Rahami is accused of being this person) set more bombs around New York and New Jersey, but two of them were discovered and defused before they could go off because they were hidden in bags that thieves and homeless people took an interest in. Read the rest

A "small" bomb exploded in a women's bathroom at the Target store in Evanston, Illinois Wednesday, and police said they thought the attack was related to the company's pro-transgender policies. They changed their mind, however, after taking a 44-year-old woman into custody, reports the Chicago Tribune.

"The detectives are not currently looking for any known additional suspects, and (at) this point there is no indication that the incident is related to any policies that the Target store has in place," the release reads.

Evanston police requested the help of the Cook County bomb squad late Wednesday afternoon after an explosion in a Target store restroom

WGNtv's Patrick Elwood reported that no-one was in the bathroom when the device exploded and that it caused minor damage. The bomb was housed in a plastic bottle and contained no shrapnel.

Target upset conservatives recently by announcing that transgender customers would be permitted to use the bathrooms that they are most comfortable using, and police at first suspected a connection. Read the rest

In World War II, the Nazis made a bunch of different booby trapped items, including thermos flasks, mess tins, motor oil cans, watches, and even a chocolate bar designed to kill Winston Churchill when he bit into it. Fortunately, England's Prime Minister did not sink his teeth into the candy-coated bomb, and the MI5 hired an artist to illustrate it and the other German booby traps it had discovered. These drawings were lost in a drawer for 70 years, but were recently found and have been published by the BBC. Read the rest

At least twenty people are dead following an explosion in Bangkok, "reports the BBC—but footage from the scene already offers a suspect. 

Videos taken by nearby CCTV and tourists show how the blast hit a crowded shrine in Thailand's largest city.

Police are now hunting the yellow-shirted man seen dumping a backpack at the site of the blast.

In the new footage, he is shown carefully and deliberately removing his backpack inside the shrine, getting up without it and immediately leaving the scene. The spot where he was sitting is precisely where the bomb went off a few minutes later, says the BBC's Jonathan Head in Bangkok.

"There is a suspect... we are looking for this guy," Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha told reporters. Authorities were "quite close" to identifying the suspect, Thai government spokesman Maj Gen Weerachon Sukhontapatipak told the BBC, but other leads were also being pursued.

Read the rest

It's like a mash-up of the games Simon and Global Thermonuclear War.

At the New Yorker, Paige Williams visits forensic chemist Adam B. Hall to talk about the surprising things you can learn about bombs and their makers by looking at the effects they produce — from the type and color of the smoke, to the smell that lingers in the air, to what the "boom" sounds like. I'd take Hall's speculation about the Boston Marathon bombings with a grain of salt (he's making his judgements from low-grade video and isn't part of the investigation), but the process he describes is absolutely fascinating. Read the rest

At Scientific American, Larry Greenemeier has a piece about the science behind the three (possibly four) improvised explosive devices that killed at least three people yesterday in Boston. It might be easy to build bombs like these, but their DIY construction techniques also leave clues that help investigators find the people responsible. Read the rest

De-mining workers from Laos are speaking in the US about the urgent need for funding of bomb clearance and survivor assistance efforts in Laos.

Baker was a 23-kiloton nuclear weapon that was detonated underwater at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The goal was to see what would happen to Navy boats if they were in the region where a nuclear bomb went off. The boats you see in this photo were unmanned, but there were sailors relatively close by, taking these shots. There's evidence that they weren't properly protected against fallout, and later used contaminated water to drink and bathe in. (Also, as a fictional side effect, Bikini Atoll nuclear tests like Baker might have been responsible for the creation of Spongebob Squarepants.)

My Modern Met has compiled several photographs and video that give you an up-close, mind-boggling view of the explosion — including the massive column of water that shot into the mushroom cloud and the 2-mile-high tidal wave that followed. Read the rest