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Historic Flight by Privately Funded Spaceship
(David Baker, Janes Space Directory, 22 June 2004)
Launched from the White Knight carrier-plane, SpaceShipOne became the first non-government vehicle to exit the earth's atmosphere and reach the vacuum of space. Largely an arbitrary figure, 100 km is officially regarded as the qualifying altitude for space flight and thus Mike Melville joins the ranks of astronauts who until now have been launched into space exclusively by vehicles designed, paid for and operated through government agencies. . . . Funded by Microsoft baron Paul Allen and designed and built by Burt Rutan and his talented team of engineers and technicians at Scale Composites Inc., the US$20 million venture was stimulated by the coveted X-Prize. The Ansari X-Prize Foundation was set up to encourage privately funded human space flight and to date 26 teams have stepped forward to compete for the US$10 million reward. Set up officially in April 2003 the Tier One programme was Rutan's bid to create a space tourist business through innovative design and engineering. While the historic flight to the edge of space gives Melville a place in the history books it does not yet win the X-Prize for the team. To achieve that and comply with the qualifying rules, SpaceShipOne must conduct two flights within a two-week period. Yet, instead of displacing the efforts of the other 25 teams, success here is expected to encourage others to provide alternative opportunities for private citizens to experience the thrill of space flight.

Also seeBruce Damer's Coverage of the launch of this historic flight. This link will take you to Bruce's excellent photos and over a dozen MPGs of SpaceShipOne's preparation and flight into space on the Summer Equinox of 2004.

posted by LoZo 2:00 PM

 

Neuroenhancement & Cognitive Liberty
(Gregory Lamb, Christian Science Monitor, June 17, 2004)
The brain-enhancement revolution is already under way. The drug Ritalin, first given to control hyperactivity in children, now is routinely used by healthy high school and college students to sharpen their thinking before taking exams. The long-term health effects are unknown. . . . Modafinil was developed to treat narcolepsy, a rare condition causing daytime sleepiness. But now it is used by those who simply want to be wakeful and alert, and recently seven American track and field athletes admitted to using it to boost their mental preparation. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, used for nearly two decades to treat depression, has also been found to enhance problem-solving abilities in normal individuals. . . . Improved brain imaging, or mapping, is yielding new techniques such as "brain fingerprinting," which purports to be able to locate memories within the brain, raising troubling possibilities for invasion of privacy. "There's nothing more private and personal than a person's memories," says Richard Glen Boire, codirector of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics in Davis, Calif. . . . Pharmaceutical companies are going to want to produce and market drugs that appeal to 100 percent of the population, not just the minority who are sick at any given time, Mr. Boire points out. After all, many people would like a better memory, to be able to think a little more quickly, or to forget troubling memories. . . . Yet a number of issues of personal liberty are being raised, he says. "What rights does the person have to manage their own thought processes?" Boire asks. "Thought is not just something that is changed by reading a book or hearing a speaker. Now, and more and more, as time goes on, thought will be changed by pharmacological agents." . . . How will we be able to say yes to therapy but no to enhancement? Professor Caplan asks. He balks at the idea of telling someone "you can take a pill if you have dyslexia, but you can't take a pill if you're just a poor reader. It's very tough. It won't work." . . . But in a recent National Science Foundation-sponsored report entitled "Neurocognitive enhancement: What can we do and what should we do?," a group of scientists, educators, and ethicists concluded that "continuing our current laissez- faire approach [toward brain boosting] risks running afoul of public opinion, drug laws, and physicians' codes of ethics. The question is therefore not whether we need policies governing neurocognitive enhancement, but rather what kind of policies we need." . . . The report identifies a number of areas of concern, including safety, fairness and equity, coercion, and "personhood and intangible values" - and concentrates on the questions surrounding enhancement drugs, stressing that they are leading the way in the field of neuroscience. . . . Safety considerations should include "both the conventional medical effects and the more subtle psychological effects that are likely to accompany neurocognitive enhancement," says Dr. Farah, an author of the study. "For example, will attentional enhancement become routine and will we use it to become an even more workaholic society than we are now?" . . . Perhaps most troubling - and most difficult to deal with from a scientific basis - is the question of personhood. "Some people just think messing with the brain is unnatural because the brain is the seat of who we are," Caplan says. "To change it is to change our identity."

posted by LoZo 1:28 PM

 

