Friday, August 10, 2007

Rare Earth Metal Theft At Stanford

OK, so exactly is going on over there in Palo Alto? First there was a theft of science equipment from various Stanford labs. Now comes a news report that several rare earth metals have been stolen from a material science lab.

"Whoever took them knew their periodic table," said physicist Ian Fisher, who discovered the metals missing from his cabinet, where elements are neatly lined up in alphabetical order. "They didn't just swipe A through E."


OK, so you have an educated thief/thieves. But I wonder if this is the same person or persons who stole the scientific equipment?

Zz.

3 comments:

Stupac2 said...

Yeah, it was a weird year for the Physics dept. We've had a ton of thefts and a girl living in the building. At least this was MatSci, which isn't the same building. And I doubt it was the same person, but you never know.

ZapperZ said...

A girl living in the building? I haven't heard about that one!

Maybe the rents around Palo Alto has gotten so expensive that (i) intelligent students are now stealing stuff to pay for living expenses and (ii) students are now living in the academic buildings!

{you know that I'm just kidding, right?}

:)

Zz.

Stupac2 said...

I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I think the girl was kicked out by her roommate and had nowhere to go. We also had a girl who was denied admission who came and lived in the dorms for seven months. It was an interesting year.

You might as well not be joking, Palo Alto is ridiculous (I've heard that Sand Hill Road has the most expensive property values in the world).