While it ain’t airborne-laser volcano-lancing this seems like a big step forward. Scientists are drilling deep, deep into the earth’s mantle to get some stuff. Beware the mole men! While I don’t want to encourage engineers to play whack-a-mole (hey I used the word mole twice in the same post. Now three times!). You’ll recall that I’ve been a big, though ingnorant, fan of this technology (click here and search for the word “boring”) . I still think — physics be damned — we should build an earth-boring machine (no, not Al Gore. Different kind of boring), that could go underneath, say, the Iranian underground nuke facilities and blow ‘em up. It would also open a second front in the war on the volcano menace.