Close-up look at comet blasts conventional theories
(David Perlman, SFGate.com, June 18, 2004)
The first rocky particles ever collected from the heart of a comet are on their way back to Earth by spacecraft, and already they are amazing astronomers with evidence that they date back to the earliest formation of the solar system, scientists said Thursday. . . . Close-up images taken by the Stardust spacecraft show rocky cliffs, sharp pinnacles and deep, dark craters on the surface of the comet known as Wild-2, upsetting theories about the nature of comets, visitors from beyond the outermost planets. . . . The precious cargo of cometary material, contained in a shockproof case, will parachute to the floor of the Utah desert in January 2006. . . . Scientists said they are convinced this comet is no simple ball of rocky rubble loosely held together by its own gravity or by deep-frozen ice, as scientists believe most comets are. . . . Rather, Wild-2 is actually a solid chunk of ancient rock with many properties -- both physical and chemical -- that are still mysterious. It will be understood only when the samples reach laboratories on Earth in two years, the scientists said. . . . The Stardust spacecraft was launched Oct. 7, 1999, on a seven-year journey. On Jan. 4, it encountered the comet, flying within only 147 miles of Wild-2 when the comet was 240 million miles from Earth -- just beyond the orbit of Mars. . . . Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington described the January fly- by: "It was like flying through a cloud of bullets speeding more than 13,000 miles an hour and surviving 20 spurting jets of thousands of those particles, some as big as small grapes, but most of them thinner than a human hair." . . . "These are the true building blocks of the solar system, the stuff that formed it 4.6 billion years ago -- we were totally stunned," he added. . . . What's most surprising to astronomers, Brownlee said, is that Wild-2 is not merely a misshapen ball of powdery rubble, as many astronomers have inferred from models. . . . It is solid, with bits of its surface crumbling and eroding from the sun's heat and flying violently off in at least 20 jets of particles emanating from the surface that Stardust photographed. A 6-foot collector made of a lightweight porous plastic called aerogel captured the particles. . . . The comet's core, or nucleus, is marked by unusually steep cliffs, some of which overhang. They indicate that Wild-2 "has substantial strength and that gravity plays little role in the shaping of the features, which is contrary to the conventional wisdom that cometary nuclei are gravity-dominated rubble piles," Weaver said.

posted by LoZo 3:21 PM

 

Proceed With Caution
(New York Times, June 6, 2004)
Bill Joy says he thinks the probability of a "civilization-changing event" is most likely in the double digits, perhaps as high as 50 percent. He doesn't merely ascribe these odds to terrorism; he suggests a pandemic disease might arise from a sudden accident or as a consequence of cutting-edge research. For disquieting evidence, he points out that a couple of years ago scientists assembled polio in a lab. That in late 2002 J. Craig Venter, the founder of Celera Genomics, announced plans to create organisms from scratch. That only a few months ago scientists were tinkering with deadly strains of bird flu in less-than-top-security labs. That the genomic sequence for the plague is now on the Web for anyone to see or make use of. Joy calls the bird-flu experimentation "insane." But he is fixated less on whether scientists committed ethical breaches in this case than on whether the larger scientific community can temper the pace of innovation before it's too late. He's not exactly optimistic, predicting that public awareness will most likely come only after an actual accident at a company or a university. Until then, he says, speed -- the mad rush for patents and market share and money -- will trump caution. Regulatory agencies are structured to catch shady C.F.O.'s, not reckless private-sector technologists. And markets are ill equipped to play traffic cop. "Markets are extremely good at go," Joy says. "They're not very good at stop. And I think we need a little bit of stop right now. Or else we're not going to like the outcome." He says he believes that businesses doing research in areas deemed risky by their peers should be forced to take out insurance against catastrophes. He also says that science guilds should have the authority to limit access to potentially dangerous ideas. The theme of risk runs through Joy's other work. He characterizes his efforts at Berkeley and Sun as a 25-year project to make computing simpler, more reliable and more secure. A longtime foe of Microsoft, he is particularly scathing when it comes to the bugs and vulnerabilities of that software company's operating system. Windows creates risk; Windows tempts a bad outcome. [From] the autobiography of Bertrand Russell...: [referring to a nuclear war, Russell states...] "I thought that people would not like the prospect of being fried with their families and their neighbors and every living person that they had heard of. I thought it would only be necessary to make the danger known and that, when this had been done, men of all parties would unite to restore previous safety. I found that this was a mistake. There is a motive which is stronger than self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better of the other fellow."

posted by A Curmudgeon 12:01 PM

 

First transit of Venus since 1882!
(Mark Peplow, nature, 4 June 2004)
On 8 June, the planet Venus will appear to cross the surface of the Sun. No living person has ever seen this happen; indeed, it will be only the fifth time that the event has been recorded. . . . The 'transit of Venus' was a valuable tool for early star-gazers trying work out the distance between the Earth and the Sun. But next week, millions of professional and amateur astronomers across the world will be watching the transit simply because it has not happened since 1882. . . . Transits happen when Earth, Venus and the Sun all lie in a straight line. They are rare because the planets' orbits are slightly tilted with respect to each other, which also means that they occur at the irregular intervals of 8, 121.5, 8 and then 105.5 years. The next transit will happen on 6 June 2012, but the one after that will not arrive until December 2117. . . . For those unable to watch it directly, various science museums and astronomical societies will broadcast the spectacle on the Internet. . . . If you are watching the transit in the flesh, remember that looking directly at the Sun can blind you: the best way to view the transit is to use a lens to project an image of the Sun on to a piece of white card kept in shadow. . . . Astronomers subsequently tried to use the event to work out how far the Earth is from the Sun, making ever more elaborate expeditions to catch Venus in its traverse. The famous British explorer James Cook stopped off in Tahiti to watch a transit in 1769, during his first circumnavigation of the globe.

posted by LoZo 12:40 PM