Links: Infecting the Orphans of Another Nation; So Many Pictures; and a Burst of Heat

"They never told me what they were doing, never gave me a chance to say no," Marta Orellana says as she recalls the moment a group of doctors ordered her to "lie down and open her legs."  It was 1946, when, "worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases," the U.S. government decided to infect 1500 Guatemalans - all orphans, prisoners, military conscripts, and prostitutes - with syphilis, chancroid, and gonorrhea in order to test their countermeasures against these diseases.  None of these test subjects agreed to be infected; in some cases, like that of Orellana, a four-year-old orphan at the time, they weren't even given the option of choosing.

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Talking Points Memo has some great pictures of the recent eruption of Puyehue volcano.

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More pictures.  Since visiting Chernobyl in 2008, Andrej Krementschouk has taken pictures of what he has encountered there, ranging from people and animals, to the growing landscape.  Guernica's collection of photographs from those excursions are definitely worth checking out.

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As midnight passed in Wichita, Kansas, temperatures began to soar at a rate of "almost one degree [Fahrenheit] a minute".  By the end of it, the temperature had gone up by 17 degrees - in the middle of the night.  So, what happened?  As John Rennie explains, the city had just experienced a rare and fascinating meteorological event known as a heat burst.  Read Rennie's article to find out more.